The headline for this article could have been improved by drawing on facts about the majority results for the poll, rather than minor facts. For example saying something like “70% of parents admitted to giving their children smartphones by the age of 13.”

Source: Daily Star (2016) – http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/506979/foreign-criminals-prisoners-UK-taxpayer-expensive-prison-population

Main Claims:

1.      More than 10% of prisoners in the UK are from abroad – and each costs £65k a year

2.      Each costs UK taxpayers £65,000 every year – adding up to a whopping £643million

3. Some 9,895 foreigners including killers, rapists and terrorists are being held.
4. Most are from Poland and Romania.
5. Others come from Jamaica, Pakistan, Lithuania, Nigeria and Ireland.
6. There are dozens more from Somalia, India, Albania and Bangladesh.

Assessment:

• In 2015, 1 in 12 (8.7% – round up to 9%) of the usual resident population of the UK had non-British nationality, which compares with 1 in 20 (5.0%) in 2004. [Source: ONS – Population of the UK by Country of Birth and Nationality: 2015]
• Around 5.2 million people were citizens of another country in 2015, according toestimates from the Office for National Statistics. [Source: ONS – Population by Country of Birth and Nationality underlying datasheets]
• The foreign national population held in custody and NOMS-operated IRCs remained just below 10,000 offenders (9,891) as at 30 June 2016. This represents a decrease of 6% compared to 30 June 2015.

This is due mainly to the withdrawal of Home Office commissioned places at Dover IRC in November 2015. The foreign national population, however, still represents just under 12% of the total prison population (round up to 12%).

The five most common nationalities after British Nationals in prisons in England and Wales are Polish, Irish, Romanian, Jamaican and Albanian, together accounting for approximately one third (35%) of the foreign national population and 1 in 25 (4%) of the prison population overall.

[Source: Ministry of Justice – Offender Management Statistics Bulletin, England and Wales – Quarterly January to March 2016 with Prison Population as at 30 June 2016]

• The Government spends an average of £37,000 on keeping an inmate for a year. [Source: The Howard League for Penal Reform]
• 9,891 foreign inmates x average cost of £37,000 = it costs around £369,297,000 a year to keep foreign inmates.

Conclusion:

The claim that more than 10% of prisoners in the UK are from abroad is correct, with the actual figure standing at 9,891 (12% of prison population) in 2016.

The claim that each foreign inmate costs £65,000 a year is false, with the actual cost being £37,000. Therefore, the claim that the foreign prison population costs £643,000,000 is also false, with the correct cost being substantially lower at £369,297,000

The claim that most of the foreign prison population is made up of people from Poland and Romania is false, as the 5 most common nationalities after British Nationals in prisons in England and Wales are Polish, Irish, Romanian, Jamaican and Albanian, which when combined account for 35% of the foreign national prison population, as opposed to ‘most of it’.

Author: Anonymous

While current generations have become more health conscious, companies have taken note and have created more ‘healthy’ products to market to the ‘clean eating’ market. This includes companies like Naked, who have created a brand revolving around healthy smoothies, packed full of fruit and no added sugar, it seems like drinking this definitely equates to being healthy and happy.

However, when you compare the real ingredients of a bottle of Naked ‘Red Machine’ to that of a can of coke, it is not at all that dissimilar.

Table 1: Ingredients from https://www.nakedjuice.co.uk/the-range/red-machine/ and http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/drinks/coca-cola/coca-cola

As shown in the table above, the Red Machine smoothie has 9 more calories than a 100mls of coke and has 0.7g more carbohydates. As a drink that markets itself as a healthy drink, it is not actually healthier than a can of coke when it is broken down. In fact, the ingredients in the smoothie are:

37 Grapes
4 Raspberries
2 Cranberries
2 Apples
1 Strawberry
1/2 Orange
1 Banana

This initially looks like a very impressive list, it looks like it has a lot of fruit in it. However, if you look at the numbers closely, it is not very much at all. In fact, it is essentially apple and grape juice with a very small quantity of other fruit added. It is in fact, not a smoothie but merely a juice with a coupele of other fruits waved near it! If you think about this – 2 cranberries and one strawberry is hardly worth mentioning.

Also, when I looked up the nutrients of each fruit, a convenient website informed me of what is both good and bad about each individual fruit. One very common theme with every fruit is that they all had a very high sugar content. Below I have listed all the good and bad properties of each fruit:

Grapes –

The good: This food is very low in Saturated Fat, Cholesterol and Sodium. It is also a very good source of Vitamin C and Vitamin K.

The bad: A large portion of the calories in this food come from sugars.

Raspberries –

The good: This food is very low in Saturated Fat, Cholesterol and Sodium. It is also a good source of Vitamin K and Magnesium, and a very good source of Dietary Fiber, Vitamin C and Manganese.

The bad: A large portion of the calories in this food come from sugars.

Cranberries –

The good: This food is very low in Saturated Fat, Cholesterol and Sodium. It is also a good source of Vitamin E (Alpha Tocopherol) and Vitamin K, and a very good source of Dietary Fiber, Vitamin C and Manganese.

The bad: A large portion of the calories in this food come from sugars.

Apples –

The good: This food is very low in Saturated Fat, Cholesterol and Sodium. It is also a good source of Dietary Fibre and Vitamin C.

The bad: A large portion of the calories in this food come from sugars.

Strawberries –

The good: This food is very low in Saturated Fat, Cholesterol and Sodium. It is also a good source of Folate and Potassium, and a very good source of Dietary Fibre, Vitamin C and Manganese.

The bad: A large portion of the calories in this food come from sugars.

Orange –

The good: This food is very low in Saturated Fat, Cholesterol and Sodium. It is also a good source of Thiamine, Folate and Potassium, and a very good source of Vitamin C.

The bad: A large portion of the calories in this food come from sugars.

Bananas –

The good: This food is very low in Saturated Fat, Cholesterol and Sodium. It is also a good source of Dietary Fibre, Vitamin C, Potassium and Manganese, and a very good source of Vitamin B6.

The bad: A large portion of the calories in this food come from sugars.

Overall, the issue with Naked smoothies was not that they lied about the numbers or were inaccurate, but they did advertise their drinks in a misleading way and overwhelmed the consumer with the quantity of fruits while when you actually think about it and compare the figures, you would actually drink fewer calories and sugars if you drank coke. This would be why PepsiCo (the parent company of Naked) were sued for misinforming their customers.

A survey generated by Groupon has reportedly found how women in Britain ‘spend an average £70,294 on their appearance in their lifetime’. This survey asked 1000 women, who use the sight ‘Groupon’ about the items they buy, focusing on buying habits centred on their looks. This report presents how the ‘average woman’ spends around over £100 a month for beautification purposes, however does not define their term of an ‘average British Woman’. This report is viable for critiques as it is inaccurate due to the British women being generalized, claiming how on average British women spend a gargantuan sum of money on their appearance, when in reality this survey doesn’t represent the whole population of British women and only represents the average in the 1000 female participants. As this survey calculated the ‘average’ the number may not be an accurate representation, this is because when determining an average of data, it only take one or two very high results to determine the overall average. Therefore, if a one of the 1000 participants in this survey spent an average of £8000 a year on produced centred on appearance and another participant only spend £200 a year, the average would be high as the higher number would increase the overall average. If this survey were to question a different 1000 women, the average may be lower therefore the article would be diverse and less shocking. Also this news article claim is biased as it only samples members from a particular organisation, which limits the number of participants.
As only 1000 women were asked, this article generalizes the population claiming that the ‘average British woman’ spend the same amount as each other and are similar. If not read critically this article may be misleading as people may believe that all women on average in the Britain spend the same amount of money on their appearance as each other. However this may not be the case, as the news article generalizes its data to describe all women in the Britain, when the news article only focuses on 1000 who are members of the specific group. This survey is a representation for women who may not wear makeup and therefore do not spend money on it, or women who are not members of the sight; therefore is an inaccurate generalization and an unreliable claim.
Further into the article, the claim of ’23 percent of women said they would consider cosmetic surgery’ is fashioned. Although this percentage is most likely to be taken from the research conducted to form the rest of the article, it does not specify where the percentage is calculated. This claim also generalizes the population as it doesn’t state that the percentage is from the 1000 participants of the survey, therefore people who read the news article may believe that the 23% is based on all women. It is important for articles to establish were there results are from as 23% of 1000 is going to be a different number of women compared to 23% of the female population in Britain. For example 23% of 1000 women is 230 women, however 23% of women in the whole of UK-not just Britain- is 7,406,000 as the population of women in the UK is around 32.2 million. This evidently shows how important it is to define the terms in the claim such as the population as a claim which represents a larger population than the one surveyed is generalizes and therefore frequently inaccurate.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/average-british-woman-spend-70000-appearance-lifetime-cosmetics-beauty-products-groupon-uk-a7623201.html

A survey completed by Pew Research Centre has found that more than two-thirds of United States’ police officers think marijuana should be legal for either personal or medical use. Looking closely at the data it is clear to see that this statement, if not read carefully could be seen to be misleading. With 69% of police officers agreeing that marijuana should be legal for certain things it appears that well over half of the US police force believe marijuana is wrongly illegal. However, further on in the article it states that the survey found that only 32%, just one-third of the survey, believe marijuana should be legal for BOTH medical and recreational use, whereas 37% of the survey believes the substance should be legal for medical use only.

During the survey, the research centre used a sample of nearly 8,000 officers nationwide. While this may seem like a reasonably large sample, considering there are around 1.13 million full time police officers across 50 different states, it may not be large enough to be able to generalise to the country as a whole. Taking this into account and assuming that the survey sampled an equal number of officers in each state, they would only have spoken to around 160 officers in each state, damaging the representativeness of the survey.

The statistic that I have found to analyse is from the ‘NSPCC’ website stating that ‘around 1 in 5 children have been exposed to domestic abuse’. This statistic appears towards the end of the page which is specific to domestic abuse, after explaining what domestic abuse can include and also what it can do to children if they are exposed to this environment.

Underneath the statistic they had provided readers with a drop-down with the source of the findings and also the findings that had been used to create this statistic. From the findings it was shown that 17.5% of 11-17 year olds have been exposed to domestic abuse between adults in their home. Despite them sourcing the statistic within the report, some children may have been scared to say that they have been exposed to domestic abuse. As well as this some children might not consider what they have seen to be a form of domestic abuse, instead they could have thought that it was something normal that happens in a family environment. This therefore could limit the accuracy of this statistic, resulting in the claim either signifying that there is either more or less abuse then they have recorded.

From researching this statistic, another website has also quoted it when giving statistics that they have found about domestic violence for all ages. Underneath ‘children’ they have included the claim about the percentage of children being affected by domestic abuse, however they have also added further research about the topic. This includes the statistic of children who were in the same or the next room when the violence was occurring, also the amount of children who are directly harmed when living in a household which contains domestic abuse. Although they have used some data which was conducted 15 years ago, showing that this data could be outdated and incorrect, resulting in the claim given not being accurate as domestic abuse could have increased or decreased within this time.

1. I found this article on BBC News. The article uses the Office For National Statistics as its source in order to support its numerical data. The BBC is not the most reliable news source as it is company website, not an official organisation which means it is prone to its own biases.
2. The International Passenger Survey collects information about passengers entering and leaving the country and it only does so on a legal basis. Immigrants who enter the country illegally would not be recorded in the system, therefore, the ‘560,000’ immigrants arriving in the UK over the 12-month period is an approximation, not a precise statistic as it is stated to be.
3. BBC News states that, ‘’For the first time in nearly three years, the number of people migrating to the UK from outside the EU increased, to 265,000.’’ However, after comparing the statistical data in the article, to the data provided in the Office For National Statistics website, I found that this statement is incorrect. According to the Office For National Statistics, there has been a decrease in migration from people outside of the European Union since 2011, when 334,000 non-EU citizen migrated to the UK.  Rather than an increase in migrants as the article proclaims, there was a decline of 69,000 non-EU individuals in the last 2/3 years.
4. Furthermore, BBC News fails to inform us about certain information. Although there has been an increase of net migration in just under the last two years, it remains below the peak of 320,000 (2005). I believe that this is a valid point that should have been mentioned at some point in the article, as the increase in net migrants could rise public concerns and may cause panic within the community as it is presented in such a negative manner. This point would support the fact that net migrant statistics are changing constantly. People often migrate to the United Kingdom due to lack of employment. If unemployment rates are high in their current country, it is likely for them to migrate elsewhere, where their chances of finding work could be higher.

https://news.therawfoodworld.com/16-million-people-us-now-vegan-vegetarian/

The article claimed that almost 16 million people in America are now vegan. To calculate whether 16 million represents the 5% of America, I searched the total population of the USA, which came to 318.9 million. I divided 16 million with 318.9 million to get a sum of 0.05 and then I multiplied this value with 100 to get the percentage sum of 5%. According to my calculation, 16 million does in fact represent 5% value and so the claim is true.

I wanted to dig deeper and find the methodology used to obtain the “16 million” value. The method used can be found in the source:

http://www.vrg.org/blog/2011/12/05/how-many-adults-are-vegan-in-the-u-s/

Harris Interactive study (commissioned by the Vegetarian Resource Group) used telephone interview on a sample of 1010 adults above the age of 18 across nationwide. Participant’s age, sex, race, education, region, number of household and number of telephone lines were considered when necessary when reflecting the actual proportions in the population. Telephone interviews can be critiqued for having a low reliability as respondents may give a dishonest answer, as there is no sense of chemistry between them and the interviewer (make it easier to give false answer).

The data overall can be criticized for being unreliable as they “did not ask about honey” which is crucial to the definition of veganism. Respondents who do not eat “Never eat meat, fish, poultry, dairy, eggs” may be considered vegan to that description but if they consume honey then they would be disregarded as a vegan.

Lastly, the sample size used is extremely poor as 1010 is a very difficult to generalise to the whole of USA with a population size of 318.9 million. Also, as the sample size only consists of those who answer and are willing to participate in the survey, the sample may be considered as biased. This is due to the reason that participants who answer may have shared characteristics (e.g. education, which state they come from, diet, etc.). This would mean that non-respondents are not included in the sample, which could’ve affected the overall result (may potentially could missed those who are vegans which would change the overall number).

Firstly, I think that this headline is misleading because “hundreds of millions of years is very vague it doesn’t reveal anything. Also, I thought reading the article would provide more information, but it also didn’t give a specific time. it seemed like someone just gave a time frame but we don’t know if it’s true or not. In the article, words such as “previously thought” can be deceptive because they never told us what or how It was before. So, if we are countering it, how do we know what they are saying. we can’t compare anything. Perhaps it wasn’t millions of years ago rather it could be hundreds. Lastly this fossil they are talking about could be any type of fossil such as dinosaur fossil. They used fossil as an example to give as an idea of how long it has been but If they were more precise then it would have giving us an estimation of how many years it was. The headline was exaggerated.

Reference:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/life-on-earth-appeared-hundreds-of-millions-of-years-earlier-than-previously-thought-ancient-a6700841.html

“’Record hate crimes’ after EU referendum” is a news article published by BBC News about the apparent rise in hate crimes after the EU Referendum. Before analysing this article it is important to first define what a hate crime is. According to the home office a hate crime is “any crime where the perpetrator’s hostility or prejudice against an identifiable group of people is a factor in determining who is victimised”.

In this article the focus is on crime motivated by race and religion. One of the first claims that is made in this article is that between July and September 2016 more than 14,000 hate crimes were reported, by looking at the statistics provided by the home office you can see that in fact only 13,925 incidents were reported. The article also claims that the numbers of reported hate crimes in July rose by 41% compared to the previous 12 months. By looking at the data you can see that this is true.  Although correct, the way they have been interpreted is very misleading. From the article the reader gets the impression that the reason the levels of hate crimes has increased is because of the EU referendum, however, by looking at the Home office’s data you can see that every year since 2013 there has been a peak in hate crimes in July.

Additionally, you can also see that the peak is increasing in size every year. Therefore, this suggests that the increase is not the result of the Brexit vote but the result of another factor such as an overall increase in hate crime or more people reporting incidents. One of the other issue with this report is how the data was collected. From that statistic you can see that the data only includes crimes which were recorded by the police. This means that hates which were not reported do not count towards the official number of hate crimes. Furthermore, what counts as a hate crime is very subjective as it covers any crime which is perceived by the victim or any other person, as a crime which is motivated by hostility or prejudice. Therefore, hate crimes may appear to be higher in certain areas when in fact those areas simply have a different definition of what a hate crime is. Overall, it is possible to see that the levels of racial and religious motivated hate crime is the highest it’s been, however, this article only looks at the claim from one point of view. In order to fully understand the levels of hate crime it is important to compare the data to previous years and question the methodology rather than just associating it with the closet political event.

Sources:

Article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38976087

Home Office Data: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hate-crime-england-and-wales-2015-to-2016