The getstats campaign has a vision in which everyone in society is able to understand and use statistics in their own lives.
In this section we will set out information and resources to help the public generally find out more about statistics and explore what they mean for them. Issues like money, life expectancy and understanding the society we live in and the world around us are a good place to start.
An Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) resource. OpenSpending is about ‘mapping the money’. OKFN aim “to track every (public) government and corporate financial transaction across the world and present it in useful and engaging forms for everyone from a school-child to a data geek”. OKFN’s online tools let you see and visualise (few spreadsheets, lots of great visualisation) the information in data that are relevant to our lives e.g. how government departments and local councils spend our taxes. OKFN aim to create a truly interactive platform, with visitors uploading their data for analysis too.
An OKFN interactive data visualization tool that allows users to explore UK’s public spending patterns using a mix of maps, timelines and graphs. It is also aimed at promoting transparency and engaging us all as citizens in looking very closely at visualised information about UK public spending, by bringing it down to the individual level. Start by moving the opening page slider to your annual income and discover how your tax money is spent in daily figures……..
Wolfram Alpha’s ‘computation engine’ uses data available on the internet to generate answers to your questions. It can access mortality statistics - data on the ages at which people died - to calculate your life expectancy. If you type “life expectancy of a [your age] year old [your sex]” it will tell you at what age you can expect to die, along with a more detailed breakdown of the likelihood of you making it to various milestone birthdays. It can also calculate dates on which something will happen so, having got your life expectancy, you can find out on what date you can expect to die by typing “[life expectancy] years after [date of birth]“. On what day can you expect to die?
Visit WolframAlpha’s Life Expectancy example page to see what your life expectancy would have been had you been born in another century or on another continent.
Professor David Spiegelhalter unwraps and explains risk. He also looks at easy to understand and meaningful ways of measuring those risks …here are just two examples of ways of measuring, comparing risks in ways which are more meaningful than those we may have encountered so far.
Chronic risk – the sort of behaviour, diet and life choices which don’t kill us straight away – lends itself well to Microlives (that’s 30 minutes off your life expectancy !) The microlife aims to make all these chronic risks comparable by showing how much life we lose on average when we’re exposed to them….smoking 2 cigarettes or drinking 3 pints of beer equate to 1 microlife each, a chest X-ray costs you 3 microlives, and undergoing a CT scan costs 180 microlives.
Acute risk – the real risk takers amongst us might be interested in looking at the site too to read more about Micromorts, a ‘friendly unit of deadly risk’ . A micromort is a 1 in 1m chance of dying: drivijng a car for 250miles and your risk is 1 micromort, the same as walking 17 miles or cycling 20 or motorcycling 6 miles….
See how statistics make sense in this now bi-monthly magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and American Statistical Association (including more articles on life expectancy and money and most other subjects you can think of). The online site is updated daily. You can download the Signficance App andor follow Significance on Twitter and Facebook.
For anybody interested in numbers…this programme on Radio 4 is unmissable for anybody interested in numbers, data and statistics. Numbers are not just facts, like words they need explaining….Tim Harford and colleagues explain and sometimes debunk – the numbers and statistics used in political debate, the news and everyday life. When it’s not on air, you can still download podcasts.
