Higgs: is it one-sided or two-sided?

Submitted by david on Tue, 03/07/2012 - 6:08pm

Announcements about the Higgs Boson are invariably framed in terms of the number of sigmas, with 5-sigmas needed for a ‘discovery’. Media outlets helpfully explain what this means by translating 5-sigmas to a probability, which is almost invariably misreported as a probability of the hypothesis that it is all just statistical error e.g.

Data overload?

30 minutesThe government announced last week that it would be greatly expanding the amount of data which it shares with the rest of us. Its white paper spells out the detailed principles of the new approach, and there is much in it to commend. It addresses many of the hideous features of government data at the moment, such as departments' habit of publishing in proprietary formats (usually Excel); the fact that data cannot necessarily be re-used without obtaining explicit permission; and the lack of coherence between different datasets on essentially the same topic.

Drinking again

Submitted by david on Fri, 01/06/2012 - 8:13am

Alcohol can cause very serious problems, both for individuals, their families and society. But the Daily Mail’s story yesterday with the headline “Don't drink more than THREE glasses of wine a week: Oxford study claims slashing the official alcohol limit would save 4,500 lives a year” almost universally aroused derision among its many commenters.

Meat and dying

Submitted by david on Wed, 21/03/2012 - 5:50pm

After all the recent coverage of the possible harms of red meat, I've done an article explaining how, if we believe the figures, eating quite a lot of extra red meat each week will take, on average, a year off our life.

Wiped Out

Submitted by david on Sat, 17/12/2011 - 11:10am

Appearing on Winter Wipeout today. Enough said.

insert alternate text

Looking deranged at the prospect of the Big Balls

Wrote an article for the Times, which appeared as this.

BBC website headline wrong shock horror

Submitted by kevin on Thu, 08/12/2011 - 12:53pm

Bowel cancer screening 'does cut deaths', said the BBC News website today, in a report on a study using data from the NHS Bowel Cancer Screening Programme in England, published in the magnificently named journal Gut. Wow, I thought, that was quick, the programme has been going only since 2006 and didn't cover the whole country till 2010. Have they really found clear evidence of an effect on death rates already?

Why it’s important to be pedantic about sigmas and commas

Submitted by david on Sat, 03/12/2011 - 6:59pm

The BBC reported last week that evidence for the Higgs Boson is “around the two-sigma level of certainty” and provides further explanation:

Particle physics has an accepted definition for a "discovery": a five-sigma level of certainty. The number of standard deviations, or sigmas, is a measure of how unlikely it is that an experimental result is simply down to chance rather than a real effect”

This is nice and clear, but it is also wrong, as we have pointed out before in a previous blog by Kevin McConway.

Are the Brits really fatter than other Europeans?

Submitted by kevin on Sun, 27/11/2011 - 6:31pm

Lots of press reports in the last couple of days on how UK women are the fattest in Europe, for example in the Daily Mail and on the BBC News website. I'm still in Berlin, and it was in the papers here too. The tabloid-style Berliner Kurier went with the headline "Man, they are fat, man", while the N24 news service went with "British and Maltese are the fattest Europeans". But is it another dodgy league table?

Microlives

Submitted by david on Tue, 22/11/2011 - 10:46am

30 minutes
Acute risks, such as riding a motorbike or going skydiving, may result in an accident - a natural unit for comparing such risks is the Micromort, which is a 1-in-a-million chance of sudden death, for some defined activity.

The next Piccadilly line train is leaving from ....

Submitted by david on Sat, 19/11/2011 - 4:24pm

Kings Cross Station now not only has a platform 9$\frac{3}{4}$, but also a platform 0. And for the numerically challenged, there are repeated announcements that 'customers are advised that Platform 0 is situated next to Platform 1'

kings-cross.JPG

I suppose the Underground platforms will now have to be given complex numbers.

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