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.
Past experience and probability theory can be used to check the odds of your football team winning or judge the risks of activities such as riding motorcycles, taking illegal drugs, going into hospital or just living. Things get more difficult when we don't fully understand what is going on, like early on in the swine flu epidemic, or when we are dealing with huge complexity, as in climate change. Then it can be helpful to admit what we don't know.
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.
David giving a 'Do Lecture'. As the Do Lectures site explains, "The idea is a simple one. That people who Do things, can inspire the rest of us to go and Do things too. So each year, a set of people are invited to come and tell us what they Do."
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?
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?
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.
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.
Past experience and probability theory can be used to check the odds of your football team winning or judge the risks of activities such as riding motorcycles, taking illegal drugs, going into hospital or just living. Things get more difficult when we don't fully understand what is going on, like early on in the swine flu epidemic, or when we are dealing with huge complexity, as in climate change. Then it can be helpful to admit what we don't know.
David giving a 'Do Lecture'. As the Do Lectures site explains, "The idea is a simple one. That people who Do things, can inspire the rest of us to go and Do things too. So each year, a set of people are invited to come and tell us what they Do."
