Thursday, August 23, 2007

It's not up, it's down?

There is a rather good post by Croydonian here about the bizarre view of the BBC to its own graphs.

Apparently the graph on the right shows a downward trend in gun crime. Honestly, the BBC News says "the trend in gun crime overall has been going down".

8 comments:

Windsor Tripehound said...

I think this is what is known in the trade as seasonal adjustment

CityUnslicker said...

ah bless them. These media grads with 2.2's from ex-poly's are unlikely to be good with statisitics!

Old BE said...

No, I think if you extrapolate between the right points........

Anonymous said...

The cheeky bastards are probably referring to the 'downward trend' from last year.

Anything to twist the overall truth, eh?

Croydonian said...

Gah, you sussed out trending in Excel/PowerPoint/whatever.

Anonymous said...

Oh dear, that's so bad it's funny!

The bloody BBC, how do they get away with it?

Pogo said...

A few minutes ago after perusing "HYS" on the BBC website a popup asking me to participate in a survey appeared.

Gave me a chance to take them soundly to task over the innumeracy of most of their "scientific" and "statistical" reporting.

Not that they'll take the blindest bit of notice of course!

Chris Paul said...

Ahhh, a chart showing NINE years of data. How very conventional.

And what does the air weapons thing do to the curve? They can be lethal and some of the crimes with tother sort can be completely non violent.

Forgetting to lock up the shotgun, having an old services handgun, being a teacher and going out with not one but two guns and firing them and expecting to still be a teacher after that.