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"Official": it does matter how risk statistics are presented

kevin's picture
Submitted by kevin on Sat, 03/19/2011 - 11:39

The respected and influential Cochrane Collaboration has just published a systematic review of research on different ways of presenting risks and reductions in risk in a health context. It won't come as a surprise to regular readers of this website that they concluded that some aspects of the presentation really do make a difference. But maybe there are a few surprises in their detailed findings.

Car insurance? How big are your feet?

david's picture
Submitted by david on Fri, 02/25/2011 - 11:07

Did an article in the Times [paywall] today on the forthcoming EU Court of Justice ruling on whether gender can be taken into account when setting insurance premiums. I think this is an important and interesting topic, but articles in the financial pages have been very dull and so tried to make this a bit lighter in tone. Text of article is here.

Odd odds

david's picture
Submitted by david on Tue, 02/22/2011 - 15:37

Ben McGarry pointed out this blog entry about an article published in Sexually Transmitted Infections Online that says some rather odd things.

Data: can we cope?

kevin's picture
Submitted by kevin on Tue, 02/15/2011 - 13:30

Are we all drowning in a deluge of data? Are our data tools and systems managing to keep up with all the numbers we're collecting all the time? A series of articles in the journal Science doesn't give an entirely positive view, at least in terms of what's going on in the scientific research community. But what does that have to do with uncertainty?

Daily Mail gets odds right shock

david's picture
Submitted by david on Sun, 02/06/2011 - 09:49

The Daily Mail and other papers carried the story about the Banwell family whose third child shares a birthday, February 5th, with two older siblings, and this time they got the odds right at 133,000 to 1!

Crime maps: how useful?

kevin's picture
Submitted by kevin on Thu, 02/03/2011 - 09:42

New online crime maps for England and Wales have just been published. They seem to show numbers of crimes for single streets. If you're in England or Wales, you'll probably have seen all the fuss about them in the media. But what do they actually tell us about the risks of crime?

The message in ley lines

kevin's picture
Submitted by kevin on Wed, 01/26/2011 - 13:18

Tom Scott has a marvellous web page, click here, that lets you check whether the place you live is on an ancient mystical energy highway. At least, it does if you live in England. If not, you can try one of the example postcodes he gives, or indeed the postcode of UU HQ here in Cambridge, CB3 0WB. Just don't forget to check the important warning that Tom gives after you've got your results.

Coincidence odds are wrong yet again

david's picture
Submitted by david on Tue, 01/25/2011 - 09:58

The Sun today features a story about a family who have had three children all born at 7.43 (two am and one pm). Heartwarming, but the quoted odds of 300,000,000 to one are sadly wrong.

Another priceless infographic from the Times ...

david's picture
Submitted by david on Fri, 01/21/2011 - 15:34

After their previous attempt at a Nightingale rose, here is another ghastly example from today's edition of the Times. Shouldn't someone tell them?


Perhaps Japan's acceptance rate looks more than twice the size of China's

Professeur Poisson still rules

david's picture
Submitted by david on Thu, 01/20/2011 - 12:04

We've previously shown that the number of homicides each day in London followed a Poisson distribution to a remarkable degree - this means that they essentially occur as a random process. Now the same analysis has been repeated by the Home Office in the crime statistics released today - and the Poisson fits very well.

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