{"id":391,"date":"2009-03-20T10:49:13","date_gmt":"2009-03-19T21:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/03\/yet_more_on_why_a_passing_fami\/"},"modified":"2009-03-20T10:49:13","modified_gmt":"2009-03-19T21:49:13","slug":"yet-more-on-why-a-passing-fami","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/03\/yet-more-on-why-a-passing-fami\/","title":{"rendered":"yet more on why a passing familiarity with stats is a good thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at his BadScience blog, Ben Goldacre has had a close look at yet another dubious use of basic statistics<\/a>. It’s to do with the provision of carbon monoxide monitors in council housing in the UK. Carbon monoxide (CO) is a nasty thing<\/a> – you can’t smell it, & it can kill you very dead quite quickly: CO binds very strongly to the haemoglobin in your bloodstream – more strongly than oxygen, & each haemoglobin molecule that’s clutchng a CO molecule is thus unavailable to carry oxygen to your cells. Anyway, a factoid released to the UK press (as part of a sales pitch, perhaps) claimed that an alarmingly high number of British council-owned flats weren’t fitted with CO detectors. However, this claim was based on some rather creative mathematics, which Ben proceeds to pull to pieces.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at his BadScience blog, Ben Goldacre has had a close look at yet another dubious use of basic statistics. It’s to do with the provision of carbon monoxide monitors in council housing in the UK. Carbon monoxide (CO) is a nasty thing – you can’t smell it, & it can kill you very dead quite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,2],"tags":[3,17,4],"yoast_head":"\nyet more on why a passing familiarity with stats is a good thing : BioBlog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/03\/yet-more-on-why-a-passing-fami\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"yet more on why a passing familiarity with stats is a good thing : BioBlog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Over at his BadScience blog, Ben Goldacre has had a close look at yet another dubious use of basic statistics. 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