John Pullinger, President of the Royal Statistical Society on why it is vital that our education system provides young people with the statistical skills our economy needs The big political question today is where the UK’s future economic growth is going to come from. One area where we are well placed to thrive internationally is in managing the explosion of data. We have produced outstanding firms like Dunnhumby (who manage

We’ve been here before, but that doesn’t make the pain of statistical abuse any lighter. A government, down in the polling dumps, gets anxious to extol its policies. It seizes eagerly on any sign they are working. Temptation looms, in the shape of exaggerating or, as some would say, actively misinterpreting data. The Department of Work and Pensions is in the firing line over statements made about the flow of claimants

Doctors have to have a minimum understanding of basic statistics and if they don’t they put patients and professional integrity at risk. That surely is a lesson from the report of the Mid-Staffs inquiry and now the enforced closure of a children’s heart unit at Leeds. Doctors will complain their training curriculum is already crowded – they don’t just have to conquer medicine but acquire personal, business and (if they are to

This year’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) adjustment of the goods and services ‘shopping basket’ which underpins the RPI and CPI measures of inflation has captured the media’s imagination. Not least the fact that champagne is no longer included in the basket. Whilst it’s interesting to look for the effects of austerity Britain in the new basket contents and easy to view it as a pop thermometer of what’s ‘hot’

The Guardian reports Facebook users are ‘unwittingly revealing intimate secrets – including their sexual orientation, drug use and political beliefs’. What a writer  calls ‘algorithmic detective work’  — the use of common Big Data techniques – could allow Facebook and similar operations to work out that if you like certain films or express certain views you are more likely to have this or that sexual orientation or religious beliefs. The culprit, it turns

Nobody can have missed recent ’England, a nation of secret binge drinkers?’ headlines spawned by new research ‘How is alcohol consumption affected if we account for under-reporting? A hypothetical scenario’.  Everyone, it seems, was shocked that 40-60% of the alcohol we buy is not included in the amount we say we drink. Whilst here it’s the size of the gap between perception and reality which has proven so startling to the media, finding a difference between

“We understand the universe much better than we understand our own societies” said Professor Helbing, Chair of Sociology, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dirk Helbing was speaking at a session entitled “Predictability: from physical to data sciences”. This was an opportunity for participating scientists to share ways in which they have applied statistical methodologies they usually use in the physical sciences to

“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

From April this year, the government is bringing in a sweeping set of changes to social benefits, with new names, new rules and – the Department of Work and Pensions has just launched a consultation - new statistics. The government is calling the new scheme Universal Credit. The original idea had been to roll together the cash support offered poor households, but that has proved too difficult: separate benefits for pensioners,

Since proposed reforms of the welfare system were announced two years ago, we have regularly heard reference to Universal Credit, the new benefit set to replace six of what are currently the main means-tested welfare benefits and tax credits. But without a sense of how levels of existing claims have changed over time, how many people are claiming in each authority, the age profile of claimants etc…without having access to