survival

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

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.

survival-paper-materials

Written instructions used to explain survival curves to participants in Rakow, Wright, Bull and Spiegelhalter (in press, Medical Decision Making).

For simple survival curves, all participants read the same set of instructions.

For multi-state survival curves, participants read one of two sets of instructions (depending on the kind of graph that they would subsequently see).

Survival Worldwide

We have adapted Link to Survival Animationour Survival Worldwide animation to visualise life table data from the Human Lifetable Database maintained by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Rostock, Germany), the Department of Demography at the University of California (Berkeley, USA), and the Institut national d'études démographiques (Paris, France).

How long did we live?

We thought it would be interesting to extend our Survival animation backwards in time. With some help by the ONS Centre for Demography we've been able to go back roughly to 1845.

Moscow 1812

This is still a work in progress, but we thought you might be interested in these different ways the data in Charles Minard's map can be visualised. The Minard map is a beautifully clear summary of the progress of Napoleon's 1812 campaign. It depicts a broad river of men flowing eastwards, suffering continuous depletion from disease, desertion and death, with just a few surviving the disastrous retreat.

Clone of The force of mortality

red man
How long are going to live? showed how the chances of dying each year depend on how old you are and what your health behaviours have been. Here we show how these annual 'hazards', survival curves and life expectancies can all be obtained from data on what proportion of people of each age die each year in the UK.

Life expectancy

getting life expectancy from life tables.

The force of mortality

red man
How long are going to live? showed how the chances of dying each year depend on how old you are and what your health behaviours have been. Here we show how these annual 'hazards', survival curves and life expectancies can all be obtained from data on what proportion of people of each age die each year in the UK.

How long are you going to live?

red manNone of us are going to last for ever. Our prospects depend on our sex, our age, our lifestyle, our genes, and many other personal factors both known and unknown. Even with all this information we're all uncertain about the exact date of our death, but by looking at large groups of people who are like us, we can count how many die each year and so get an idea of the risks we face and how long we might live. Our risks can be summarised in different ways which are shown in the animation below.

Calculating Risk?

Here, we attempt to explain how the evidence is used to formulate results through the risk calculators.

The calculations are formed by combining the average life span for a population with the average reduction of life-span associated with a particular disease. Calculations get trickier when you want to know the combined risk of more than one disease and behaviour on life-span.

Risk Calculators

Our intrepid head of the Understanding Uncertainty team, David Spiegelhalter, booked himself in to see the doctor. At least for purely research reasons we are delighted that we can make use of his newly acquired medical information.
He came out with a rather ominous status of having a 10% risk of heart disease within the next 10 years – a result from his doctor’s calculator.

Subscribe to RSS - survival