RaptorMaps shared last night's $10,000 Thomson Reuters Data Prize, awarded to a data-centric business, with Quorum, which is building a data-driven webpage with interactive visualizations and constantly updated statistics on politicians' voting habits and the status of bills, among other things.
But the programme's evaluation, published today, is the perfect case study of how the manipulation of statistics by politicians and civil servants led directly to bad policy and to the wasting of hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money.
Artists have the chance to communicate what statistics and politicians can't, by touching on the variety of human senses beyond the intellect.
It is one of those statistics adored by politicians since it sounds wonderful while being entirely meaningless.
"Inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people.
The theme of the week was pension-and-benefits reform, and in his introductory remarks, Christie explained the inefficiency in the state's health care costs not by wielding a stack of damning statistics, as some politicians might, but by relating a story.
I've popped up all over the BBC discussing numbers and statistics and how politicians use them and I've learned a lot too.
Ben Goldacre (from his blog) is a medical doctor, academic, campaigner, and writer whose work focuses on uses and misuses of science and statistics by journalists, politicians, drug companies, and quacks.
All we need to do is just train everyone up in statistics, and make politicians and editors realise that things would be so much better if only they could learn to speak to the public in streams of ungarnished fact-nuggets.
One of the the worst things you can do to a politician is hand him some economic statistics, because any politician worth his salt in Washington will inevitably twist them into a mess of bad motives and bad policy.
