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I’m fed up with home delivery for things I’ve bought online – why can’t it be more like buying a pizza. Time for a bit of a moan, methinks.

Here’s how my local pizza shop works – I phone them up, they tell me how long until they can deliver it, then they deliver it. I’m always at home when they deliver because I phoned them up and they told me when they’d deliver it. It’s never more than an hour after I phone them that it turns up. The pizza box has the delivery driver’s mobile number on it, in case after he’s sped off I realise he’s forgotten something. It’s like magic.

Here’s how DHL works – they don’t tell me that they’re coming except through some cryptic code their deeply unusable order tracking page. A page, of course, that I have to make a point of remembering to visit.

They put a big note through my door telling me I was out. The note says “While you were out…” with ‘you’ printed in a big red italic font to make me feel special. The note itself is a masterclass in poor design. Attached to the note is a map to their local delivery centre, presumably in case that I forget what I paid them for and go and collect the parcel myself.

I phone them to arrange redelivery, hoping to speak to someone who might be able to get in touch with the van driver and tell him he missed me by two minutes and I’m at home now. No luck. Just an automated service that lets me get it redelivered tomorrow – not tomorrow morning or afternoon, but just some time tomorrow. It’s like… well, shite.

Of course DHL aren’t alone in this – I don’t think I’ve had a good online delivery experience. They all seem to be geared towards delivering to 9-5 businesses with receptionists or stockrooms to take delivery.

Update: oddly enough, I’ve just been searching their website and found a press release announcing their DHL@Home service which sounds like it’s just the job. The press release was written in April, and talks about all the things that pissed me off today. I wonder if the service actually exists, it didn’t for me, and now I know that they’re well aware of the problems I’ve mentioned.

I’ve been struggling to understand the A-level results, a provisional summary of which is published by the Joint Council of Qualifications. Naturally, it’s published in PDF format which is a very useful way of publishing data tables…

That aside, I can’t see how from the data presented one can conclude that the results represent a definitive improvement. I’m not suggesting there hasn’t been an improvement, but I don’t think the data show one.

What the data do show is that for each individual subject, the percentage of entrants achieving higher grades has improved.

A perfectly valid hypothesis would be that candidates were being more selective about the subjects they took and biasing their choices to those subjects in which they would perform better. Or the corollary of that, candidates were dropping subjects in which they couldn’t achieve a high grade.

Let’s take a couple of concrete examples: first, a high flying student is taking four A-levels and expects to achieve AAAB grades. By dropping the fourth subject, these statistics would show an ‘improvement’ though no change in the population’s ability has occurred. Equally, a lower-ranked student may be expecting to pass two A-levels and fail another. Again, by dropping the one she expects to fail the statistics would improve. Again, the population has become neither smarter nor thicker.

I’d suggest that to make sense of these results, we need them to be normalised against the number of A-levels taken, or some other weighting scheme that would remove these biases.

Certainly, the published results don’t justify the director of the JCQ’s conclusion that “the improvement of the results at A-level reflects how well students have done this year.”

Perhaps Dr Sinclair has some other results that do show this which he forgot to publish. Or perhaps he should go back to his school textbooks – I’m sure that they still teach about self-selection biases at A-level.

Wouldn’t it be a service if one of the journalists covering this today asked about this issue? I wouldn’t hold your breath, given that on breakfast time this morning one of them looked flustered on being told that 300 million divided by 300 was one million.

There’s been talk recently about the BBC’s problems with integrity – I heard one chap say that the current crop of BBC journalists are the best-trained they’ve ever been. But, their science and health coverage continues to be shamefully poor. Lets take today’s headline story – Alcohol link to bowel cancer risk.

Now, if you’d already read the Cancer Research UK you would be forgiven for feeling a sense of déjà vu.

The only piece of information the journalist has added was a quote from a chap at Alcohol Concern, the rest is copied almost directly from the press release. When I was at school, this was called ‘cheating’.

But, worse, the journalist seems to have made no effort to explain what the 10% increased risk actually means. Let me suggest two possible interpretations that any competent, numerate journalist might have considered and clarified on our behalf.

Let’s say my risk is 1 in 20. A 10% increase in risk could mean that that my chances of getting cancer moves to 1 in 18. In other words from 5% chance to 5.6% chance.

This is called the ratio of odds and it’s a common way for the media to misrepresent health statistics since it tends to give a bigger number to a smaller risk – 10% seems a lot scarier than .6% increase.

But, it could be that the 10% increase in risk mean that my chances go from 5% to 5.5%. This way of explaining things uses the ratio of rates.

Which is it? Well, thanks to the lazy BBC journalist, I can’t tell. To be fair, the press release doesn’t say anything about this either – but it’s the journalist’s job to investigate these things.

Also, note that I have no idea what the average and median alcohol consumption is – so can’t have any idea whether I’m in the 1 in 20 risk group, or given my alcohol consumption what my risk is.

Terrible journalism and what’s worse – deeply lazy.

More than 400 people will die this year because they need organ transplants.

Shame on you if you’re reading this blog and have not registered your intention to donate organs after your death on the NHS Organ Donor Register.

It’s the least you can do, and I can’t see how any ethical person could object to being on this register. Only 14 million people are on the register, even though opinion polls show that more than 80% of people support organ donation.

But there is more that you can do – if you write a blog then you should post about this today, and if you use facebook or twitter or other social network tools you should tell your friends about it there. Go on, do it now.

A couple of people have asked, after my last post about this, if I’m ill. I’m not – or at least I’m in no worse state than normal…

It took me just 30 seconds to register on the NHS organ donor register. You should do it now. I’m pretty ashamed that I haven’t done this before.