Words of the day 11 December 2007
“A dollar a day”
Although even I heard this one several years ago, it gets in the words of the week because I have suddenly found out that it doesn’t mean a dollar a day at all! When economists and developmental whathaveyou experts talk about how many people are living on less than a dollar a day and how many people they want to get over that level, all those numbers are in fact adjusted for the cost of living in various countries- meaning that the amount of money they actually have coming into and (very quickly) out of their pockets is very much less than what you could convert into a dollar down the nearest Thomas Cook, if there is even such a thing…
This information comes from the excellent BBC Radio 4 programme “More or Less“, that does genuinely manage to make statistics interesting. No, no, no, really! Reminds me of Freakonomics, which is a good thing, trust me.
This programme should also be required listening for all Applied Linguistics MAs, because in my experience most of the English Lit major types who come off an MA can just about do the stats (at best), but still don’t really understand it- a dangerous position for a researcher to be in, thank god English teaching is less risky to life than biotechnology or nuclear engineering!
While we are talking about education, “More or Less” also analyses how the press have misinterpreted the international comparison of standards in schools that came out recently, just to make a attention grabbing headline apparently- well I never! They seem to ignored the fact that half the countries weren’t on the list last time the survey was done and that there was an asterix by the English schools score (literally!) saying that the score was probably unreliable, and therefore making comparisons and saying England had slipped down the table was a little bit clumsy/ lazy/ slimy. Whoops!
In the archives, there is also a programme that explains why it is more difficult to learn maths if your first language is English rather than Hindi, although I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet.