The mixed results from a recent IPSOS MORI survey commissioned by the Royal Statistical Society and King’s College London show there’s more work to be done to improve the public’s understanding of statistics, and of the role of statistics in their own lives and in policy making. Only a few days after a senior government member was reprimanded by the UK Statistics Authority for making tenuous claims about one of

Statisticians may sometimes seem over- meticulous and detail-obsessed – but if anyone can see the wood for the trees, it’s them. By checking through detail, they are really just bringing everything together so that they can look at the big picture. At the weekend, in an interview on Radio 4 the ONS’s chief economist Joe Grice said that the ‘did it/didn’t it?’ debate around the UK and double dip recessions was “counter productive” and that we’d

Last year there was a surge of measles in England and Wales and already this year health authorities in South Wales and the north east of England are reporting spikes in cases of a disease that had been on its way out – thanks to the success of the MMR vaccine says NHS Choices. A causal link can’t definitively be made with the Wakefield case in 1998 and the way, then and since

‘What the budget numbers tell us, and what they don’t’ an RSS-getstats parliamentary panel event took place on 19 March. Read on for a brief account of discussion. Budgets are ‘political’ and interpretation of the numbers they present will always be ‘pluralist’, the RSS getstats panel audience was told - the event taking place a day before Chancellor George Osborne did his best to prove the point. But recognising political reality did not exonerate government,

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

“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

Adverts for financial products say – though usually in tiny print at the bottom of the page – past performance is no guide to how things will be in future. Stuff happens, such as banks collapsing, stock markets imploding, wars, pestilence (and their opposites, too, booms and prolonged prosperity included). Put the point in the sort of language statisticians use and you might say extrapolating from yesterday’s trends makes for a dubious

With advances in technologies like cancer screening, we need to be as clear as possible when stating results in terms of probabilities It’s not just patients who sometimes find risks and probabilities difficult to understand. Doctors can be challenged by them too. In an experiment in 2004, psychologist Professor Gigerenzer and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development set a group of experienced doctors the following problem: About 1% of women

We are all guilty of relying too heavily on personal experience – and not evidence – when it comes to views on how society should work.  We tend to assume our own experience is the measure of how people should behave.  My treatment in hospital may have been excellent…but this is not necessarily how things really are.  We have only to read the most recent Care Quality Commission report to know differently.

We are all being encouraged to make informed decisions and choices about our health. But to do this we need communication around the benefits and risks of different screening and treatment options available to us to be as clear as possible. Whilst recent media coverage  has focused on the ‘harm’ attached to breast cancer screening…NHS Choices has unwrapped the facts. In the main, the media story has been the undoubted anxiety attached to false