Submitted by david on Sun, 31/10/2010 - 5:54pm
This page contains the text of articles which have appeared in newspapers and magazines, as well as links to articles on other people's websites.
Submitted by david on Wed, 18/04/2012 - 4:09pm
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).
Submitted by kevin on Thu, 08/12/2011 - 12:53pm
Submitted by kevin on Sun, 27/11/2011 - 6:31pm
Lots of press reports in the last couple of days on how UK women are the fattest in Europe, for example in the Daily Mail and on the BBC News website. I'm still in Berlin, and it was in the papers here too. The tabloid-style Berliner Kurier went with the headline "Man, they are fat, man", while the N24 news service went with "British and Maltese are the fattest Europeans". But is it another dodgy league table?
Submitted by david on Sat, 19/11/2011 - 4:24pm
Kings Cross Station now not only has a platform 9$\frac{3}{4}$, but also a platform 0. And for the numerically challenged, there are repeated announcements that 'customers are advised that Platform 0 is situated next to Platform 1'
I suppose the Underground platforms will now have to be given complex numbers.
Submitted by david on Tue, 08/11/2011 - 3:19pm
You’re finally landed after a nightmare flight in cattle-class. All you can think of is getting home, cleaning up the cat-sick and opening the post and a bottle of wine. Then you get to immigration control and are confronted by a queue that overflows the room, with a patient border official steadily working their way through the grumpy mob. It’s enough to make you want to stay at home.
Submitted by david on Mon, 31/10/2011 - 8:49am
I recently tweeted a link to this problem drawn on a blackboard, which got a lot of retweets.
Multiple Choice: If you choose an answer to this question at random, what is the chance you will be correct? A) 25% B) 50% C) 60% D) 25%
This is a fun question whose paradoxical, self-referential nature quickly reveals itself – A) seems to be fine until one realizes the D) option is also 25%.
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.
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.
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.
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