Elections are taking place across England and Wales later this year for the new post of police and crime commissioner – in London the elected mayor fills an analogous role, and the contest for that job is in May. It looks as if a fair numbers of candidates (the Police Foundation is regularly updating runners and riders) will have a background in policing and criminal justice. Some – Alun Michael has thrown his hat

An article on the CNN website about Greece and the euro included information (see table below) on recent currency devaluations.  Now if the Argentinian peso had really been reduced in value by 280% it would literally be worth less than nothing; it would be a currency with negative value. Think about a sale in which an item originally costing £10 is reduced in price. If the reduction is 50% the new price

When even the deputy prime minister of a Conservative-led government can refer sarcastically to the rich as the ’have yachts’, it’s a sign sensibility is changing about inequality. That’s the contention of a new  BBC World Service programme. The Wealth Gap argues that inequality had been a low-key issue but now – across the ideological spectrum – there’s concern and dismay at the dramatic trends in recent years in the distribution of

How often do you think something is a coincidence? getstats is enjoying the call-out by Cambridge Coincidences call for our stories of coincidences: surprising repetitions, simultaneous events, parallel lives, uncanny patterns or unlikely chains of events.  Whilst risk and the arbitrary accidents and illnesses that befall us might seem more like Professor David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk’s and the Understanding Uncertainty team’s usual territory, they are also interested in what might seem like

The pressure group Migration Watch UK has just published a paper suggesting there is a link between youth unemployment and immigration from the eight former Soviet Bloc countries (the EUA8) that joined the EU from 2004. At the same time the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has published a paper claiming that there is no such link. The Migration Watch paper contains the following graph, showing the numbers

We’ve blogged at Employability4socialsciences – a resource put together by Professor Malcolm Todd and colleagues at Sheffield Hallam University – pulling together the case for humanities and social science first-degree students to think about their stats literacy. Employers across the sectors say they’d love recruits to be better equipped for the ‘age of  data’, and possess higher levels of quantitative skill – not just in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths)

A Swedish project is looking at how citizens and stats could be better connected – especially by means of better ‘interfaces’ to make numerical information come alive. Its focus is Scandinavia plus Estonia and Iceland, bringing together government statisticians, software developers and others. The project is after ‘an easy-to-use, powerful, and flexible standard interface for communication of data and metadata between statistics producers (statistical agencies) and citizen-centric applications, developed by

Journalists should use stats better and need more training, according to the Guardian’s readers’ editor, pictured left. Chris Elliott says the media organisation has been trying to improve its use of numbers and has convened three sessions with external experts during the past year. Despite the Guardian’s support for an in-house data team the misuse of numbers remains a concern, he said in a weekly blog that picks up points made by readers,

The Department for Education conducts a census each January of class sizes in schools in England and Wales. According to the politics.co.uk website, the average size of Key Stage 1 classes taught by a single teacher on the census day in 2010 was 26.6. Suppose now that the census had been focussed on the children rather than the teacher. The average size of Key Stage 1 classes as experienced by

“A good decision is based on knowledge not on numbers” (Plato)   A passing reference to this quotation in the New Year Sunday papers has got us wondering what Plato would have made of the data deluged world we live in today.    Put simply, Plato thought that as we cannot see numbers and have no causal connection with them, we cannot actually know about them. He thought that numbers must exist in a separate