Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter is leading a vanguard of statisticians in the UK media helping the public make sense of vital information.
#20 years down n dirty series#
The BBC’s More or Less radio series (and podcast)(2020) are doing excellent work unpacking the deluge of numbers in the news for a lay audience.
“ The Coronavirus Exponential: A Preliminary Investigation into the Public’s Understanding” (Podkul et al., 2020) found that most people could grasp the scale of exponential growth with visual aids and a few multiple-choice options, but struggled without. (2020), “this is a rare scenario in which most now have both.” They used the opportunity to test how well the public understands one key statistical idea. “One often laments that the general population does not have the time or resources to understand the data science behind social scientific concepts,” note Podkul et al. The challenge is to turn that interest into better understanding and more confidence. Who would have thought, a year ago, that rates of increase, the reliability of data, and the failings of computer models, would become the stuff of heated arguments in whatever (real or digital) forum replaced the pub or coffee shop? For those of us who want to nurture wider public interest, understanding, and confidence in statistics and data, the problem has suddenly shifted. If I can gain their BSc in seven years of part-time study, so can anyone else. They should be preparing to market their whole Mathematics and Statistics degree course, not only to teenagers but to their parents and grandparents. The Open University has made its Medical Statistics course (OpenLearn, 2019) free to access, but that’s designed for people at (roughly) second-year undergraduate Maths level. Let’s hope some of them go on to study statistics and data science when education sputters back to life.
#20 years down n dirty serial#
Guardian columnist Tim Dowling (2009) commented at the time, “In order to ensure there are enough jobs to go round, more than half of them will have to retrain as serial killers.”Īs today’s teenagers, their schools closed, watch the news coverage of COVID-19, they must be absorbing the importance of logarithmic scales, projected curves, and R numbers for saving real, not fictional, lives. The number of Forensic Science degree courses rose from 2 to 285 in under 20 years, recruiting 1,667 students in 2008 alone. As Silent Witness, followed by CSI: Miami and its ilk, drew millions of viewers, British universities noticed increased demand from teenagers aspiring to solve crimes in white coats.
In the 1990s, a UK television drama series about a forensic pathologist had an unexpected effect.
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