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

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

NHS Choices reckons health reporting has been improving with ‘wonder cures’ hitting the headlines less often and peer-reviewed medial reports covered more responsibly. But the paper illustrated, the Daily Express, is a ‘dishonourable exception’ to the trend, according to the Department of Health-supported information site, which monitors how reports of new therapies and treatments are handled by the media. However ‘headlines can often give a different impression’. Rely on them and you

That’s the headline we were looking for…but didn’t see. Instead, in the midst of the excitement around the US Powerball lottery jackpot - odds of hitting the $550m (£344m) jackpot were calculated at one in 175 million – statisticians were reported as saying that you have more chance of getting struck by lightning or dying from a bee sting than scooping the jackpot. Comparing winning the lottery with the risk of dying may be intended to get us

“Tails you win: the science of chance”, a Wingspan Productions programme for BBC Four, presented by Professor David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, Cambridge University was broadcast on 18 October. ‘Tails you win’ tracked chance back to its roots. In the 1500s, when trying to crack the secrets of gambling, Dr Cardano found that the results of dice rolling can be seen as fractions. In the late 1600s  Edmund Halley‘s analysis

On Thursday 18 October, the eve of getstats‘ second anniversary, BBC Four will be showing a documentary on statistics and probability. ‘Tails You Win:the science of chance” will be presented by David Spiegelhalter, Royal Statistical Society fellow, getstats board member and long-time champion for greater statistical literacy in society. We spoke to David about what it was like to make the BBC documentary, and how to engage teenagers in the

Just to whet our appetite, Wingspan Productions have alerted us to the new ‘Tails you win” clip on the BBC’s YouTube channel. The 4.5 mins snippet shares David’s positive outlook on life and why he thinks that knowing more about chance and risk may actually increase our enjoyment of life (and perhaps boost our life expectancy too). For those of us keen to know more about the numbers and research underlying

We’re hoping to use the summer break from parliamentary politics – isn’t it amazing how political news dries up when MPs are absent? – to think about what stats our parliamentary representatives work with. What is the basic equipment an MP needs to operate as a legislator, select committee member, policy debater, constituency activist and so on? We’d like your ideas. For example, MPs fixate on figures to do with electoral

Stevie Wonder sang it with gusto over the Jubilee holiday but it may not be a happy birthday if you are over 60. A study of Swiss death certificates published in Annals of Epidemiology has found a significant number of ‘extra’ deaths occur on the day people are celebrating their birth. Researchers checked the data was sound – some people’s birthdays are not exactly known. They calculated the increased risk

‘Risk is risky’, it says in Note 12 in Number Hygiene our guide to journalists on how to write up stats. Unsuspecting readers too often get waylaid by headlines screaming things like ‘eating bacon increases bowel cancer by 20 per cent’ …when what we know is that consuming a large extra amount of the offending ham produces a slight increase in the absolute risk of contracting the disease. But journalists won’t mend their ways. The Lancet has just