Someone told me recently, "men have seven times more grey matter in their brains than women, women have ten times more white matter than men".
I was sure this absolutely startling statement couldn't be true -- and when I checked, it was not -- but I think it could have both accurately remembered and quoted. The trouble is, the original paper didn't say that, but it had been mangled in some reports (4).
This is something of an accidental blog post. We were asked recently for some information about young people, which I misinterpreted as asking about differences between local authorities.
I always learn things from listening to the radio. On 'The Infinite Monkey Cage', I heard Brian Cox rattle off a 'rule of thumb', which goes something like:
A number plus or minus the square root of the sample size is consistent with random sampling error.
Test