In 1917, the first year for which there are records, King George V sent birthday cards to 24 British centenarians to congratulate them on turning 100. Since the beginning of her reign Elizabeth II has sent over 110,000 100th birthday telegrams/cards to delighted recipients. In passing, a recent article in The Independent noted the expected number of Britons aged 100 or more would be 100,000 in 25 years time and calculated that our then monarch will be congratulating centenarians “at a rate of 250

The debate concerning the UK’s ageing population usually concerns social care, health and pensions. When it touches on transport, it invariably looks at the number of older drivers and their propensity to cause or be involved in road accidents and rarely on the number of older pedestrians dying in road traffic accidents. Department for Transport (DfT) research ‘Collisions Involving Older Drivers: An In-depth Study‘ found that, ‘older drivers do not

So bad that comments are unnecessary … A Daily Telegraph headline: Essex teenager has higher IQ than Einstein The story in brief: a 16-year-old girl has scored 161 on the Mensa IQ test. Einstein never took an IQ test as none of the modern intelligence tests existed during the course of his life, but experts believe he had an IQ of around 160. And a ‘helpful’ gloss: the IQ test is designed to test

“New figures tell us that the richest 4,000 taxpayers in the UK, the total number of UK income taxpayers who earn more than £2million a year, pay 4.5 % of the UK’s income tax. Discuss.” At the end of last month, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) released data on Income Tax Liability Statistics and shortly after, discussion around a headline statistic from the report kicked off ‘heated debate’ on a late night

Though the government has promised to maintain real-terms spending on the NHS, healthcare managers are under severe pressure to find savings, in order to find room to cope with growing demands for care and the costs of the massive reorganisation the government has pushed through. Attention turns to ‘productivity’. Sir David Nicholson, chief executive of the NHS Commissioning Board, has demanded NHS trusts in England find £20billion worth of productivity

In the BBC Sport website article ‘Managerial league table 2012-13: Who leads the way?’ each manager in the top 4 divisions is ranked using an approach based on the points per game record they have obtained this season. Top of the league is Sir Alex Ferguson (his team, Manchester United is at the top of the Premier League table). Whilst it would be hard to argue that Sir Alex is not

Statisticians often make quite a fuss about the various ways of measuring the average – and that’s because averages used wrongly can give a very misleading impression. The following story, based on a survey of 2000 drivers, appeared in the Metro newspaper. And it raises quite a lot of questions. A typical driver will jump 87 red lights, spend 99 days stationary on gridlocked roads and share 680 kisses during a lifetime

Earlier this week the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies published a new statistical analysis which has found that the Earth’s land areas are more likely to experience extreme summer heat now than they were in the middle of the 20th century. They looked at average (mean average) summer temperatures since 1951 and found that the odds have increased in recent decades for what they define as “hot”, “very hot” and “extremely hot” summers. Between

Today’s headlines - the Telegraph’s  ‘Crime really doesn’t pay – a third of bank robbers make nothing at all’ and the Scotsman’s ‘Crime does not pay very well: robbers on £ 12k a job’ – share new data-driven insight which can be used in fighting crime. The articles pick up on a press release on an article which will be coming out in Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and the

According to an item on the BBC website “Astronomers currently estimate that every star in the night sky hosts, on average, 1.6 planets” Is that poor statistics or poor use of English? If every star “hosts, on average, 1.6 planets”, then our near neighbour Proxima Centauri, for example, hosts on average 1.6 planets – and so, for that matter, does the Sun. What could that possibly mean? Perhaps the number