level 1
Welcome to Understanding Uncertainty
Posted November 29th, 2007 by david
Are you uncertain? Are you struggling with risk, doubt, ignorance, ambiguity and indecision? You are not on your own.
Here we try and make some sense of what we hear about chance, risk, uncertainty and probability.
This site was launched in May 2008 and we are gradually adding material.
- In Coincidences we look at why surprising things happen.
- In National Lottery we examine the history of the UK Lottery and show some apparently remarkable events. Is it all just chance?
- In Premier League we look at the English Football Premier League over two seasons. Who really are the best and worst teams?
There will be a lot more things appearing - see About Us.
Latest: The 2007-2008 Premier League
Watch how the 2007-2008 season developed.
You need to install the Adobe Flash Player to see the animation.
Click to enlarge the animation
Go to Premier League to get the full story on how much of the point-spread is due to chance alone.
Time to hug a tree?
Posted July 24th, 2008 by Horace
in
The Risk and Regulation Advisory Council (RRAC) is trying to stimulate public interest in a debate about how to manage the 'risk' posed by trees.
Risk in the media
Posted June 5th, 2008 by Horace
in
One of our aims is to look at how the mass media portray risk stories, and what we might learn from that experience. The only way most people (including us) hear about risks is through the media, and understanding the reporting could help towards a better understanding of risk and uncertainty.
Day one
Posted May 14th, 2008 by Horace
in
Hello, and welcome to the first blog entry from the Understanding Uncertainty team!
We hope you enjoy the site: it's only got a bit of content so far but there's lots more in the pipeline.
David S
About Us
Posted April 29th, 2008 by gmp26
What is this site?
This site is produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim is 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!
For Educators
Posted April 8th, 2008 by gmp26
We hope this site may be useful to people teaching about uncertainty, whether it's the mathematics of probability and statistics, or the responses of individuals or society to risk.
Uncertainty - what do we mean?
Posted April 2nd, 2008 by hauke
This website is about the use of probability and statistics when dealing with uncertainty, where we use 'uncertainty' in a slightly restricted way. We are only concerned about situations in which individuals or society are uncertain about what is true, which means that we only worry about things that can, at least in principle, be eventually found out to be true or not.
Cromwell's Law
Posted February 5th, 2008 by david
Cromwell's Rule refers to a principle that you should not give probabilities of 1 to any event that is not demonstrable by logic to be true, and never to give probability 0 to any event unless it can be logically shown to be false - see page 91 of Understanding Uncertainty by Dennis Lindley. It comes from Cromwell's appeal to the Church of Scotland to 'think it possible you may be mistaken'.
Why does anyone win the lottery?
Posted February 5th, 2008 by david
Consider a lottery in which there are $N$ possible number combinations - in the UK Lottery $N $= 13,983,816. Each ticket therefore has a $1/N$ chance of sharing in the jackpot. Suppose we sell $N$ tickets, what is the chance of nobody winning the jackpot? What if we sell $2N$? The chances are shown in the table below, and hold whatever $N$ is, provided it is large!
Three children with the same birthday?
Posted February 5th, 2008 by david
A recent news story featured a family whose three children had all been born on January 29th. But is this so remarkable?
