Understanding Uncertainty

As of the 23rd May 2022 this website is archived and will receive no further updates.

https://understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

Many of the animations were produced using Flash and will no longer work.

Another doubtful league table?

Submitted by david on Tue, 01/11/2011 - 12:13pm

David Cameron has prominently commented on the recent performance tables concerning adoption in local authorities, in particular the proportion of children whose adoption placement occurs within 12 months. But are the local authorities really as different as they have been made out to be?

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A Maserati for £1

Submitted by david on Mon, 17/10/2011 - 2:16pm

After Dave and Angela Dawes won £101 million on the Euromillions lottery, Radio 5 Live asked me to comment on the different ways one could win a decent amount of money for £1. I chose £100,000, which will buy you a shiny new Maserati ( a Ferrari would be about double that). The recording of my interview is here, and here are the details of my calculations, which I hope are roughly correct.

Surgeons create Frankenstein numbers?

Submitted by david on Thu, 29/09/2011 - 7:50am

The BBC News website and Radio 4 news both led this morning on the Royal College of Surgeons' report on emergency surgery. The BBC web site states that
'A report by the college highlights figures that show that about 170,000 patients undergo emergency abdominal operations each year. Of these, 100,000 will develop complications and 25,000 of these patients will die.'

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Divide and rule: getting rates in a mess

Submitted by kevin on Wed, 28/09/2011 - 2:54pm

I've been a bit inactive in here for a few weeks, because I've temporarily moved to Berlin. But it turns out that one can find bad presentations of risk in the German media too, and here's one, pointed out to me by my new colleague Jan Multmeier. The topic is a serious one: suicide rates in German troops serving abroad, and the error involves dividing by the wrong thing when calculating rates.

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The dangers of 'don't worry'

Submitted by david on Tue, 27/09/2011 - 7:48am

(appeared in the Times, 26th September 2011) - pdf here

Now that the rogue US satellite has crashed into the Pacific we can all come out from under our beds. The biggest bit of the satellite was about the weight of an adult gorilla, although not as soft, and travelled at 100 mph so it sounds rather ominous, but people only take up one 80,000th of the earth’s surface so it would be more than an unlucky day if anyone had been hit. 40 tons of debris got scattered over mainland USA after the Columbia shuttle disaster and nobody was injured, although NASA afterwards concluded there had been around a 1 in 4 chance of some casualties.

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Get under the table?

Submitted by david on Fri, 23/09/2011 - 8:26am

The remnants of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) are due to hit the earth later today and NASA have put up some details of their risk assessment. But this doesn't say where their '1 in 3200 chance of anyone being hit' comes from, and so can we get this figure from a back-of-an-envelope calculation?

Lottery league tables

Submitted by david on Thu, 15/09/2011 - 11:13am

The Daily Mail and other media sources have featured league tables for the 'luckiest parts of the country' based on the proportion of the population that have become millionaires by winning the lottery. Straight Statistics have done a nice demolition job on this absurd story, pointing out that any comparison should be based on the number of tickets sold, not the population.

Visualising uncertainty

Submitted by david on Thu, 15/09/2011 - 9:54am

We have had a review paper published in Science called Visualising uncertainty about the future, although it primarily focuses on probability forecasts.

You may access the full paper by following the links below.