The Tiger That Isn't - Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot
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.
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A lot of material on numbers in society and how to deal with them. Particularly relevant items are
- p 14: thinking about dosage of acrylamide
- p 25: definitions of 'violent' children
- p 30: Aristotle: it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things
just so far as the nature of the subject permits - p 32: chance clustering of cancers near radio mast: - use image of rice thrown on carpet, cluster near
dots placed on carpet - p 35: cluster of heads and tails when toss coins 30 times. People as poor assessors of clustering
- p 40: real clusters can occur - nasal cancer in High Wycombe
- p 40: image of waves and tides: need to distinguish them
- p 42: RTM using speed cameras - quotes from papers. Get audience to be roads and throw 2 dice, 10 11 12 get speed cameras. Claim just 20% of apparent reduction is real
- p 47: Home Office report in 2006 on evidence-base of policy?
- p 50: Shipman - lack of monitoring now
- p 61: averages: most earn less than average
- p 65: median survival as poor summary
- p 68: longest waiting time going down can obscure increase in median etc
- p 74: targets: waiting time in A&E distorting practice, Bevan/Hood saying saying PIs should represent the whole and be 'gameproof' - ambulance response times
- p 80: Bevan/Hood - introduce randomness into the monitoring. Police gaming of arrest targets
- p 83: risk communication: 6% increase in breast cancer per drink. Relative and absolute risk. Natural fequencies
- p 88: cancer from mobile phones: EMR
- p 92: screening. false negatives, Gigerenzer, bayes
- p 96: Chap 8: biases arising from design/sampling
- p 120: Data quality - Bristol,
- p 128; a culture that respected data, that put proper effort into collecting and interpreting statistical information with care and honesty, that valued statistics as a route to understanding, and took pains to find out what was said by numbers we have already got, that regarded them as something more than a political plaything, a culture like this would, in our view be the most valuable improvement to the conduct of government and setting of policy Britain could achieve.
- p 137: shock stories get coverage: amazing story, duff number, or misinterpretation, which is more likely?
- p 139; drug testing in sport, outliers happen
- p 147; league tables in education, brief history, CVA etc
- p 157; league tables of countries, definitions and weights
- p 167; correlation and causation examples - climate change etc
