I have been locked in abstruse statistical debate with Sir Bob Worcester, founder of MORI, after my suggestion a week or so back that 1,000 is too small a sample to be worthwhile. “I'm afraid you are not right,” he insists. It would suffice in, for example, an exit poll on voting intentions. But in the poll I was writing about, which took 1,000 people across a range of professions and “proved” which were the most stressed, the sample from each profession was much smaller and randomly compiled.

I'll spare you the arcane details, but we bat messages back and forth and Bob eventually accepts that, in this case, the data are pretty meaningless. But he understandably rejects suggestions from elsewhere that all pollsters are “some sort of fortune-tellers, reading palms or tea leaves”. I agree. He muses: “We reported to my first political client, Harold Wilson, on the Tuesday before the 1970 election that the Tories had a two-point lead and he dismissed this, saying to colleagues that 'Bob's only been in the country less than a year and doesn't really understand British politics'. You may recall he lost on the Thursday.”

Old story plus new book equals more controversy

A forthcoming book by a staffer at Bear Stearns has re-ignited suggestions that the bank's collapse was not helped by traders at Goldman Sachs. Fox Business News claims to have one of the few advance copies of Bear Trap, which will be published next month. The writer says that e-mails from Goldmans were the trigger for short-selling in the bank's shares, a story that has already done the rounds and been firmly denied by Goldmans, and that its Lloyd Blankfein spoke to Bear chief executive Alan Schwartz to deny the rumours. “It's a terrific story but it lacks one essential element. It isn't true,” Goldmans insists. “We went out of our way to be helpful to Bear Stearns and the senior management of the company before it hit the buffers knew that.”

Sign of the times: those spam messages urging me to invest in this or that stock “which is going to EXPLODE!” that were so common a year ago seem to have disappeared. Have the boiler rooms and dodgy brokers peddling them gone bust? Instead, the latest round of spam I see urges me, in serious tones, to act against various porn websites and the trafficking of women, etc, etc, by blocking them. It then provides a long list of addresses of such sites. Is this genuine or, as I assume, a double-bluff by the pornographers?

There is a campaign among disappointed customers of Wrapit, the crashed wedding list firm, to get as many friends and contacts as possible to take their accounts away from HSBC, the bank that pulled the plug. There is also the suggestion that this could be the start of a campaign on Facebook. “I cannot see what we have to lose by entertaining even the most far-fetched notions in these awful circumstances,” one says. It has been made much easier for the campaigners to co-operate with each other because the e-mail they each received from Wrapit included everyone else's address. Possibly by error. Possibly not.

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