Coincidence Coincidence

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.

This is going to sound like a bad joke, but the fact is that I got pointed to this web-page twice independently in an hour after never having heard of it before. (In order to understand the anecdote below it might be worth noting that I am a fairly new academic in the field of statistics. So perhaps the really surprising thing is that I hadn't heard of David Spiegelhalter before this sequence of events took place.) First I was having a chat with a colleague about a very strange data set that had come out of an experiment I had been carrying out for a while (which I will post as a separate coincidence), and she suggested have a look at David Spiegelhalter's work, and his web-page for reporting coincidences. So I went and had a look at the web-page before going to a catch up with a different colleague where we ended up talking communicating comprehension of probability, and he suggested I should look up a guy called David Spiegelhalter who has a web-page where people can report coincidences.
Total votes: 187
Date submitted:Wed, 07 Jul 2021 02:10:09 +0000Coincidence ID:11372