Dr Clare Craig is a darling of the lockdown sceptic movement. Certainly her mumsy-ness is a welcome contrast to the usual “angry man” persona. She comes across as reasonable, personable and — indeed — plausible on her radio and television appearances. But none of that makes her any less wrong. …

Meet Joel Smalley Meet @RealJoelSmalley. Joel variously describes himself as “a Blockchain architect and early stage, polymath data-driven technologist, specializing in fintech, healthtech and IoT” and, more recently, as an “expert quantitative analyst.” I think we may safely assume that he does not suffer from low self-esteem. Personally, what I would describe Joel…

Right people. Listen carefully. The false positive rate is, “ratio between the number of negative events wrongly categorized as positive (false positives) and the total number of actual negative events (regardless of classification).” In the context of COVID-19 PCR tests, it does not change based on the prevalence of the…

Today, I stumbled across self-published paper by Dr Chris Hope — a Reader at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School. The paper claims to have established a link between the the number of per capita deaths a country has, and the severity of the preceding two flu seasons. …

A rude awakening. I have written elsewhere that I am not a fan of international comparisons at this stage during the coronavirus crises. That was cathartic, and my internet rage has subsided a little since doing so. Until now. And then… AND THEN… Ed Conway, Economics Editor from Sky News posted this tweet:

Anyone that tells you that lives would have been saved if their government had responded differently to the COVID-19 crisis is either a liar or a fool. In either case, you should not listen to them. Lives might have been saved. …

My team has just put live an interactive form that enables users to provide feedback to us about our service. …

A while ago, I came across this video. In it, an earnest civil servant from the Government Digital Service explains that the search function on GOV.UK is important because it is used by 4% of visitors to the site. …

The UK’s Government Digital Service are — according to their website — “world leaders in public sector digital innovation”. At the heart of their design principles is the concept of emphasising “user needs” above all else. At first glance that seems sensible. It’s obvious that if you are — for…