The Critical Thinking Blog

The Huffington Post article (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/19/pollution-from-burgers-worse-than-trucks_n_1897730.html) entitled “Pollution From Burgers Worse Than From Diesel Trucks” inaccurately claims that the pollution produced by the commercial cooking of burgers (the commercial charbroilers) Is more than double that produced by 18-wheeler trucks.

When one refers to the original article(https://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/8896), however, it is clarified that in fact “When you consider both the directly-emitted PM2.5 from trucks, as well their NOx emissions that form particulate matter in the atmosphere, trucks are responsible for nearly three times the amount of PM2.5 pollution than that emitted by all commercial charbroilers,” amongst other things.The Huffington Post article deliberately deceives the reader by simply quoting a few parts of the article that support the premise that charbroilers are more harmful to the environment than heavy-duty diesel vehicles, for example the quote, “For comparison, an 18-wheeler diesel-engine truck would have to drive 143 miles on the freeway to put out the same mass of particles as a single charbroiled hamburger patty.”

More importantly, however, is that the title of the Huffington Post article implies that it is simply the cooking of burgers in general that produces extortionate amounts of pollution, when in fact the study very specifically focuses upon the method of charbroiling burgers as the primary cause of the high pollution production in the process of cooking burgers.

Moreover, they employ the use of a highly hyperbolic, emotive quote from someone that supposedly lives near a new burger restaurant claiming, “My throat hurt, my eyes burned, I can’t live like this.” This further undermines the already questionable objectivity and reliability of the Huffington Post’s article’s claims. Overall, the article is highly inaccurate and deceptive; deliberately hand-picking phrases from the original article in order to mislead the public into believing something that simply isn’t true; quite possibly in order to support a biased agenda.

First off, the article never gives a precise number as to how many people have apparently stopped using the national lottery. Furthermore, there is no mention as to how this data was acquired and we can be pretty sure they didn’t ask a million people.  The article headline also claims there have been ‘disastrous changes’ and this really could not be further from the truth, these so called disasters included raising the ticket price by about 50 pence and upping the number of total balls by ten, from 49-59. These changes are hardly disastrous and nobody really cared as the national lottery is still going strong and people will always play if there is even the smallest chance of winning. This article title is simply just a way to gain more readers as clicks equal money. The lottery is fine, no one cares or is angry and it is as simple as that.

Source: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2586229/shattered-kids-are-working-more-than-46-hours-a-week-survey-finds/

Critique: 

The figure of 46 hours working a week provided in the headline is incorrect since the data from the survey, commissioned by centre parks, actually shows that 46 hours is the average weekly time spent by participants in activities. Not only is the headline therefore misleading for stating children are working ‘more than 46 hours’ but also for the term ‘work’. This is as the activities measured included not only school work and housework but also extracurricular activities and hobbies, which can arguably be seen as pleasurable free time rather than ‘work’. The headline is further misleading with its use of the subjective and emotive term ‘shattered’ which was not measured in the survey. Findings may support that children are spending high hours doing activities but do not support any level of tiredness. 

The study was commissioned by Centre Parks and published by Parent Focus. This may therefore present a potential bias. It would be in the interest of Centre Parks, as an activity based family holiday resort which promotes itself through the ideal of quality family time, to present findings of overworked and tired children in need of a break. 

The report was comprised of qualitative and quantitative measures. The quantitative survey was online and had a sample size of 2000. This is a reasonable sample size and the use of an online survey means the sample is less likely to be regional and therefore is more likely to be generalisable. The qualitative interview was carried out with 44 parents and their children. The sample comprised of participants of different class and ethnic backgrounds as well as geographical locations thus improving its representativeness. However in the interviews children of ages 6-11 were asked if they thought they worked harder than their parents which majority thought they did this was included in the report and article associated with this headline. Children are highly influenced by researcher effect, at this age it is unlikely they would understand how many hours their parents work given the studies use of ‘work’ as anything that it is not time off, this reduces the reliability of the evidence.  

In a study carried out by the International rescue committee, the president of the committee, George Rupp said ‘The conflict and its aftermath, in terms of fatalities, surpass any other since the second world war,’ he went onto say ‘Congo’s loss is equivalent to the entire population of Denmark or the state of Colorado perishing within a decade.’ However when examining the investigation and what it actually set out to find, the statistical claim made by the International Rescue Committee falls apart. ‘Since our last study in 2004, there’s been no change in the national [mortality] rate, which is nearly 60% higher than the sub-Saharan average,’ said Richard Brennan, who is the director of the countries global health programme. Using the figure of the national mortality rate hurts their argument when comparing it to their own findings, as their survey did not cover the every single death, their study was only conducted on 14,000 households across the DRC. They are already extrapolating their statistics and increasing them for use on a nationwide scale. This will lead to a thoroughly unrepresentative sample of people who have died. As well as this their sample of people who have died in war will be even more inaccurate, as they are claiming that these deaths all stem from the war, which implies combat deaths, whereas the high mortality rate of the DRC is because of problems indicative of many sub-Saharan nations, diseases such as Malaria and AIDS contributed massively, to put all these deaths down to war is irresponsible and misleading. Perhaps they should have just conducted a survey in the most war torn areas of the country, these would have had smaller populations, and therefore the survey would have been more representative of the loss of the local area, as well as this they would still be able to get a good figure for a headline as well, due to the smaller populations, they would likely just a high percentage figure of people who have experienced loss or been displaced

Source: https://www.rescue.org/report/mortality-democratic-republic-congo-ongoing-crisis

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/councils-issue-more-than-88m-worth-unauthorised-school-absence-jon-platt-term-time-holiday-fines-a7671076.html

After checking all the statistics, the article shows a realistic view of the number of unauthorised absences within the 145 councils researched. The article gives a very details account to why there has been a change in policy towards the attitude of parents taking their children out of school for things such as holidays. However, only 145 councils were part of the data and only represent 34.5% families out of the 418 councils within England. This does not give the reader the whole picture of the amount of unauthorised absences within England, making the data limited and lack validity. The statistics for the remaining 273 councils within England could show the reader something completely different from the data in this article. The data was collected from the freedom of information request conducted by law firm Simpson Millar from schools and local councils ensuring the data was truthful and from a direct source where they could be checked.

This article was posted on the 27^th March 2017 by the BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-39380529

A recent story in the news about a parent wanting to take their child on holiday during term-time has resulted in this article being published. The headline of this article states that ‘term-time holidays accounted for a quarter of unauthorised absences from schools in England, analysis of official figures show.’ According to teachers the threat of £60 fines for an unauthorised absence do not deter parents from taking their children on holiday during term-time, when in fact the main reason is because of the price of holidays increase during the school holidays.

This article can be critiqued because of the percentages they use in the headline and the main body of the article contradict each other. The headline of the article states that a quarter (25%) of unauthorised absences are due to term-time holidays, however, later in the article it states that ‘term-time holidays accounted for an average of 27% of all missed “sessions” of school’. This therefore makes the article misleading as the reader will not know which percentage is the correct one. These figures can also be misleading because the numbers that are given for the academic year of 2015-16 saying how many children had unauthorised absences because of a term-time holiday was 801,980, which results in being 24% of all unauthorised absences for that academic year.

Also, we do not know the context of this article for example, it does not tell us whether the number of unauthorised absences have increased over time or have stayed roughly around the same amount, the article only gives us information from 2014-15 academic year and 2015-16 academic year. Also, the article does not tell us whether the number of pupils enrolling at school have increased, therefore if they have increased then it would result in there being more unauthorised absences than in previous years.

Overall this article can be reliable as the data is from a reliable source, however, the way in which the data is presented in this article can be misleading for the readers because it does not contain all the information needed to understand all the data and it does not contain other reasons as to why a child miss school, the article only gives u the reader the main reasons, which are; term-time holidays, children arriving late. Whereas there are reasons such as the child may be ill, which would result in an unauthorised absence if the parent does not let the school know.

This article is fundamentally flawed on a number of counts. Firstly, the headline is grossly misleading as, where it states ‘mental health issues’, the findings actually found that the students had mental health ‘worries’ instead. This is important as the headline leads us to believe that 80% of students definitevley had medically diagnosed mental health problems. Whereas, in reality, the survey asked questions about how stressed students were about money and their course, for example, and labelled those that said they were stressed about such things as having ‘mental health issues,’ clearly far from the development of serious, medically diagnosed mental illnesses. Thus, in that sense, the article is misleading.

The article is further undermined by the poor methodology used by the researchers, NUS-USI. They interviewed 3,600 students, less than 2% of their sample population of 200,000. Therefore, the margin of error in their findings will be significant. This is further compounded by the fact that their total population of 200,000 students – i.e. those represented by NUS-USI – actually accounts for under half of the entire number of students in Northern Ireland. That is to say that the researchers made claims about a population of over 415,000 having interviewed less than 1% of said population. Therefore, it cannot be said with any confidence whatsoever that the figure of 80% is either accurate or representative of all students in Northern Ireland.

Also, the 80% figure quoted in the headline is actually rounded up from the true figure of 78% found in the study. While rounding up by 2% doesn’t seem significant, it accounts for over 4,000 students, thus they have hyperbolised the findings to make the article more dramatic. It is significantly poor practice as they are claiming 4,000 students have mental health issues that, in reality, do not.

A survey was conducted by YouGov which had asked people across the UK, “Do you think life is fair or not fair?” whereby out of the sampled 1,660 people, 25% had supported the notion that life is fair. The headline is regarded to be accurate based on this calculation: the UK population size is 65.5 million (65,511,098 in 2017) – when searched up on google. So, (1,660/65,511,098) x 1,000,000 = 25%. Despite there being a higher percentage of people believing that ‘life is not fair’ (59%) in the UK, the data presented in this article supports the headline, thus the article is not misleading. Furthermore, the survey presented is seen as informative as the results shown is based on their: age, gender, regions and the political parties they side with. However, they do not elaborate on what they mean by ‘fair’ leaving this article to slightly unclear.

References:

Smith, M. (2017). ‘Is life fair? Only a quarter of Brits think so’. YouGov. [Online]. Available from: https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/04/12/only-quarter-brits-think-life-fair/ [Accessed on 14th April].

Smith, M. (2017). YouGov Survey Results in ‘Is life fair? Only a quarter of Brits think so’. YouGov. [Online]. Available from: https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/3epd3mk4h1/InternalResults_170110_Fairness_W.pdf [Accessed on 14th April].

“Health service staff have received a one per cent pay rise but inflation is at 2.3 per cent”

The news report that I have chosen to analysis is based around the NHS pay cuts which have left nurses struggling to make enough money.  I decided to look into the statistical data to see if this report was reliable or not. The report starts off by saying

‘’the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has asked its 270,000 members across the UK whether they want to take industrial action in protest at continuing cuts to their pay.’’

I wanted to find out if the royal college of nursing really asked 270,000 members in order to strike or if it was just for effect. I found from the RCN website that they I fact have 270,000 members and a report from the nurses are visible on their website ‘’ https://www.rcn.org.uk/’’

Within the news report headline it claims that inflation is at 2.3%, I decided to go online and I went on http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/inflation-cpi/forecast which identifies how inflation rises or drops. I discovered that inflation is at 2.3% at this current stage.

From this graph we can see that inflation has risen from January, however, the report was only made yesterday, therefore inflation is at 2.3%. overall this report is trustworthy due to the fact that the statistics they have produced can be proven correct.

According to an article on the Daily Mail the use of electric shock therapy has been increasing in England, with an increase of 11% in the last four years and the number of treatments per patient rising from 9.6 to 10.1. This article has a negative view of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) and suggests the cause of the rise is due to increased accessibility and incorrect prescription from medics.

The data was collected from 44 NHS trusts which are trustworthy sources with definitive data rather than a survey. However many trusts were unable to access relevant data and some data provided was found to be incorrect and not included in the survey, this suggests an inaccurate and incomplete recoding of ECT with different practices recording data in a different way. Trusts admitted to having missing data for set periods making the data untrustworthy. The data does not include private practices, and therefore cannot make assumptions about the overall use when there could have been more ECT in private practices in previous years. The overall calculation of 11% increase is correct, with 20,400 treatments in 2012-13 rising to 22,600 treatments in 2015-16. However when looking at individual practices only 66% of trusts reported a rise in ECT carried out over the years. The number of treatments per patient reported was also accurate with 9.6 per patient in 2012-13 increasing to 10.1 in 2015-16, however it is not mentioned that the overall number of patients has also increased from 2,125 to 2,237. There is still a clear increase in treatments per patient but it is not made clear that a greater number of patients are being considered.

Source

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-4418804/Electric-shock-therapy-rise-England.html