TY - JOUR T1 - Hard Data JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 107 LP - 107 DO - 10.3399/bjgp18X694865 VL - 68 IS - 668 AU - Roger Jones Y1 - 2018/03/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/68/668/107.abstract N2 - IT management consultants often seem to use the analogy between data and water. One thing that their glossy websites don’t usually say, though, is that, as well as sailing to your destination on water, you can also drown in it. Several years ago someone calculated that the amount of information transmitted globally, now measured in zettabytes, is the equivalent of each person on earth receiving 174 newspapers every day. We have now, of course, entered the mis-information age, of alternative facts and fake news. Mis-information and mis-representation are so problematic that the chair of the UK Statistics Authority has twice in the last few months publicly rebuked senior politicians for inaccurate statements about key matters of fact.We should be able to do better than that … ER -