Animations
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.
Many of our articles make use of illustrative animations which we try to make as reusable as possible. If you have some data which could benefit from one of these visualisations, we encourage you to go ahead, but do get in touch. Here we list all the embeddable animations we have created so far.
Thumbnails link to the live animation, and titles link to a (possibly) expanded version of the catalogue entry.
Within each animation, the about button provides author and licensing information and links to the original articles. The embed button gives you code that can be pasted into an HTML file. If you upload the code to a web server, we will need to enable it for you before it will work.
This animation
This animation
Our Survival animation
Our Survival Worldwide
This animation can be used for comparing risks under two sets of circumstances. Risks are compared using two back-to-back bar charts which can be filled either with a solid colour, or with icons. 
When assessing a risk it's sometimes helpful to have a picture. Here, you can display a risk as a visual fraction of people - numerator over denominator. A maximum of 1000 people are displayed, but you may enter a denominator up to 10000 since the visualisation is capable of displaying tenths of a person. You can also ask it to display things like 8.3 out of 100.
This is really a quincunx made to look like lightning for a bit of fun. The lightning has to make 20 left or right choices on its way to the ground. If the stick man stays put he has a 1 in $2^{20}$ chance of being struck on each flash. That's roughly one micromort. As the strikes hit the ground the number of hits in each place appears as a bar chart.
In this animation, a happy smiley has won the lottery. The other 16,777,215 sad smileys all lost. Can you find the winner? We've given you some help - he's in the square outlined in white, and you can zoom and pan to find him. In the standard 6 ball 1-49 lottery, the chance of matching all 6 is comparable at 1 in 13,983,816.
