It’s been a long battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to become the Democratic nominee for the next US Presidential race.

The process for choosing the nominee is complicated. The final decision will be reached by delegates at Democratic National Convention in August. Most of these delegates will have been sent by their States with instructions on who to vote for, and different States will send different numbers of delegates. How the States decide who their delegates will vote for varies; some States let people vote, others hold caucuses.

At the end of the selection process, though, it’s simple: whoever gets the backing of a majority of delegates at the National Convention wins.

For most of the selection process, Obama has been the clear favourite. In fact, for months there have been calls for Clinton to concede defeat, but she’s hung in there. Today, as Obama closed in on number of delegates needed to win the race, Clinton came out with a strangely positive statement: “We’re winning the popular vote.”

Winning the popular vote? She’s as good as lost!

This is one of those sneaky stats that dresses up a defeat as a victory. Here’s how it works:

Clinton isn’t claiming to have the most delegates (she doesn’t, Obama does); she’s claiming have the most votes, and she’s right.

By focusing on votes, Clinton gets to ignore several States that are sending delegates to vote for Obama. In States that held caucuses no votes were cast. In Colorado and Minnesota, for example, zero votes were cast for Obama and zero votes were cast for Clinton, but at their caucuses there was strong backing for Obama and the majority of their delegates will vote for him at the conference. In the caucus states, Obama has done much better than Clinton but without getting any more votes than her.

By focusing on votes, Clinton also gets to include some States that aren’t sending any delegates to the party conference at all. In an attempt to grab centre-stage, Michigan and Florida brought their votes forward so that they would be among the first to choose a nominee. In doing so, they broke party rules, and as a punishment were stripped of their delegates. They held their votes anyway, and both States backed Clinton. In California Clinton beat Obama by over 420,000 votes, and in Michigan (where Obama’s name wasn’t even on the ballot paper) by 328,000 votes, but none of these extra votes translates into extra delegates at the National Convention.

So that’s how Clinton was able to say that she’s winning the vote even as she loses the nomination. It just goes to show that you can put a positive spin on any set of data if you have enough ingenuity.

Today the media have picked up on claims that the violence on Britain’s streets is a result of women consuming alcohol while pregnant. The story seems to have started with Scotland’s chief medical officer, Dr Harry Burns, reporting the connection to MSPs.

Pre-natal exposure to alcohol is thought to be linked to a wide range of physical and mental defects, including growth deficiency, learning difficulties, epilepsy, and (at a lower level) poor memory and general clumsiness. Children exposed to alcohol in the womb are even reported to have distinctive facial features, narrow eyes and thin upper lips. The name for these phenomena is Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASDs).

The idea that alcohol exposure damages unborn children is perfectly plausible; after all, it clearly damages adults. There’s still a little work to be done to show that alcohol consumption during pregnancy is a significant cause of violent behaviour on the streets of Britain, however, and certainly not enough in the media reports to do so.

The first thing it would be useful to know is whether the explanation being offered is sufficiently powerful. What proportion of pregnant women drink sufficient quantities of alcohol to cause FASDs? What proportion of children whose mothers drink that much alcohol display violent behaviour? How does this compare to the proportion of children whose mothers don’t drink that much alcohol who display violent behaviour?

Without knowing these things, we can’t know how much violent behaviour could be attributed to FASDs if the claim of a causal link were accepted, so can’t assess its importance as a possible cause of anti-social behaviour.

No doubt at least some of this information is out there (even if it didn’t make it into the media reports). However, there was a slightly concerning comment made in The Herald that the only large study of the prevalence of FASDs was in Italy. For a start, Italian drinking habits are rather different to those in Britain, so there has to be some doubt as to whether Italian findings are applicable here. The lack of corroborative studies also raises a doubt as to whether the connection is as well understood as the reports first made it seem.

Before questioning the significance of FASDs as a cause of violence, however, we should question whether they are a cause of violence at all. Assuming that a correlation between pregnant women drinking and their children tending towards violence has been found, how else might this correlation be explained?

One possible explanation would be that women with a disregard for authority are both (a) more likely to disregard medical advice not to drink while pregnant, and (b) more likely to rear children with a disregard for authority (and so with anti-social tendencies). In that case, a mother drinking while pregnant wouldn’t cause her child to be violent; rather, the mother’s drinking and the child’s violence would share a common cause: the mother’s disregard for authority.

There are other theories that could explain the data too. Perhaps living in a rough neighbourhood tends to drive women to drink and to draw children into gangs. Perhaps children who can steal alcohol from their parents are more likely to get drunk and so get involved in fights. Etc, etc.

Of course, there’s a chance that the claimed connection is real and we’re experiencing social problems in Britain because of pregnant women drinking. There’s also a chance that the scientific community has good reason to believe in this connection.

However, the evidence made available in the national press doesn’t show that there’s a correlation between pre-natal alcohol exposure and violent tendencies in this country, doesn’t show that the best explanation of such a correlation would be that pre-natal alcohol exposure causes violent tendencies, and doesn’t show that pre-natal alcohol exposure causing violent tendencies would explain the levels on violence on Britain’s streets.

For these reasons, the information presented in the media falls well short of demonstrating the connection between drinking and violence that is claimed.

We hear a lot about climate change and what we need to do to reduce carbon emissions and so preserve the environment.

One suggestion is that we should replace fossil fuel consumption with biofuel consumption, moving from burning coal and oil to burning ethanol and biodiesel.

Biofuels are liquid fuels made by fermenting plant material such as corn and rapeseed. Although they release carbon when burned, this is carbon aborbed by the plants when they’re grown. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, release into the atmosphere carbon which would otherwise be stored in coal and oil desposits underground. The impact on the environment of burning biofuels is therefore less than the impact of burning fossil fuels.

Or is it? Critics of biofuels point out that to fully understand their environmental impact we need to think more carefully than this.

The process of growing the crops used to make biofuels can be polluting, as can the process of converting the crops into fuel. Areas of rainforest, which act as a carbon sink, are being destroyed to make room to grow biofuel crops; whatever carbon would have been absorbed by the rainforest but now isn’t is a carbon cost of biofuel production.

It may well be that all things considered, biofuels are greener than fossil fuels, at least when they are produced in the right way. What we can’t do, though, is generalise from biofuels being greener than fossil fuels in one way (whatever carbon is emitted into the atmostphere when biofuels are burned is first absorbed when the biofuel crops are grown) to the conclusion that they are greener than fossil fuels full stop.