Podcast appearances and mentions of winton centre

This is a preview of The Huddle Breakdown Interview available at www.huddlebreakdown.comWe are thrilled to welcome Sir David Spiegelhalter to The Huddle Breakdown in the second installment of ‘The Huddle Breakdown Interview'. He talks to Alan and James in a wide ranging conversation including the role of luck in football.Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is the closest thing the world of statistics has to a national treasure. His new book, The Art of Uncertainty: Living with Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck is an engaging and informative guide to living with uncertainty in a world that makes it inevitable. He is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics, has been published in 11 languages. His current roles are as Non-Executive Director, UK Statistics Authority; Mathematical Futures expert board of the Royal Society; Member of the Statistics Expert Group for the Infected Blood Inquiry, 2019 – 2024; and Advisor; NHS Maternity and Neonatal Outcomes Group. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Often, we'll hear it said that we live in an uncertain world. Upon hearing this, most of us respond, well of course we do. But what does the term uncertainty actually mean when analysed under a scientific lens and how can we think about it more rationally. In this episode, we catch up with Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge, to talk about his new book, The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck. He tells us how uncertainty essentially comes from our personal relationships with the outside world, how to analyse and express probability more effectively and why philosophers argue that there are several different types of luck. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do Doctors know best? How do you explain the risks and benefits of a medicine when you yourself don't really know? We chat to Maricarmen Climént, Research and Editorial Officer at Sense about Science about risk communication and how we best help patients to make better choices in the face of uncertainty?Maricarmen has a diverse background in science journalism and risk communication and holds a degree in Veterinary Medicine and an MSc in Science Communication. She also worked for four years at the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, which we discuss. Do clinicians, deep down, think they know best? How can you teach risk to those whose career is predicated on supposedly knowing everything? How do you explain complexity in a simple way when the reality is rarely simple?Things are never certain and we discuss how clinicians can best navigate this difficult terrain and the importance of training in understanding and explaining risk. Dr Julian Treadwell's research we mention - " GPs' knowledge of the absolute benefits and harms of treatments is poor, with inaccuracies of a magnitude likely to meaningfully affect clinical decision-making and impede conversations with patients regarding treatment choices" https://bjgpopen.org/content/4/1/bjgpopen20X101016In our micro-discussion we delve into the paper “Bad news: how the media reported on an observational study about cardiovascular outcomes of COVID-19”. Are the media deliberately biased - or just incompetent - in how they report on scientific research? And how much are the papers' authors themselves to blame? https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2024/04/17/bmjebm-2023-112814. As with all of our guests, Maricarmen shares with us a Memory Evoking Medicine, a career anthem and book that has influenced her career or life.Sense about Science: https://senseaboutscience.org/. Spurious Correlations: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations. Our new website is now live https://www.theauralapothecary.com/ and as well as being a searchable database of all episodes, we will be uploading transcripts and extra content for your enjoyment and education. Have a look and let us know what you think! Our latest blog posts talks about our first live public show - ‘Music, Memories and Medicines' - have a read here; https://www.theauralapothecary.com/blog/the-three-apothecaries-music-medicines-and-memories/. To get in touch follow us on Twitter and Instagram @auralapothecary or email us at auralapothecarypod@gmail.com . Don't forget to rate us and comment wherever you have got this podcast from. You can listen to the Aural Apothecary playlist here; https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3OsWj4w8sxsvuwR9zMXgn5?si=tiHXrQI7QsGtSQwPyz1KBg You can view the Aural Apothecary Library here;  https://litalist.com/shelf/view-bookcase?publicId=KN6E3O

In this episode we talk about the growth of data use in the media and the potential impact of misinformation on the public's trust in official statistics.   Navigating podcast host Miles Fletcher through this minefield is Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, from the University of Cambridge; Ed Humpherson, Head of the Office for Statistics Regulation; and award-winning data journalist Simon Rogers.    Transcript    MILES FLETCHER  Welcome again to Statistically Speaking, the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics, I'm Miles Fletcher. Now we've talked many times before in these podcasts about the rise of data and its impact on our everyday lives. It's all around us of course, and not least in the media we consume every day. But ‘what' or ‘who' to trust: mainstream media, public figures and national institutions like the ONS, or those random strangers bearing gifts of facts and figures in our social media feeds?  To help us step carefully through the minefields of misinformation and on, we hope, to the terra firma of reliable statistical communication, we have three interesting and distinguished voices, each with a different perspective. Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter is a well-known voice to UK listeners. He's chair of the Winton Centre for Risk Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge and was a very prominent voice on the interpretation of public health data here during the COVID pandemic. Also, we have Ed Humpherson, Director General of regulation and head of the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), the official stats watchdog if you like, and later in this podcast, I'll be joined by award winning data journalist and writer Simon Rogers, who now works as data editor at Google.  Professor, you've been one of the most prominent voices these last few years – a fascinating few years, obviously, for statistics in which we were told quite frankly, this was a golden age for statistics and data. I mean, reflecting on your personal experience as a prominent public voice in that debate, when it comes to statistics and data, to be very general, how well informed are we now as a public, or indeed, how ill-informed on statistics?     DAVID SPIEGELHALTER  I think things have improved after COVID. You know, for a couple of years we saw nothing but numbers and graphs on the news and in the newspapers and everywhere, and that went down very well. People didn't object to that. In fact, they wanted more. And I think that has led to an increased profile for data journalism, and there's some brilliant ones out there. I'm just thinking of John Burn-Murdoch on the FT but lots of others as well, who do really good work. Of course, in the mainstream media there is still the problem of non-specialists getting hold of data and getting it wrong, and dreadful clickbait headlines. It is the sub editors that wreck it all just by sticking some headline on what might be a decent story to get the attention and which is quite often misleading. So that's a standard problem. In social media, yeah, during COVID and afterwards, there are people I follow who you might consider as - I wouldn't say amateurs at all, but they're not professional pundits or media people - who just do brilliant stuff, and who I've learned so much from. There are also some terrible people out there, widespread misinformation claims which are based on data and sound convincing because they have got numbers in them. And that, I mean, it's not a new problem, but now it is widespread, and it's really tricky to counter and deal with, but very important indeed.     MF  So the issue aside from - those of us who deal with the media have heard this a hundred times - “I don't write the headlines”, reporters will tell you when you challenge that misleading kind of headline. But would you say it's the mainstream media then, because they can be called out on what they report, who broadly get things right? And that the challenge is everything else - it's out there in the Wild West of social media?     DS  Yeah, mainstream media is not too bad, partly because, you know, we've got the BBC in this country, we've got regulations, and so it's not too bad. And social media, it's the Wild West. You know, there are people who really revel in using numbers and data to make inappropriate and misleading claims.     MF  Is there anything that can be done? Is it the government, or even those of us like the ONS who produce statistics, who should we be wading in more than we do? Should we be getting out there onto the social media platforms and putting people right?     DS  It's difficult I mean, I don't believe in sort of censorship. I don't think you can stop this at source at all. But just because people can say this, it doesn't give them a right for it to be broadcast wide, in a way and to be dumped into people's feeds. And so my main problem is with the recommendation algorithms of social media, where people will see things because it's getting clicks, and the right algorithm thinks persona will like it. And so we just get fed all this stuff. That is my real problem and the obscurity and the lack of accountability of recommendation algorithms right across social media is I think, a really shocking state of affairs. Of course, you know, we come on to this later, but we should be doing something about education, and actually sort of pre-empting some of the misunderstandings is something I feel very strongly about with my colleagues. You've got to get in there quick, and rather than being on the backfoot and just reacting to false claims that have been made, you've got to sort of realise how to take the initiative and to realise what misunderstandings, misinterpretations can be made, and get in there quickly to try to pre-empt them. But that of course comes down to the whole business of how ONS and others communicate their data.     MF  Because when you ask the public whether they trust them - and the UK statistics authority does this every two years - you ask the public if they trust ONS statistics, and a large proportion of them say they do. But of course, if they're not being presented with those statistics, then they're still going to end up being misled.     DS  Yeah, I mean, it's nice to get those responses back. But, you know...that's in terms of respondents and just asking a simple question, do you trust something or not? I think it's good to hear but we can't be complacent about that at all. I'm massively influenced by the approach of the philosopher, Baroness Onora O'Neill, who really makes a sharp distinction between organisations wanting to be trusted and revelling in being trusted, and she says that shouldn't be your objective to be trusted. Your objective should be to be trustworthy, to deserve trust, and then it might be offered up to you. And so the crucial thing is trustworthiness of the statistics system and in the communications, and that's what I love talking about, because I think it's absolutely important and it puts the responsibility really firmly back to the communicator to demonstrate trustworthiness.     MF  So doing more as stats producers to actually actively promote data and get people to come perhaps away from the social platforms, and to have their own websites that present data in an accessible way, in an understandable way, where people can get it for nothing without requiring an expensive subscription or something, as some of the best of the media outlets would require.     DS  The other thing I'd say is there's no point of being trustworthy if you're dull, as no one's going to look at it or take any notice, and other media aren't going to use it. So I think it's really worthwhile to invest, make a lot of effort to make what you're putting out there as attractive, as vivid and as grabbing as possible. The problem is that in trying to do that, I mean, that's what a lot of communicators and media people want to do, because of course they want people to read their stuff. But what that tends to do largely is make their stuff kind of opinionated and have a very strong line, essentially to persuade you to either do something or think something or buy something or vote something. So much communication has to do with persuading that I think it's just completely inappropriate. In this context, what we should be doing is informing people.    In a way we want to persuade them to take notice, so that's why you want to have really good quality communications, vivid, get good people out there. But in the end, they're just trying to inform people, and that's why I love working with ONS. I just think this is a really decent organisation whose job is just trying to raise the...to obviously provide official statistics...but in their communications, it's to try to raise the level of awareness raise the level of discussion, and by being part of a non -ministerial department, they're not there, the comms department, to make the minister look good, or to make anyone look good. It's just there to tell people how it is.    MF  Exactly. To put that data into context. Is this a big number or is this is a small number, right? Adjectives can sometimes be very unhelpful, but often the numbers don't speak for themselves, do they.    DS   Numbers never speak for themselves, we imbue them with meaning, which is a great quote as well from Nate Silver.    MF  And in doing that, of course, you have to walk the same line that the media do, in making them relevant and putting them into context, but not at the same time distorting them. There's been a big debate going on recently, of course, about revisions. And if you've listened to this podcast, which we'd always advise and consume other articles that the ONS has published, we've said a lot about the whole process of revising GDP, and the uncertainty that's built into those initial estimates, which although helpful, are going to be pretty broad. And then of course, when the picture changes dramatically, people are kind of entitled to say, oh hang on, you told us this was something different and the narrative has changed. The story has changed because of that uncertainty with the numbers, shouldn't you have done more to tell us about that uncertainty. That message can sometimes get lost, can't it?     DS  Yeah, it's terribly important. You've got to be upfront. We develop these five points on trustworthy communication and the first one was inform, not persuade. And the second is to be balanced and not to have a one-sided message to tell both sides of the story, winners and losers, positives and negatives. And then to admit uncertainty, to just say what you don't know. And in particular, in this case, “provisionality”, the fact that things may change in the future, is incredibly important to emphasise, and I think not part of a lot of discussion. Politicians find it kind of impossible to say I think, that things are provisional and to talk about quality of the evidence and limitations in the evidence, which you know, if you're only basing GDP on a limited returns to start with, on the monthly figures, then you need to be clear about that. And the other one is to pre-empt the misunderstandings, and again, that means sort of getting in there first to tell you this point, this may change. This is a provisional judgement, and you know, I think that that could be emphasised yet more times, yet more.     MF  And yet there's a risk in that though, of course the message gets lost and diluted and the...    DS  Oh no, it always gets trotted out - oh, we can't admit uncertainty. We can't tell both sides of story. We have to tell a message that is simple because people are too stupid to understand it otherwise, it's so insulting to the audience. I really feel a lot of media people do not respect their audience. They treat them as children - oh we've got to keep it simple, we mustn't give the nuances or the complexity. All right, if you're going to be boring and just put long paragraphs of caveats on everything, no one is going to read that or take any notice of them. But there are ways to communicate balance and uncertainty and limitations without being dull. And that's what actually media people should focus on. Instead of saying, oh, we can't do that. You should be able to do it. Good media, good storytelling should be able to have that nuance in. You know, that's the skill.     MF  You're absolutely right, you can't disagree with any of that, and yet, in communicating with the public, even as a statistics producer, you are limited somewhat by the public's ability to get used to certain content. I mean, for example, the Met Office recently, a couple of years back, started putting in ‘percentage of chance of rainfall', which is something that it hadn't done before. And some work on that revealed just how few people actually understood what they were saying in that, and what the chances were actually going to be of it raining when they went out for the afternoon's work.     DS  Absolute nonsense. That sorry, that's completely I mean, I completely rely on those percentages. My 90-year-old father used to understand those percentages. Because it's a novelty if you are going to ask people what they understand, they might say something wrong, such as, oh, that's the percentage of the area that it's going to rain in or something like that. No, it's the percentage of times it makes that claim that it's right. And those percentages have been used in America for years, they're completely part of routine forecast and I wouldn't say the American public is enormously better educated than the British public. So this is just reluctance and conservatism. It's like saying oh well people don't understand graphs. We can't put up line graphs on the news, people don't understand that. This is contempt for the public. And it just shows I think, a reluctance to make an effort to explain things. And people get used to stuff, once they've learned what a graph looks like, when they see it again, then they'll understand it. So you need to educate the public and not, you know, in a patronising way, it's just that, you know, otherwise you're just being misleading. If you just say, oh, you know, it'll rain or not rain you're just misleading them. If you just say it might rain, that's misleading. What does that mean? It can mean different things. I want a percentage and people do understand them, when they've got some experience of them.     MF  And what about certainty in estimates? Here is a reaction we add to the migration figures that ONS published earlier in the summer. Somebody tweeted back to say, well estimates, that's all very good but I want the actual figures. I want to know how many people have migrated.    DS  Yeah, I think actually, it's quite a reasonable question. Because, you know, you kind of think well can't you count them, we actually know who comes in and out of the country. In that case it's really quite a reasonable question to ask. I want to know why you can't count them. And in fact, of course ONS is moving towards counting them. It's moving away from the survey towards using administrative data to count them. So I think in that case, that's quite a good question to ask. Now in other situations, it's a stupid question. If you want to know if someone says, oh, I don't want an estimate of how many people you know, go and vote one way or do something or other, I want to know how many, well then you think don't be daft. We can't go and ask everybody this all the time. So that's a stupid question. So the point is that in certain contexts, asking whether something is an estimate or not, is reasonable. Sometimes it's not and that can be explained, I think, quite reasonably to people.     MF  And yet, we will still want to be entertained. We also want to have numbers to confirm our own prejudices.     DS  Yeah, people will always do that. But that's not what the ONS is for, to confirm people's prejudices. People are hopeless at estimating. How many, you know, migrants there are, how many people, what size ethnic minorities and things, we know if you ask people these numbers, they're pretty bad at it. But people are bad at estimating all numbers. So no, it's ONS's job to try to explain things and in a vivid way that people will be interested in, particularly when there's an argument about a topic going on, to present the evidence, not one side or the other, but that each side can use, and that's why I really feel that the ONS's migration team, you know, I have a lot of respect for them, when they're changing their format or consulting on it, they go to organization's on both sides. They go to Migration Watch and the Migration Observatory and talk to them about you know, can they understand what's going on, is this data helping them in their deliberations.     MF  Now, you mentioned earlier in the conversation, education, do we have a younger generation coming up who are more stats literate or does an awful lot more need to be done?     DS  A lot more needs to be done in terms of data education in schools. I'm actually part of a group at the Royal Society that is proposing a whole new programme called mathematics and data education, for that to be put together within a single framework, because a lot of this isn't particularly maths, and maths is not the right way or place to teach it. But it still should be an essential part of education, understanding numbers, understanding data, their limitations and their strengths and it uses some numeracy, uses some math but it's not part of maths. The problem has always been where does that fit in the syllabus because it doesn't, particularly at the moment. So that's something that every country is struggling with. We're not unique in that and, and I think it's actually essential that that happens. And when you know, the Prime Minister, I think quite reasonably says people should study mathematics until 18. I mean, I hope he doesn't mean mathematics in the sense of the algebra and the geometry that kids do, get forced to do essentially, for GCSE, and some of whom absolutely loathe it. And so, but that's not really the sort of mathematics that everyone needs. Everyone needs data literacy. Everyone needs that.    MF  Lies, damned lies and statistics is an old cliche, it's still robustly wheeled out in the media every time, offering some perceived reason to doubt what the statisticians have said. I mean looking ahead, how optimistic are you, do you think that one day we might finally see the end of all that?     DS  Well my eyes always go to heaven, and I just say for goodness sake. So I like it when it's used, because I say, do you really believe that? You know, do you really believe that, because if you do you're just rejecting evidence out of hand. And this is utter stupidity. And nobody could live like that. And it emphasises this idea somehow, among the more non-data-literate, it encourages them to think that numbers they hear either have to be sort of accepted as God given truths or rejected out of hand. And this is a terrible state to be in, the point is we should interpret any number we hear, any claim based on data, same as we'd interpret any other claim made by anybody about anything. We've got to judge it on its merits at the time and that includes do we trust the source? Do I understand how this is being explained to me? What am I not being told? And so why is this person telling me this? So all of that comes into interpreting numbers as well. We hear this all the time on programmes like More or Less, and so on. So I like it as a phrase because it is so utterly stupid, then so utterly, easily demolished, that it encourages, you know, a healthy debate.    MF  We're certainly not talking about good statistics, we're certainly not talking about quality statistics, properly used. And that, of course, is the role of the statistics watchdog as we're obliged to call him, or certainly as the media always call him, and that's our other guest, Ed Humpherson.     Ed, having listened to what the professor had to say there, from your perspective, how much misuse of statistics is there out there? What does your organisation, your office, do to try and combat that?      ED HUMPHERSON     Well, Miles the first thing to say is I wish I could give you a really juicy point of disagreement with David to set off some kind of sparky dialogue. Unfortunately, almost everything, if not everything that David said, I completely agree with - he said it more fluently and more directly than I would, but I think we are two fellow travellers on all of these issues.      In terms of the way we look at things at the Office for Statistics Regulation that I head up, we are a statistics watchdog. That's how we are reported. Most of our work is, so to speak, below the visible waterline: we do lots and lots of work assessing reviewing the production of statistics across the UK public sector. We require organisations like the ONS, but also many other government departments, to be demonstrating their trustworthiness; to explain their quality; and to deliver value. And a lot of that work just goes on, week in week out, year in year out to support and drive-up evidence base that's available to the British public. I think what you're referring to is that if we care about the value and the worth of statistics in public life, we can't just sort of sit behind the scenes and make sure there's a steady flow. We actually have to step up and defend statistics when they are being misused because it's very toxic, I think, to the public. Their confidence in statistics if they're subjected to rampant misuse or mis explanation of statistics, it's all very well having good statistics but if they go out into the world and they get garbled or misquoted, that I think is very destructive. So what we do is we either have members of the public raise cases with us when they see something and they're not they're not sure about it, or indeed we spot things ourselves and we will get in contact with the relevant department and want to understand why this thing has been said, whether it really is consistent with the underlying evidence, often it isn't, and then we make an intervention to correct the situation. And we are busy, right, there's a lot there's a lot of there's a lot of demand for work.     MF  Are instances of statistical misuse on the rise?     EH  We recently published our annual summary of what we call casework - that's handling the individual situations where people are concerned. And we revealed in that that we had our highest ever number of cases, 372, which might imply that, you know, things are getting worse. I'd really strongly caution against that interpretation. I think what that increase is telling you is two other things. One is, as we as the Office for Statistics Regulation, do our work, we are gradually growing our profile and more people are aware that they can come to us, that's the first thing this is telling you; and the second thing is that people care a lot more about statistics and data now, exactly as Sir David was saying that this raised profile during the pandemic. I don't think it's a sign that there's more misuse per se. I do think perhaps, the thing I would be willing to accept is, there's just a generally greater tendency for communication to be datafied. In other words, for communication to want to use data: it sounds authoritative, it sounds convincing. And I think that may be driving more instances of people saying well, a number has been used there, I want to really understand what that number is. So I would be slightly cautious about saying there is more misuse, but I would be confident in saying there's probably a greater desire to use data and therefore a greater awareness both of the opportunity to complain to us and of its importance.      MF  Underlying all of your work is compliance with the UK code of practice for statistics, a very important document, and one that we haven't actually mentioned in this podcast so far…      EH  Shame on you, Miles, shame on you.      MF  We're here to put that right, immediately. Tell us about what the code of practice is. What is it for? what does it do?      EH  So the Code of Practice is a statutory code and its purpose is to ensure that statistics serve the public good. And it does that through a very simple structure. It says that in any situation where an individual or an organisation is providing information to an audience, there are three things going on. There's the trustworthiness of the speaker, and the Code sets out lots of requirements on organisations as to how they can demonstrate they're trustworthiness. And it's exactly in line with what David was saying earlier and exactly in line with the thinking of Onora O'Neill – a set of commitments which demonstrate trustworthiness. Like a really simple commitment is to say, we will pre-announce at least four weeks in advance when the statistics are going to be released, and we will release them at the time that we say, so there is no risk that there's any political interference in when the news comes out. It comes out at the time that has been pre-announced. Very clear commitment, very tangible, evidence-based thing. It's a binary thing, right? You either do that or you do not. And if you do not: You're not being trustworthy. The second thing in any situation where people are exchanging information is the information itself. What's its quality? Where's this data from? How's it been compiled? What are its strengths and limitations? And the code has requirements on all of those areas. That is clarity of what the numbers are, what they mean, what they don't mean. And then thirdly, in that exchange of information, is the information of any use to the audience? It could be high, high quality, it could be very trustworthy, but it could, to use David's excellent phrase, it could just be “dull”. It could be irrelevant, it could not be important. And the value pillar is all about that. It's all about the user having relevant, insightful information on a question that they care about. That's, Miles, what the Code of Practice is: it's trustworthiness, it's quality and it's value. And those things we think are kind of pretty universal actually, which is why they don't just apply now to official statistics. We take them out and we apply them to all sorts of situations where Ministers and Departments are using numbers, we always want to ask those three questions. Is it trustworthy? Is it quality, is it value? That's the Code.      MF  And when they've satisfied your stringent requirements and been certified as good quality, there is of course a badge to tell the users that they have been.      EH  There's a badge - the badge means that we have accredited them as complying with that Code of Practice. It's called the National Statistics badge. The term is less important and what it means what it means is we have independently assessed that they comply in full with that Code.      MF  Most people would have heard, if they have heard of the OSR's work, they'll have seen it perhaps in the media. They'll have seen you as the so-called data watchdog, the statistics watchdog. It's never gently explained as it it's usually ‘slammed', ‘criticised', despite the extremely measured and calm language you use, but you're seen as being the body that takes politicians to task. Is that really what you do? It seems more often that you're sort of gently helping people to be right.      EH  That's exactly right. I mean, it's not unhelpful, frankly, that there's a degree of respect for the role and that when we do make statements, they are taken seriously and they're seen as significant, but we are not, absolutely not, trying to generate those headlines. We are absolutely not trying to intimidate or scare or, you know, browbeat people. Our role is very simple. Something has been said, which is not consistent with the underlying evidence. We want to make that clear publicly. And a lot of time what our intervention does actually is it strengthens the hand of the analysts in government departments so that their advice is taken more seriously at the point when things are being communicated. Now, as I say, it's not unwelcome sometimes that our interventions do get reported on. But I always try and make these interventions in a very constructive and measured way. Because the goal is not column inches. Absolutely not. The goal is the change in the information that's available to the public.      MF  You're in the business of correcting the record and not giving people a public shaming.      EH  Exactly, exactly. And even correcting the record actually, there's some quite interesting stuff about whether parliamentarians correct the record. And in some ways, it'd be great if parliamentarians corrected the record when they have been shown to have misstated with statistics. But actually, you could end up in a world where people correct the record and in a sort of tokenistic way, it's sort of, you know, buried in the depths of the Hansard parliamentary report. What we want is for people not to be misled, for people to not think that, for example, the number of people in employment is different from what it actually is. So actually, it's the outcome that really matters most; not so much the correction as are people left understanding what the numbers actually say.      MF  Surveys show - I should be careful using that phrase, you know - nonetheless, but including the UKSA survey, show that the public were much less inclined to trust in the words of the survey. Politicians use of statistics and indeed, Chris Bryant the Labour MP said that politicians who have been who've been found to have erred statistically should be forced to apologise to Parliament. Did you take that on board? Is there much in that?     EH  When he said that, he was actually directly quoting instances we've been involved with and he talks about our role very directly in that sense. Oh, yeah, absolutely. We support that. It will be really, really good. I think the point about the correction, Miles, is that it shows it's a manifestation of a culture that takes fidelity to the evidence, truthfulness to the evidence, faithfulness to the evidence, it takes that seriously, as I say, what I don't want to get into is a world where you know, corrections are sort of tokenistic and buried. I think the key thing is that it's part of an environment in which all actors in public debate realise it's in everybody's interests or evidence; data and statistics to be used fairly and appropriately and part of that is that if they've misspoken, they correct the record. From our experience, by and large, when we deal with these issues, the politicians concerned want to get it right. What they want to do is, they want to communicate their policy vision, their idea of the policy or what the, you know, the state of the country is. They want to communicate that, sure, that's their job as politicians, but they don't want to do so in a way that is demonstrably not consistent with the underlying evidence. And in almost all cases, they are… I wouldn't say they're grateful, but they're respectful of the need to get it right and respect the intervention. And very often the things that we encounter are a result of more of a cockup than a conspiracy really - something wasn't signed off by the right person in the right place and a particular number gets blown out of proportion, it gets ripped from its context, it becomes sort of weaponized; it's not really as a deliberate attempt to mislead. Now, there are probably some exceptions to that generally positive picture I'm giving. but overall it's not really in their interests for the story to be about how they misuse the numbers. That's not really a very good look for them. They'd much rather the stories be about what they're trying to persuade the public of, and staying on the right side of all of the principles we set out helps that to happen.      MF  Your remit runs across the relatively controlled world sort of government, Parliament and so forth. And I think the UK is quite unusual in having a body that does this in an independent sort of way. Do you think the public expects you to be active in other areas, we mentioned earlier, you know, the wilder shores of social media where it's not cockup theories you're going to be hearing there, it's conspiracy theories based on misuse of data. Is there any role that a statistics regulator could possibly take on in that arena?      EH  Absolutely. So I mentioned earlier that the way we often get triggered into this environment is when members of the public raised things with us. And I always think that's quite a solemn sort of responsibility. You know, you have a member of the public who's concerned about something and they care about it enough to contact us - use the “raise a concern” part of our website - so I always try and take it seriously. And sometimes they're complaining about something which isn't actually an official statistic. And in those circumstances, even if we say to them, “well, this isn't really an official statistic”, we will say, “but, applying our principles, this would be our judgement”. Because I think we owe it to those people who who've taken the time to care about a statistical usage, we owe it to take them seriously. And we have stepped in. Only recently we're looking at some claims about the impact of gambling, which are not from a government department, but from parts of the gambling industry. We also look at things from local government, who are not part of central government. So we do we do look at those things, Miles. It's a relatively small part of our work, but, as I say, our principles are universal and you've got to take seriously a situation in which a member of the public is concerned about a piece of evidence.     MF  Professor Spiegelhalter, what do you make of this regulatory function that the OSR pursues, are we unusual in the UK in having something along those lines?     DS  Ed probably knows better than I do, but I haven't heard of anybody else and I get asked about it when I'm travelling and talking to other people. I have no conflict of interest. I'm Non-Executive Director for the UK Stats Authority, and I sit on the regulation committee that oversees the way it works. So of course, I'm a huge supporter of what they do. And as described, it's a subtle role because it's not to do with performing, you know, and making a big song and dance and going grabbing all that attention but working away just to try to improve the standard of stats in this country. I think we're incredibly fortunate to have such a body and in fact, we know things are never perfect and there's always room for improvement of course, but I think we're very lucky to have our statistical system.     MF  A final thought from you...we're at a moment in time now where people are anticipating the widespread implementation of AI, artificial intelligence, large language models and all that sort of thing. Threat or opportunity for statistics, or both?    DS  Oh, my goodness me, it is very difficult to predict. I use GPT a lot in my work, you know, both for sort of research and making inquiries about stuff and also to help me do codings I'm not very good at. I haven't yet explored GPT-4's capacity for doing automated data analysis, but I want to, and actually, I'd welcome it. if it's good, if you can put some data in and it does stuff - that's great. However, I would love to see what guardrails are being put into it, to prevent it doing stupid misleading things. I hope that that does become an issue in the future, that if AI is automatically interpreting data for example, that it's actually got some idea of what it's doing. And I don't see that that's impossible. I mean, there were already a lot of guardrails in about sexist statements, racist statements, violent statements and so on. There's all sorts of protection already in there. Well, can't we have protection against grossly misleading statistical analysis?     MF  A future over the statistics watchdog perhaps?    DF  Quite possibly.    EH  Miles, I never turn down suggestions for doing new work.   MF  So we've heard how statistics are regulated in the UK, and covered the role of the media in communicating data accurately, and now to give some insight into what that might all look like from a journalist's perspective, it's time to introduce our next guest, all the way from California, award-winning journalist and data editor at Google, Simon Rogers. Simon, welcome to Statistically Speaking. Now, before you took up the role at Google you were actually at the forefront of something of a data journalism movement here in the UK. Responsible for launching and editing The Guardian's data blog, looking at where we are now and how things have come on since that period, to what extent do you reckon journalists can offer some kind of solution to online misinterpretation of information?    Simon Rogers   At a time when misinformation is pretty rampant, then you need people there who can make sense of the world and help you make sense of the world through data and facts and things that are true, as opposed to things that we feel might be right. And it's kind of like there is a battle between the heart and the head out there in the world right now. And there are the things that people feel might be right, but are completely wrong. And where, I think, Data Journalists can be the solution to solving that. Now, having said that, there are people as we know who will never believe something, and it doesn't matter. There are people for whom it literally doesn't matter, you can do all the fact checks that you want, and I think that is a bit of a shock for people, this realisation that sometimes it's just not enough, but I think honestly, the fact that there are more Data Journalists now than before...There was an EJC survey, the European Journalism Centre did a survey earlier this year about the state of data journalism. There are way more data journalists now than there were the last time they did the survey. It's becoming much more...it's just a part of being a reporter now. You don't have to necessarily be identified as a separate data journalist to work with data. So we're definitely living in a world where there are more people doing this really important work, but the need, I would say it has never been greater.     MF  How do you think data journalists then tend to see their role? Is it simply a mission to explain, or do some of them see it as their role to actually prove some theories and vindicate a viewpoint, or is it a mixture, are there different types of data journalists?     SR  I would say there were as many types of data journalists as there are types of journalists. And that's the thing about the field, there's no standard form of data journalism, which is one of the things that I love about it. That your output at the end of the day can be anything, it can be a podcast or it can be an article or a number or something on social media. And because of the kind of variety, and the fact I think, that unlike almost any other role in the newsroom, there really isn't like a standard pattern to becoming a data journalist. As a result of that, I think what you get are very different kind of motivations among very different kinds of people. I mean, for me, personally, the thing that interested me when I started working in the field was the idea of understanding and explaining. That is my childhood, with Richard Scarry books and Dorling Kindersley. You know, like trying to understand the world a little bit better. I do think sometimes people have theories. Sometimes people come in from very sophisticated statistical backgrounds. I mean, my background certainly wasn't that and I would say a lot of the work, the stats and the way that we use data isn't necessarily that complicated. It's often things like, you know, is this thing bigger than that thing? Has this thing grown? You know, where in the world is this thing, the biggest and so on. But you can tell amazing stories that way. And I think this motivation to use a skill, but there are still those people who get inured by maths in the same way that I did when I was at school, you know, but I think the motivation to try and make it clear with people that definitely seems to me to be a kind of a common thread among most of the data journalists that I've met.    MF  Do you think that journalists therefore, people going into journalism, and mentioning no names, as an occupation...used to be seen as a bit less numerous, perhaps whose skills tended to be in the verbal domain. Do you think therefore these days you've got to have at least a feel for data and statistics to be able to be credible as a journalist?     SR  I think it is becoming a basic skill for lots of journalists who wouldn't necessarily consider themselves data journalists. We always said eventually it is just journalism. And the reason is because the amount of sources now that are out there, I don't think you can tell a full story unless you take account of those. COVID's a great example of that, you know, here's a story that data journalists, I think, performed incredibly well. Someone like John Burn-Murdoch on the Financial Times say, where they've got a mission to explain what's going on and make it clear to people at a time when nothing was clear, we didn't really know what was going on down the road, never mind globally. So I think that is becoming a really important part being a journalist. I mean, I remember one of my first big data stories at the Guardian was around the release of the coins database – a big spending database from the government - and we had it on the list as a “data story” and people would chuckle, snigger a little bit of the idea that there'll be a story on the front page of the paper about data, which they felt to be weird, and I don't think people would be snickering or chuckling now about that. It's just normal. So my feeling is that if you're a reporter now, not being afraid of data and understanding the tools that are there to help you, I think that's a basic part of the role and it's being reflected in the way that journalism schools are working. I teach here one semester a year at the San Francisco Campus of Medill. There's an introduction to data journalism course and we get people coming in there from all kinds of backgrounds. Often half the class are just, they put their hands up if they're worried about math or scared of data, but somehow at the end of the course they are all making visualisations and telling data stories, so you know, those concerns can always be overcome.     MF  I suppose it's not that radical a development really if you think back, particularly from where we're sitting in the ONS. Of course, many of the biggest news stories outside of COVID have been data driven. think only of inflation for example, the cost of living has been a big running story in this country, and internationally of course, over the last couple of years. Ultimately, that's a data driven story. People are relying on the statisticians to tell them what the rate of inflation is, confirming of course what they're seeing every day in the shops and when they're spending money.     SR  Yeah, no, I agree. Absolutely. And half of the stories that are probably about data, people don't realise they're writing about data. However, I think there is a tendency, or there has been in the past, a tendency to just believe all data without questioning it, in the way that as a reporter, you would question a human source and make sure you understood what they were saying. If we gave one thing and that thing is that reporters would then come back to you guys and say ask an informed question about this data and dive into a little bit more, then I think we've gained a lot.     MF  So this is perhaps what good data journalists are bringing to the table, perhaps and ability to actually sort out the good data from the bad data, and actually, to use it appropriately to understand uncertainty and understand how the number on the page might not be providing the full picture.    SR   Absolutely. I think it's that combination of traditional journalistic skills and data that to me always make the strongest storytelling. When you see somebody, you know, who knows a story inside out like a health correspondent, who knows everything there is to know about health policy, and then they're telling a human story perhaps about somebody in that condition, and then they've got data to back it up - it's like the near and the far. This idea of the near view and the far view, and journalism being the thing that brings those two together. So there's the view from 30,000 feet that the data gives you and then the individual view that the more kind of qualitative interview that you get with somebody who is in a situation gives you. The two things together - that's incredibly powerful.    MF  And when choosing the data you use for a story I guess it's about making sound judgements – you know, basic questions like “is this a big number?”, “is this an important number?”     SR  Yeah, a billion pounds sounds like a lot of money, but they need to know how much is a billion pounds, is it more about a rounding error for the government.    MF  Yes, and you still see as well, outside of data journalism I stress, you still see news organisations making much of percentage increases or what looks like a significant increase in something that's pretty rare to start with.     SR  Yeah, it's all relative. Understanding what something means relatively, without having to give them a math lesson, I think is important.     MF  So this talk about supply, the availability of data journalism, where do people go to find good data journalism, perhaps without having to subscribe? You know, some of the publications that do it best are after all behind paywalls, where do we find the good stuff that's freely available?    SR  If I was looking from scratch for the best data journalism, I think there are lots of places you can find it without having to subscribe to every service. Obviously, you have now the traditional big organisations like the Guardian, and New York Times, and De Spiegel in Germany, there is a tonne of data journalism now happening in other countries around the world that I work on supporting the Sigma Data Journalism Awards. And over half of those entries come from small one or two people units, you know, practising their data journalism in countries in the world where it's a lot more difficult than it is to do it in the UK. For example, Texty in Ukraine, which is a Ukrainian data journalism site, really, and they're in the middle of a war zone right now and they're producing data journalism. In fact, Anatoly Barranco, their data editor, is literally in the army and on the frontline, but he's also producing data journalism and they produce incredible visualisations. They've used AI in interesting ways to analyse propaganda and social media posts and stuff. And the stuff happening everywhere is not just limited to those big partners behind paywalls. And what you do find also, often around big stories like what's happened with COVID, people will put their work outside of the paywall. But um, yeah, data is like an attraction. I think visualisation is an attraction for readers. I'm not surprised people try and monetize that, but there is enough going on out there in the world.    MF  And all that acknowledged, could the producers of statistics like the ONS, and system bodies around the world, could we be doing more to make sure that people using this data in this way have it in forms have it available to be interpreted? Is there more than we can do?     SR  I mean, there was the JC survey that I mentioned earlier, it's definitely worth checking out because one thing it shows is that 57% of data journalists say that getting access to data is still their biggest challenge. And then followed by kind of like lack of resources, time pressure, things like that. PDFs are still an issue out there in the world. There's two things to this for me, on one side it's like, how do I use the data, help me understand what I'm looking at. On the other side is that access, so you know, having more kind of API's and easy downloads, things that are not formatted to look pretty but formatted for use. Those kinds of things are still really important. I would say the ONS has made tremendous strides, certainly since I was working in the UK, on accessibility to data and that's a notable way, and I've seen the same thing with gov.us here in the States.    MF  Well it's good to hear the way the ONS has been moving in the right direction. Certainly I think we've been tough on PDFs.   SR Yes and to me it's noticeable. It's noticeable and you've obviously made a deliberate decision to do that, which is great. That makes the data more useful, right, and makes it more and more helpful for people.     MF  Yes, and at the other end of the chain, what about storing publishers and web platforms, particularly well you're at Google currently, but generally, what can these big platforms do to promote good data journalism and combat misinformation? I mean, big question there.    SR  Obviously, I work with Google Trends data, which is probably the world's biggest publicly available data set. I think a big company like Google has a responsibility to make this data public, and the fact that it is, you can download reusable datasets, is incredibly powerful. I'm very proud to work on that. I think that all companies have a responsibility to be transparent, especially when you have a unique data set. That didn't exist 20 years earlier, and it's there now and it can tell you something about how the world works. I mean, for instance, when we look at something like I mean, I've mentioned COVID before, but it's such a big event in our recent history. How people were searching around COVID is incredibly fascinating and it was important information to get out there. Especially at a time when the official data is always going to be behind what's actually happening out there. And is there a way you can use that data to predict stuff, predict where cases are going to come up... We work with this data every day and we're still just scratching the surface of what's possible with it.    MF   And when it comes to combating misinformation we stand, so we're told, on the threshold of another revolution from artificial intelligence, large language models, and so forth. How do you see that future? Is AI friend, foe, or both?     SR  I work for a company that is a significant player in the AI area, so I give you that background. But I think in the field of data, we've seen a lot of data users use AI to really help produce incredible work, where instead of having to read through a million documents, they can get the system to do it for them and pull out stories. Yeah, like any other tool, it can be anything but the potential to help journalists do their jobs better, and for good, I think is pretty high. I'm going to be optimistic and hope that that's the way things go.    MF  Looking optimistically to the future then, thank you very much Simon for joining us. And thanks also to my other guests, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter and Ed Humpherson. Taking their advice on board then, when we hear or read about data through the news or experience it on social media, perhaps we should first always ask ourselves – do we trust the source? Good advice indeed.     You can subscribe to new episodes of this podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and all the other major podcast platforms. You can also get more information, or ask us a question, by following the @ONSFocus on X, or Twitter, take your pick. I'm Miles Fletcher, from myself and our producer Steve Milne, thanks for listening.   ENDS 

Ty Tashiro (@tytashiro) is an author and relationship expert. He wrote Awkward: The Science of Why We're Socially Awkward and Why That's Awesome and The Science of Happily Ever After . His work has been featured at the New York Times, Time.com, TheAtlantic.com, NPR, Sirius XM Stars radio, and VICE. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Minnesota, has been an award-winning professor at the University of Maryland and University of Colorado, and has addressed TED@NYC, Harvard Business School, MIT's Media Lab, and the American Psychological Association. Sir David Spiegelhalter (@d_spiegel) is the Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has dedicated his work to improving the way that quantitative evidence is used in society. He is the former President of the Royal Statistical Society as well as a three-time former guest on Stats and Stories.

We chat to Professor Debi Bhattacharya - Professor of Behavioural Medicine at the University of Leicester and a primary care pharmacist. Debi led on research into a behaviour change toolkit designed to reduce opioid prescribing and is now actively involved in a programme designed to implement this at a systems level. https://www.uea.ac.uk/groups-and-centres/patient-care-group/chronic-opioid-use-in-non-cancer-painWe have a great chat with Debi about the challenges of implementing change at a systems level and the importance of behaviour change in clinicians as well as patients. We talk about intentional non-adherence and the impact of this, as well as the importance of understanding why a patient might not take their medicines. Our micro-discussion focuses on a new set of shared decision guidelines produced by NHS England in conjunction with the Winton Centre for Risk Communication. These are a set of detailed tools aimed at helping patients understand the risk and benefits of treatment in advance of a consultation. We deliver our verdict on what could be a game changing set of tools. https://www.england.nhs.uk/shared-decision-making/decision-support-tools/. Gimmo uses them as yet another excuse to complain about his knee.As with all of our guests, Debi shares with us a Meaningful Medicine, a career anthem and book that has influenced her career. Great choices this week!The Aural Apothecary Live!See the Apothecaries live and join in with the conversation! Our next live show will be at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society National Conference. Book your place here; https://events.rpharms.com/website/8675/. If you would like us to appear at your next event then please get in touch via the email below. To get in touch follow us on Twitter @auralapothecary or email us at auralapothecarypod@gmail.com . Don't forget to rate us and comment wherever you have got this podcast from. You can listen to the Aural Apothecary playlist here; https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3OsWj4w8sxsvuwR9zMXgn5?si=tiHXrQI7QsGtSQwPyz1KBg You can view the Aural ApothecaryLibrary here; https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/31270100-paul-gimson?ref=nav_mybooks&shelf=the-aural-apothecaryDebi BiographyI am Professor of Behavioural Medicine at the University of Leicester and a primary care pharmacist. My mission is to support NHS practitioners to apply behavioural science to implement positive change with a particular focus on addressing medicine optimisation challenges. Two key strands of this work are medication adherence and deprescribing. I led the design of the IMAB-Q which is funded by the NIHR to be developed into a service embedded into structured medication reviews to support primary care teams to work with patients to identify and address barriers to adherence. I also led development of the opioid toolkit which is a theory and evidence-based approach to system level change that equips practitioners to work with patients to taper opioids when the chance of harm outweighs benefit. The opioid toolkit is currently being implemented in one ICB and has been embedded across many systems globally. I am also the lead researcher of CHARMER which is an England-wide trial to test a hospital deprescribing intervention.I am currently developing a training and mentoring programme for NHS practitioners to equip them with the skills and confidence to apply behavioural science to their identified medicines optimisation challenges.

In this episode, Mark and Georgia spoke to Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, who is currently Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, based within the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge. Prior to this, he was the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory within the same department. He completed his undergraduate degree in statistics at the University of Oxford, later moving to University College London to complete his MSc and PhD in mathematical statistics under the supervision of Sir Adrian Smith. His research interests include use of Bayesian methods in medical statistics, and the monitoring and comparing of clinical and public-health outcomes and their associated publication as performance indicators. Currently, he is working on improving the way in which risk and statistical evidence is taught and discussed in society. He has hosted and appeared on various TV and radio shows such as BBC Horizon and Desert Island Discs, and has also published several books. You can find Professor Spiegelhalter on Twitter @d_spiegel, or his personal home page: https://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~david/ (where you can find the video of him on Winter Wipeout!). The BlueSci Podcast is run by the Cambridge University Science Magazine. This episode was hosted by Georgia Nixon and Mark Grimes. Visit www.bluesci.co.uk to access our free magazine, and find out how to get involved. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review or rating! we welcome your feedback and suggestions via email: podcast(at)bluesci.co.uk. You can also follow us on Twitter on @bluescipod or Instagram @bluescicam.

What does the future hold for statistics education? How can we improve public data literacy? Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, PhD is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at University of Cambridge, dedicated to improving the way that quantitative evidence is used in society. He has been an applied statistician for over 40 decades and has been involved in several projects with important implications. His academic work has focused in Bayesian statistics, including being co-developer of BUGS and winBUGS, biomedical applications and science communication. He has won numerous awards for his work including being knighted in 2014. He is the author of a very popular book The Art of Statistics, Learning from Data. Our Data Science Zoominars feature interactive conversation with data science experts and a Q+A session moderated by Rafael A. Irizarry, PhD, Chair, Department of Data Science at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Today, 23 March 2022, marks two years since the UK locked down for the first time in the COVID-19 pandemic.  We relaunch the Plus podcast by looking back to where our pandemic coverage all began, by revisiting our podcast from April 2020. Back in March and April 2020 one thing was on everybody's mind: the novel coronavirus - now better known as COVID-19. In this podcast we spoke to two people who have become very familiar to many of us over the last two years.  We reported on our first COVID-19 conversation with Julia Gog, an epidemiologist who has been informing the Science Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).  Julia is now a close collaborator with us here at Plus as part of the JUNIPER modelling consortium (as we'll find out in the next podcast).  We also spoke with David Spiegelhalter, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, who is now a familiar figure through his frequent appearance on radio, TV and in print giving clear and calm explanations about the numbers behind the pandemic.  David told us about how to communicate science during a crisis.  And, at the end of the podcast, we had a go at explaining the maths of herd immunity in one minute. To find out more about the topics covered in this podcast see: Communicating the coronavirus crisis How can maths fight a pandemic? A call to action on COVID-19 Taking the pandemic temperature And you can find out much more in all our other coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic The music in this podcast comes from the band eusa. The track is called Now we are all SoB's.

People's perception of risk can vary greatly from person to person, making it challenging for healthcare professionals to communicate benefits and harms of medicines in a balanced fashion. Alexandra Freeman from the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication discusses how to give patients the information they need to decide what's best for them.Tune in to find out:Why people perceive risks so differentlyWhy medical communicators should strive to inform rather than persuadeHow to communicate in a trustworthy fashionWant to know more?There is no right way to communicate evidence to patients, but there are a few things you can do to avoid getting it wrong.Conventional communication techniques are good for persuading people – but when the aim is to inform, the principles of evidence communication should be applied instead.Graphics can help people translate abstract numbers into contextualised risks they can relate to, like these visuals that illustrate the risk of blood clots with the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.These evidence-based guidelines can help professional communicators illustrate the personalised risk of dying from COVID-19.The Winton Centre offers plenty of resources on risk and evidence communication, including free e-learning courses for healthcare professionals, the Risky Talk podcast with statistician David Spiegelhalter, and the RealRisk tool to help healthcare professionals and communicators extract the right statistics from academic papers.For more on communicating benefits and harms in pharmacovigilance, revisit this Drug Safety Matters episode on vaccine safety communication.Join the conversation on social mediaFollow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and share your thoughts about the show with the hashtag #DrugSafetyMatters.Got a story to share?We're always looking for new content and interesting people to interview. If you have a great idea for a show, get in touch!About UMCRead more about Uppsala Monitoring Centre and how we work to advance medicines safety.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter specialises in medical statistics. He is the Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University, and one of the most frequently cited experts in his field. During the Covid 19 pandemic, he has made regular appearances as a broadcaster and newspaper commentator, analysing and explaining complex data for a general audience. David was born in Barnstable, the youngest of three children. After studying maths at Oxford University and University College London, he spent a year teaching at the University of Berkeley, California before returning to the UK. He has also worked in the field of computer-aided diagnosis. His expertise was called upon in the Bristol Royal Infirmary Inquiry and the Harold Shipman Inquiry. He was knighted in 2014 for his services to medical statistics. Presenter Lauren Laverne Producer Sarah Taylor

David Spiegelhalter is an expert on medical statistics. He was the president of the Royal Statistical Society and is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence communication. He is also a World Champion, in a version of pool called Loop and hosts his own podcast, Risky Talk. David has a new book out (with Anthony Masters), COVID by Numbers, which is an excellent book on COVID statistics. This follows his previous bestseller, the Art of Statistics. David discusses what was most surprising and misunderstood about COVID statistics. David emphasises how numbers can be emotional and weaponised and what we can do to protect ourselves. We chat about what thinking about risk and techniques we should teach children and think about in every day life. Ideas such as baseline risk and absolute vs relative risk. We think about unintended consequences, the agency challenges of regulators and how to think of a range of risk. David explains fat tails and extreme values and that, for instance, AI risk is an extreme existential risk but perhaps over rated. I learn about the “Rose Paradox” and “Cromwell's law”, in statistics. The Rose paradox suggests policy might be useful at a general population level but not at an individual basis. For instance, government messages about drinking less and things like that can be rational at the population level and yet it's also rational for individuals to take no notice of it. Cromwell's law implies many life events are not 0% or 100% and you should take that into account in decision making. Or, in plain English, you should always imagine there's something you haven't thought of. We discuss the risks of alcohol and touch on air pollution and cholesterol (statin drugs), and how to think about medical statistics. David explains the attraction and beauty of stained glass art. David ends with life advice about enjoying life and taking (good, well-managed) risks in order to have a fulfilling life. Transcript and video are available here.

There's so much data out there about COVID-19 it can be hard to make sense of it all. Over the last year, a couple of statisticians have been working to help the readers of the Guardian, get a handle on the numbers. Dr. Anthony Masters and Sir David John Spiegelhalter have a new book out based on their weekly blog titled COVID by the Numbers, which is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories. Dr. Anthony Masters (@anthonybmasters) is a Chartered Statistician, a Statistical Ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society, and a frequent blogger and explainer of statistical ideas. In his voluntary role as a Statistical Ambassador, Dr. Masters has contributed to BBC and Full Fact articles, among others, and he writes about statistics, survey research, and coding in R on Medium. Sir David Spiegelhalter (@d_spiegel) is the Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has dedicated his work to improving the way that quantitative evidence is used in society. He is the former President of the Royal Statistical Society as well as a three-time former guest on Stats and Stories.

Folks, this is the 50th episode of LBS — 50th! I never would have thought that there were so many Bayesian nerds in the world when I first interviewed Osvaldo Martin more than 2 years ago.  To celebrate that random, crazy adventure, I wanted to do a special episode at any random point, and so it looks like it's gonna be #50! This episode is special by its guest, not its number — although my guest knows a thing or two about numbers. Most recently, he wrote the book Covid by Numbers. A mathematical statistician dedicated to helping the general public understand risk, uncertainty and decision-making, he's the author of several books on the topic actually, including The Art of Statistics. You may also know him from his podcast, Risky Talk, or his numerous appearances in newspapers, radio and TV shows. Did you guess who it is? Maybe you just know him as the reigning World Champion in Loop – a version of pool played on an elliptical table – and are just discovering now that he is a fantastic science communicator – something that turns out to be especially important for stats education in times of, let's say, global pandemic for instance. He holds a PhD in Mathematical Statistics from the University of London and has been the Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University since 2016. He was also the President of the famous Royal Statistical Society in 2017-2018. Most importantly, he was featured in BBC1's Winter Wipeout in 2011 – seriously, go check it out on his website; it's hilarious. So did you guess it yet? Yep, my guest for this episode is no other than Sir David Spiegelhalter — yes, there are Bayesian knights! Our theme music is « Good Bayesian », by Baba Brinkman (feat MC Lars and Mega Ran). Check out his awesome work at https://bababrinkman.com/ (https://bababrinkman.com/) ! Thank you to my Patrons for making this episode possible! Yusuke Saito, Avi Bryant, Ero Carrera, Brian Huey, Giuliano Cruz, Tim Gasser, James Wade, Tradd Salvo, Adam Bartonicek, William Benton, Alan O'Donnell, Mark Ormsby, Demetri Pananos, James Ahloy, Jon Berezowski, Robin Taylor, Thomas Wiecki, Chad Scherrer, Nathaniel Neitzke, Zwelithini Tunyiswa, Elea McDonnell Feit, Bertrand Wilden, James Thompson, Stephen Oates, Gian Luca Di Tanna, Jack Wells, Matthew Maldonado, Ian Costley, Ally Salim, Larry Gill, Joshua Duncan, Ian Moran, Paul Oreto, Colin Caprani, George Ho, Colin Carroll, Nathaniel Burbank, Michael Osthege, Rémi Louf, Clive Edelsten, Henri Wallen, Hugo Botha, Vinh Nguyen, Raul Maldonado, Marcin Elantkowski, Tim Radtke, Adam C. Smith, Will Kurt, Andrew Moskowitz, Hector Munoz, Marco Gorelli, Simon Kessell, Bradley Rode, Patrick Kelley, Rick Anderson, Casper de Bruin, Philippe Labonde, Matthew McAnear, Michael Hankin, Cameron Smith, Luis Iberico, Alejandro Morales and Tomáš Frýda. Visit https://www.patreon.com/learnbayesstats (https://www.patreon.com/learnbayesstats) to unlock exclusive Bayesian swag ;) Links from the show: David's website: http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~david/ (http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~david/) David on Twitter: https://twitter.com/d_spiegel (https://twitter.com/d_spiegel) The Art of Statistics: https://dspiegel29.github.io/ArtofStatistics/ (https://dspiegel29.github.io/ArtofStatistics/) Risky Talk podcast: https://riskytalk.libsyn.com/ (https://riskytalk.libsyn.com/) Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication: https://wintoncentre.maths.cam.ac.uk/ (https://wintoncentre.maths.cam.ac.uk/) Frank Ramsey -- A Sheer Excess of Powers: https://www.amazon.fr/Frank-Ramsey-Sheer-Excess-Powers/dp/019875535X (https://www.amazon.fr/Frank-Ramsey-Sheer-Excess-Powers/dp/019875535X) BBC Radio 4, David Spiegelhalter on Frank Ramsey: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q8pq (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q8pq) De Finetti's theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Finetti%27s_theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Finetti%27s_theorem) Laplace's... Support this podcast

Talya Miron-Shatz, PhD, is a leader in research at the intersection of medicine and behavioral economics. She is professor and founding Director of the Center for Medical Decision Making at Ono Academic College in Israel, senior fellow at the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest in New York, and a visiting researcher at the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge. Miron-Shatz was a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton University, and a lecturer at Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of over 60 academic papers on medical decision making. She is CEO of CureMyWay, an international health consulting firm whose clients include Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Samsung.   She wrote the book Your Life Depends on It: What You Can Do to Make Better Choices About Your Health. She wrote it for patients and clinicians alike. We discuss how patients are frequently overwhelmed with the information we give them. How to give it to them in a more digestible way, while still being time efficient, how we can tell if they are understanding us and how to tell if they don't plan on following our recommendations. She also teaches us how to increase the chances that a patient will choose us as their doctor. Find her at www.talyamironshatz.com   Today's Sponsor is Locumstory. To find out more visit: doctorpodcastnetwork.com/locumstory  

With data on the Covid-19 pandemic changing shape with every new outbreak and new mutation, it's a complex task to make sense of where the story of the virus will head next. David Spiegelhalter is chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University and an expert on crunching figures in order to understand successes and failures. His new book Covid by Numbers, co-written with Anthony Masters, seeks to shine a spotlight on the UK's handling of the pandemic. In this episode he speaks with the virologist and host of The Naked Scientist podcast Dr Chris Smith. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/intelligencesquared. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

My guest today is Talya Miron-Shatz, PhD., a leader in research at the intersection of medicine and behavioral economics. She is professor and founding Director of the Center for Medical Decision Making at Ono Academic College in Israel, senior fellow at the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest in New York, and a visiting researcher at the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge. The topic is her book Your Life Depends on It: What You Can Do to Make Better Choices About Your Health. In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss: Vaccination and Public Trust COVID-19 Vaccination Wearing Masks Against COVID-19 Delta Variant Treatment for Obesity Israel's COVID-19 Vaccination Coronavirus Disease Statistics Risk Factors for COVID-19 HIV and COVID-19 Medical Decision Making Jump in! --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel Facebook: @trendfollowing LinkedIn: @covel Instagram: @mikecovel Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

In recent years, we have gained unprecedented control over choices about our health. But these choices are hard and often full of psychological traps. As a result, we're liable to misuse medication, fall for pseudoscientific cure-alls, and undergo needless procedures. Talya Miron-Shatz explores the preventable ways we make bad choices about everything from nutrition to medication, from pregnancy to end-of-life care. She reveals how the medical system can set us up for success or failure and maps a model for better doctor-patient relationships. Full of new insights and actionable guidance, Miron-Shatz is a guide to making good choices when you can't afford to make a bad one. Bio: Talya Miron-Shatz, PhD., is a leader in research at the intersection of medicine and behavioral economics. She is professor and founding Director of the Center for Medical Decision Making at Ono Academic College in Israel, senior fellow at the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest in New York, and a visiting researcher at the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge. In this episode of Trend Following Radio: Vaccination and Public Trust COVID-19 Vaccination Wearing Masks Against COVID-19 Delta Variant Treatment for Obesity Israel's COVID-19 Vaccination Coronavirus Disease Statistics Risk Factors for COVID-19 HIV and COVID-19 Medical Decision Making

In this episode, Geoff Allen speaks with Ilan Goodman about the intersection of philosophy and science. They discuss: Ilan's background as a philosopher, podcaster and actor; scientific philosophy versus ‘pure philosophy'; Patricia Churchland's views on philosophy and neuroscience; philosophy as a mapping exercise; scientific realism and mind-independent truths; the distinctions between philosophy and science; causality at the level of quantum particles; communicating science to the public; the motivations for podcasting; the current state of intellectual discourse; the challenges of communicating coronavirus information to the public; and other topics. Ilan Goodman is a podcaster, producer and communicator of science. He works as a producer for science-focused podcasts, including CrowdScience (BBC World Service), The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry (BBC R4) and Azeem Azhar's Exponential View. In a past role, he worked at the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, working as a producer for Risky Talk with David Spiegelhalter. Ilan is the host and producer of NOUS the podcast, which explores questions about the mind through philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. Ilan is also an actor, and he has appeared extensively on stage, in TV shows and in feature films. Ilan holds an MSc in History and Philosophy of Science from UCL, and this common ground formed the basis for much of our conversation. Ilan holds Bachelor degrees in Experimental Psychology & Philosophy (University of Oxford) and Acting (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). *** Follow Extrapolator on social media for all the latest news: instagram.com/extrapolatorpod facebook.com/extrapolatorpod linkedin.com/company/extrapolator

All adults under 30 should be offered the Pfizer-BioNtech or Moderna coronavirus vaccine due to a potential link between the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab and extremely rare blood clots. The UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said there was no proof the Covid vaccine had caused the clots but the link was getting firmer. R4 Today programme's Mishal Husain looked at what the risks and benefits were to taking the coronavirus jab and how it will be used on the over-30s. She heard from professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group; professor Sir David Spielgelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge; and Matt Hancock MP, health secretary. Audience questions were answered by professor Anthony Harnden, deputy chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JVCI); and Dame Clare Gerada, former chair of the Royal College of GPs. (Image: Vials with AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccine; Credit: Reuters)

Statistics need care and context - but journalists are under pressure to craft engaging stories. Is there a way of doing both?  Joining David to explore how you turn data into a clear and compelling story are: Caelainn Barr - Data Projects Editor at The Guardian Tom Chivers - Science Editor at UnHerd and the author of How To Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them) Paul Milner - Programmes Director at National Numeracy Check out Tom’s Statistical Style Guide at howtoreadnumbers.com and sign up to the campaign! *** Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.

This round table, recorded at the nuffield summit 2021, asks what does following the science actually mean - do ministers understand the nuance of the science in the pandemic, and how does uncertainty get interpreted through the lens of ideology and the power of compelling stories. Taking part are: Kamran Abassi, executive editor of The BMJ Partha Kar, consultant in diabetes and endocrinology Deborah Cohen, health correspondent for BBC Newsnight Tom Sasse, associate director at the Institute for Government Christina Pagel, professor of Operational Research at University College London Matt Morgan, intensive care consultant Andy McKeon, chair of the Nuffield Trust Isobel Hardman, assistant editor of The Spectator Mary Dixon-Woods, director of This Institute Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos MORI Alexandra Freeman, executive director of the Winton Centre for Risk & Evidence Communication Will Moy, chief executive of Full Fact Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust

Scientific publications drive science, well that's stating the obvious, isn't it, but the form and way it's processed is historic. It's historic in the sense that there are journals that are gatekeepers, their editors that are sending out submissions to reviewers, who are then providing comments, and then it's almost that it's set in stone and locked in place for the future. But there are challenges to this and one of the challenges is the focus of this episode of Stats+Short Stories with guest Alexandra Freeman. Alexandra Freeman is the Executive Director of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, a role she took up in 2016. She previously spent 16 years working for the BBC, primarily a producer and director for BBC Science. Alexandra is passionate about bringing science to the widest possible audience. Along with working in television she has also helped develop content for computer games, social media and websites, as well as formal learning resources

Communicating risk is difficult at any time but during a pandemic, communicating risk well can be what keeps a disease from spreading, as one public health official has put it, like wildfire. During the COVID 19 pandemic, experts, journalists, and elected officials have all been working to find the most effective way to communicate risk to the public. Helping people understand their risks of infection – or of infecting others – can be the thing that gets them to follow mask mandates or other public health advisories. Effectively communicating risk in COVID 19 is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guests Alexandra Freeman and Claudia Schneider Alexandra Freeman is the Executive Director of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, a role she took up in 2016. She previously spent 16 years working for the BBC, primarily a producer and director for BBC Science. Alexandra is passionate about bringing science to the widest possible audience. Along with working in television she has also helped develop content for computer games, social media and websites, as well as formal learning resources. Claudia Schneider is a postdoctoral research associate with the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory. At the Winton Centre she studies the communication of uncertainty about evidence to various stakeholders, particularly the unquantified ‘quality of the underlying work’. Claudia received her PhD in Psychology from Columbia University and also held a graduate research scholar position at Princeton University. Her research focus lies at the intersection of decision science and applied social psychology. Her work uses a combination of methods ranging from quantitative laboratory surveys to field studies in diverse cultural and social settings.

On November 11, Saira Shah hosted our risk webinar. In advance of this insightful event on how our human senses assess complex, modern risks, Saira spoke to a man described as ‘probably the greatest living statistical communicator’. Professor, Sir David Spiegelhalter is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University. Crucially, he is also currently the Joint Chair of the Royal Statistical Society COVID-19 task force. Here, he explains the mathematical and real world underpinnings that inform his work on the pandemic and other statistical risks. He also illustrates why we need to use both our instinctive gut reactions in tandem with slow, methodical thinking to make sense of modern risks. 'I think humans are a wonderful combination between the two,” said Sir David. "People have said that you've got risks as analysis and you've got risk as feeling, and they're both terribly important. This interaction between the two - that's where I work quite a lot - is so riveting, particularly at this time of COVID.'

Communicating about vaccines has never been higher stakes. How do we do it well? Joining David to explore the importance of scientific rigour, listening and building relationships are: Professor Heidi Larson - Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project and the author of Stuck: How Vaccine Rumours Start — and Why They Don’t Go Away. Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and creator of the Vaccine Knowledge Project. *** Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.

In this talk evidence covid-19 update, we're taking on risk - how do you figure out your individual risk of dying from the disease? Try QCovid, but remember that it's figuring out your risk back in April. When it comes to talking about risk, very few people actually engage with the number, so Alex Freeman from the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge joins us to describe their research into more effective ways of presenting it. Huseyin Naci, from the London School of Economics, returns to the podcast to talk to us about the problems of pulling all the trial data together, and where covid-19 has made people work together most effectively in tackling that issue. Reading list; Living risk prediction algorithm (QCOVID) for risk of hospital admission and mortality from coronavirus 19 in adults https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3731 Repurposed antiviral drugs for COVID-19 –interim WHO SOLIDARITY trial results https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.15.20209817v1 Producing and using timely comparative evidence on drugs: lessons from clinical trials for covid-19 https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3869.full

In this talk evidence covid-19 update, we're taking on risk - how do you figure out your individual risk of dying from the disease? Try QCovid, but remember that it's figuring out your risk back in April. When it comes to talking about risk, very few people actually engage with the number, so Alex Freeman from the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge joins us to describe their research into more effective ways of presenting it. Huseyin Naci, from the London School of Economics, returns to the podcast to talk to us about the problems of pulling all the trial data together, and where covid-19 has made people work together most effectively in tackling that issue. Reading list; Living risk prediction algorithm (QCOVID) for risk of hospital admission and mortality from coronavirus 19 in adults https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3731 Repurposed antiviral drugs for COVID-19 –interim WHO SOLIDARITY trial results https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.15.20209817v1 Producing and using timely comparative evidence on drugs: lessons from clinical trials for covid-19 https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3869.full

Chemical spills, food scares, terrorist attacks and, of course, pandemics: How can we help manage and reduce the impact of these frightening events with good communication - even while evidence is scant and uncertainty predominates? Joining David to share their experience from the frontlines are: Professor Brooke Rogers OBE - Behavioural scientist at KCL, and SAGE participant advising the UK government on the coronavirus measures and risks to national security. Professor Lord John Krebs - former head of the Food Standards Agency where he dealt with BSE in sheep, dioxins and a series of food scares. A full transcript is available here. *** Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.

In this episode of the Heart podcast, Digital Media Editor, Dr James Rudd, is joined by Dr Alexandra Freeman and Dr Gabriel Reccia from The Winton Centre at the University of Cambridge. They discuss their paper which is about how best to communicate risks to cardiology (and other) patients. Link to published paper: 1. https://wintoncentre.maths.cam.ac.uk/ 2. https://heart.bmj.com/content/early/2020/08/11/heartjnl-2020-317593 If you enjoy the show, please subscribe to the podcast to get episodes automatically downloaded to your phone and computer. Also, please consider leaving us a review at https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/heart-podcast/id445358212?mt=2

The public appetite for scientific evidence during the coronavirus pandemic has been voracious. But communicating it well is a fiendish challenge. How can governments give clear advice while also acknowledging uncertainty? How can scientists debate complex evidence while supporting strong interventions? And how can the media scrutinise public health measures without undermining them? Joining David to navigate the principles and pitfalls of communicating evidence in a pandemic are: Victoria Macdonald, Health and Social Care Editor for C4 News Tracey Brown OBE, Director of Sense About Science Professor Christina Pagel, Operational Research at UCL and member of Independent SAGE Access the full transcript here. *** Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.

David Spiegelhalter is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the University of Cambridge, which aims to improve the way that statistical evidence is used by health professionals, patients, lawyers, media and policy-makers. Apart from academic publications, he has written The Norm Chronicles (with Michael Blastland), Sex by Numbers, and the recently-published The Art of Statistics. He presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance and the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005, knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, and was President of the Royal Statistical Society for 2017-2018. His greatest achievement came in 2011, when he was 7th in an episode of Winter Wipeout. 5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

David Spiegelhalter discusses with Ivan six things which he thinks should be better known. Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the University of Cambridge, which aims to improve the way that statistical evidence is used by health professionals, patients, lawyers and judges, media and policy-makers. He advises organisations and government agencies on risk communication and is a regular media commentator on statistical issues, with a particular focus on communicating uncertainty. His background is in medical statistics, and he has over 200 refereed publications and is co-author of 6 textbooks, as well as The Norm Chronicles (with Michael Blastland), and Sex by Numbers. He works extensively with the media, and presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers, and in 2011 came seventh in an episode of BBC1’s Winter Wipeout. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005, and knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics. He was President of the Royal Statistical Society for 2017-2018. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics, was published in March 2019. He is @d_spiegel on Twitter, and his home page is http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~david/ Alan Bennett reading Winnie the Pooh https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n22/alan-bennett/diary Ilfracombe https://www.visitilfracombe.co.uk/see-do/ Whelks https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/whelks-are-healthy-versatile-and-sustainable-so-why-did-we-stop-eating-them-in-the-uk-9598928.html Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/04/riddley-walker-russell-hoban-book-club The Singing Detective https://www.npr.org/2012/02/24/147037460/25-years-later-the-singing-detective-still-shines?t=1591547850222 Poisson distribution https://understandinguncertainty.org/another-tragic-cluster-how-surprised-should-we-be This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Nick asks Robert Buckland, Secretary of State for Justice whether the Government will reach the testing target set out by Matt Hancock earlier this month. Nick also speaks to Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter who is a Statistician and Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, University of Cambridge Plus a fascinating listen to the Professor from Imperial College London, who is leading their COVID-19 vaccine trials

This podcast is dedicated to the one thing that's been on everybody's mind for the last few weeks: the coronavirus. We report on our conversation with Julia Gog, an epidemiologist who has been informing the Science Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), talk to David Spiegelhalter, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, about how to communicate science during a crisis, and explore the maths of herd immunity in one minute. To find out more about the topics covered in this podcast see https://plus.maths.org/content/tags/covid-19 The music in this podcast comes from the band, eusa, and the track is called "Now we are all SOB's". You can find their music on soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/eusa

This podcast is dedicated to the one thing that's been on everybody's mind for the last few weeks: the coronavirus. We report on our conversation with Julia Gog, an epidemiologist who has been informing the Science Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), talk to David Spiegelhalter, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, about how to communicate science during a crisis, and explore the maths of herd immunity in one minute. To find out more about the topics covered in this podcast see https://plus.maths.org/content/tags/covid-19 The music in this podcast comes from the band, eusa, and the track is called "Now we are all SOB's". You can find their music on soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/eusa

What do we know about public trust in expert knowledge when the stakes are high and there is considerable uncertainty? This week, our host Dr Rob Doubleday sits down with Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter and Dr Alexandra Freeman of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication. In the context of the current pandemic, we discuss what research has been done on the best way to communicate evidence and uncertainty and the best way to communicate the relationship between expert advice and political decision making. CSaP's Science and Policy Podcast is a production of the Centre for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge. This series on science, policy and pandemics is produced in partnership with Cambridge Infectious Diseases and the Cambridge Immunology Network. Our guests this week: Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge. He was Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge from 2007 to 2018. He has worked on Understanding Uncertainty, and is the acclaimed author of The Art of Statistics. He has recently been exploring the question "how much ‘normal' risk does Covid represent?", and he regularly hosts the podcast Risky Talk. Dr Alexandra Freeman is the Executive Director of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication. She previously worked for the BBC, primarily a producer and director for BBC Science. She worked on a number of popular series including "Walking with Beasts", "Trust Me I'm a Doctor" and "Climate Change by Numbers". Her work has won numerous awards, including a BAFTA and the AAAS Kavli gold award for science journalism. She has recently written about how different countries are reacting to the COVID-19 risk and their governments' responses. -- This series is hosted by CSaP Executive Director Dr Rob Doubleday, and is edited and produced by CSaP Communications Coordinator Kate McNeil. If you have feedback about this episode, or questions you'd like us to address in a future week, please email enquiries@csap.cam.ac.uk .

The unfolding coronavirus pandemic is a story driven by numbers. But how reliable are the numbers we have? What can the data really tell us – and what are the major areas of uncertainty? In this special episode, recorded on 1st April,  Michael Blastland and Professor David Spiegelhalter help us separate the signal from the noise. Why the absolute numbers of confirmed cases and deaths from Covid 19 are dodgy, but the rate at which those numbers change is still a useful indicator. Why Norway vs Sweden is an unfolding natural experiment: neighbouring countries with broadly similar populations, but Norway has gone into strict lockdown and Sweden is being relatively relaxed. There are usually around 600,000 deaths per year in the UK. When we look back, will Covid 19 have caused many excess deaths – or could the figures for 2020 end up looking similar to a bad flu season? How can we think about our personal risk of dying from Covid 19? David sets out how getting Covid 19 multiplies your existing level of risk depending your age: it provides a “pulse” of heightened risk over a short period.  Full transcript available at: https://riskytalk.libsyn.com/transcript-of-coronavirus-understanding-the-numbers *** Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.  

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, puts the risks of Covid-19 into perspective. He found that the proportion of people who get infected by coronavirus, who then go on to die increases with age, and the trend matches almost exactly how our background mortality risk also goes up. Catching the disease could be like packing a year’s worth of risk into a couple of weeks. (Mathematician and Risk guru, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter at the University of Cambridge. Credit: In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images)

Risky Talk features conversations with the world’s top experts in risk and evidence communication addressing urgent, practical challenges: How can doctors communicate the risks and benefits of medical treatment? How should scientists communicate evidence about climate change? How can journalists make numbers meaningful to readers? How should government institutions convey important statistics? Hosted by David Spiegelhalter (@d_spiegel) Get in touch with us on Twitter (@RiskyTalkPod) or email (riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk) Produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.

Today's guest is distinguished researcher and statistician, Sir David Spiegelhalter. A fellow of the Royal Society, he is currently Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge. He has dedicated his career, in his words to, “improving the way that quantitative evidence is used in society.” This includes (of particular interest to us) biostatistics and medical research. David is an ISI highly cited researcher who has also focused much of his time and energy to public education through numerous media appearances, documentaries such as his recent BBC series geared towards children, and books such as the one we are discussing today. That book, The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data, was published in the UK by Penguin in March, 2019 and recently released here in the US by Basic Books in September 2019. Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's guest is distinguished researcher and statistician, Sir David Spiegelhalter. A fellow of the Royal Society, he is currently Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge. He has dedicated his career, in his words to, “improving the way that quantitative evidence is used in society.” This includes (of particular interest to us) biostatistics and medical research. David is an ISI highly cited researcher who has also focused much of his time and energy to public education through numerous media appearances, documentaries such as his recent BBC series geared towards children, and books such as the one we are discussing today. That book, The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data, was published in the UK by Penguin in March, 2019 and recently released here in the US by Basic Books in September 2019. Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Today's guest is distinguished researcher and statistician, Sir David Spiegelhalter. A fellow of the Royal Society, he is currently Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge. He has dedicated his career, in his words to, “improving the way that quantitative evidence is used in society.” This includes (of particular interest to us) biostatistics and medical research. David is an ISI highly cited researcher who has also focused much of his time and energy to public education through numerous media appearances, documentaries such as his recent BBC series geared towards children, and books such as the one we are discussing today. That book, The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data, was published in the UK by Penguin in March, 2019 and recently released here in the US by Basic Books in September 2019. Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's guest is distinguished researcher and statistician, Sir David Spiegelhalter. A fellow of the Royal Society, he is currently Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge. He has dedicated his career, in his words to, “improving the way that quantitative evidence is used in society.” This includes (of particular interest to us) biostatistics and medical research. David is an ISI highly cited researcher who has also focused much of his time and energy to public education through numerous media appearances, documentaries such as his recent BBC series geared towards children, and books such as the one we are discussing today. That book, The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data, was published in the UK by Penguin in March, 2019 and recently released here in the US by Basic Books in September 2019. Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the University of Cambridge, which aims to improve the way that statistical evidence is used by health professionals, patients, lawyers and judges, media and policy-makers. He advises organisations and government agencies on risk communication and is a regular media commentator on statistical issues, with a particular focus on communicating uncertainty.He has over 200 refereed publications and is co-author of 6 textbooks, as well as The Norm Chronicles (with Michael Blastland), Sex by Numbers, and The Art of Statistics. He works extensively with the media, and presented the BBC4 documentaries ‘Tails you Win: the Science of Chance” and the award-winning “Climate Change by Numbers”. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005, knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, and was President of the Royal Statistical Society for 2017-2018.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the University of Cambridge, which aims to improve the way that statistical evidence is used by health professionals, patients, lawyers and judges, media and policy-makers. He advises organisations and government agencies on risk communication and is a regular media commentator on statistical issues, with a particular focus on communicating uncertainty.He has over 200 refereed publications and is co-author of 6 textbooks, as well as The Norm Chronicles (with Michael Blastland), Sex by Numbers, and The Art of Statistics. He works extensively with the media, and presented the BBC4 documentaries ‘Tails you Win: the Science of Chance” and the award-winning “Climate Change by Numbers”. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005, knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, and was President of the Royal Statistical Society for 2017-2018.

David Spiegelhalter is Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, and President of the Royal Statistical Society.

David Spiegelhalter is Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication , and President of the Royal Statistical Society . He is passionate about helping the public understand uncertainty and risk . His recent book, Sex by Numbers , describes scientific research that provides a view of the world of sex.

David Spiegelhalter is Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication , and President of the Royal Statistical Society . He is passionate about helping the public understand uncertainty and risk . His recent book, Sex by Numbers , describes scientific research that provides a view of the world of sex.