Data driven? Who’s driving?
An article on BBC News about the Ebola outbreak got me thinking about data. In all the media reports, the virus is described as having a shockingly high 90% fatality rate. This article says that the key words in reports is “up to” and that the fatality rate is...
The Student, Number 6
I am not a number, I am a free man. I went in to school to ask about my daughter’s education. Out came a laptop and up popped a spreadsheet. There was my daughter: neatly bound in row 12. A tidy little string of numbers explaining just how she...
The number of the beast
My daughter came home with a math test the other day. She’s got a good teacher and he’d given her feedback on individual questions like, “You understand this, but made this kind of mistake.” But there it was: on the top sheet of the test, at the top center...