̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - statistics

Award-winning broadcaster Hannah Fry joins Cambridge as Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics

sc604 — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 00:04:32 +0000

Fry brings outstanding experience to the role of communicating to diverse audiences, including with people not previously interested in maths. She will follow in the footsteps of giants of public engagement with mathematics, including David Spiegelhalter and the late Stephen Hawking as she joins the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP).

“I’m really looking forward to joining the Cambridge community,” said Fry, “to those chance encounters and interactions that end up sparking new ideas and collaborations: it’s so exciting to be in an environment where every single person you speak to is working on something absolutely fascinating.”

Fry won the Christopher Zeeman Medal for promoting mathematics in 2018 and the Royal Society David Attenborough Award in 2024, and is the current President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.

She is currently Professor of the Mathematics of Cities at UCL, where she works with physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, architects and geographers to study patterns in human behaviour – particularly in an urban setting. Her research applies to a wide range of social problems and questions, from shopping and transport to urban crime, riots and terrorism, and she has applied this research by advising and working alongside governments, police forces, supermarkets and health analysts.

“When you create a mathematical model, it doesn’t really matter how beautifully crafted your equations are, or how accurate your simulations are,” said Fry. “You have to think about how the work you’ve created is going to be seen and perceived by other people and how it’s going to be understood or misunderstood.”

̽��ֱ��new professorship builds on Cambridge’s long track record in sharing maths. DAMTP is also the home of the largest subject-specific outreach and engagement project in the ̽��ֱ�� – the Millennium Mathematics Project (MMP).

Fry says she plans for her work at Cambridge to follow on from Spiegelhalter's extensive public communication work, which she sees as a vital part of the research process.

“Communication is not an optional extra: if you are creating something that is used by, or interacts with members of the public or the world in general, then I think it’s genuinely your moral duty to engage the people affected by it,” she said. “I’d love to build and grow a community around excellence in mathematical communication at Cambridge – so that we’re really researching the best possible methods to communicate with people.”

“Hannah is an outstanding mathematician and researcher, and one of the UK’s best maths communicators,” said Professor Colm-cille Caulfield, Head of DAMTP. “Mathematics affects so many aspects of our everyday lives in interesting and exciting ways, and Hannah will strengthen the excellent work already being done at Cambridge in this area. We in DAMTP and our Faculty of Mathematics colleagues in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics are so excited to have her join us.”

Professor Fry announced her appointment at an event yesterday (21 November) organised by the MMP in collaboration with the Newton Gateway to Mathematics at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��event – Communicating mathematical and data sciences – what does success look like? – explored evidence for effectively communicating mathematical and data science research to policymakers, mainstream media and the wider public.

“Professor Fry is one of the most exciting voices in science and mathematics today,” said Professor Nigel Peake, Head of the School of the Physical Sciences. “Her deep commitment to sharing the excitement of maths with people of all ages and backgrounds, at a time when mathematical literacy has never been so important, will be an enormous benefit to Cambridge, and the UK as a whole.”

Professor Hannah Fry, mathematician, best-selling author, award-winning science presenter and host of popular podcasts and television shows, will join the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge as the first Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics on 1 January.

Lloyd Mann

Hannah Fry

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Study suggests R rate for tracking pandemic should be dropped in favour of ‘nowcasts’

cg566 — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 23:26:07 +0000

̽��ֱ��study, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface and led by researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, is based on time-series models developed using classical statistical methods. ̽��ֱ��models produce 'nowcasts' and forecasts of the daily number of new cases and deaths that have already proved successful in predicting new COVID-19 waves and spikes in Germany, Florida in the USA, and several states in India.

̽��ֱ��study is co-authored by Andrew Harvey and Paul Kattuman, whose time-series model reflecting epidemic trajectories, known as the Harvey-Kattuman model, was introduced last year in a paper published in Harvard Data Science Review.

“ ̽��ֱ��basic R rate quickly wanes in usefulness as soon as a pandemic begins,” said Kattuman, from Cambridge Judge Business School. “ ̽��ֱ��basic R rate looks at the number of infections expected to result from a single infectious person in a completely susceptible population, and this changes as immunity builds up and measures such as social distancing are imposed.”

In later stages of a pandemic, the researchers conclude that use of the effective R rate which takes these factors into account is also not the best route: the focus should be not on contagiousness, but rather on the growth rate of new cases and deaths, examined alongside their predicted time path so a trajectory can be forecasted.

“These are the numbers that really help guide policymakers in making the crucial decisions that will hopefully save lives and prevent overcrowded hospitals as a pandemic plays out – which, as we have seen with COVID-19, can occur over months and even years,” said Kattuman. “ ̽��ֱ��data generated through this time-series model has already proved accurate and effective in countries around the world.”

̽��ֱ��study examines waves and spikes in tracking an epidemic, noting that after an epidemic has peaked, daily cases begin to fall as policymakers seek to prevent new spikes morphing into waves. ̽��ֱ��monitoring of waves and spikes raises different issues, primarily because a wave applies to a whole nation or a relatively large geographical area, whereas a spike is localised.

Therefore, a localised outbreak in a country with low national infection numbers can result in a jump in the national R rate, as occurred in the Westphalia area of Germany in June 2020 after an outbreak at a meat processing factory. However, this sort of jump does not indicate that there has been a sudden change in the way the infection spreads and so has few implications for overall policy.

̽��ֱ��Harvey-Kattuman model has been adapted into two trackers. ̽��ֱ��two Cambridge academics worked with the National Institute of Economic and Social Research to produce a UK tracker which is published biweekly by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. In addition, they produce an India tracker which is published by the Centre for Health Leadership and Excellence at Cambridge Judge Business School. District-level pandemic trajectory forecasts using the model are used by public health policymakers in three states in India – Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Kerala – to identify regions at high risk and to frame containment and relaxation policies.

Reference:
Andrew Harvey and Paul Kattuman. ‘A Farewell to R: Time Series Models for Tracking and Forecasting Epidemics.’ Journal of the Royal Society Interface (2021). DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2021.0179

When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in 2020, the R rate became well-known shorthand for the reproduction of the disease. Yet a new study suggests it’s time for ‘a farewell to R’ in favour of a different approach based on the growth rate of infection rather than contagiousness.

These are the numbers that help guide policymakers in making the decisions that will save lives and prevent overcrowded hospitals as a pandemic plays out

Paul Kattuman

Image by torstensimon from Pixabay

Covid-19 vaccine

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Real-time drone intent monitoring could enable safer use of drones and prevent a repeat of 2018 Gatwick incident

sc604 — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 23:12:50 +0000

̽��ֱ��researchers, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, used a combination of statistical techniques and radar data to predict the flight path of a drone, and whether it intends to enter a restricted airspace, for instance around a civilian airport.

Their solution could help prevent a repeat of the Gatwick incident, as it can spot any drones before they enter restricted airspace and can determine, early, if their future actions are likely to pose a threat to other aircraft.

This new predictive capability can enable automated decision-making and significantly reduce the workload on drone surveillance system operators by offering actionable information on potential threats to facilitate timely and proportionate responses.

Real radar data from live drone trials at several locations was used to validate the new approach. Some of the results will be reported today (15 September) at the Sensor Signal Processing for Defence Conference in Edinburgh.

Drones have become ubiquitous over the past several years, with widespread applications in agriculture, surveying and e-commerce, among other fields. However, they can also be a nuisance or present a potential safety risk, especially with the wide availability of cheap and increasingly more capable platforms.

A few days before Christmas 2018, reported drone sightings near the perimeter of Gatwick Airport caused hundreds of flights to be disrupted due to the possible risk of collision. No culprit was found.

“While we don’t fully know what happened at Gatwick, the incident highlighted the potential risk drones can pose to the public if they are misused, whether that’s done maliciously or completely innocently,” said paper co-author Dr Bashar Ahmad, who carried out the research while based at Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “It’s crucial for future drone surveillance systems to have predictive capabilities for revealing, as early as possible, a drone with malicious intent or anomalous behaviour.”

To aid with air traffic control and prevent any possible collisions, commercial airplanes report their location every few minutes. However, there is no such requirement for drones.

“There needs to be some sort of automated equivalent to air traffic control for drones,” said Professor Simon Godsill from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who led the project. “But unlike large and fast-moving targets, like a passenger jet, drones are small, agile, and slow-moving, which makes them difficult to track. They can also easily be mistaken for birds, and vice versa.”

“We need to spot threats as early as possible, but we also need to be careful not to overreact, since closing civilian airspace is a drastic and highly disruptive measure that we want to avoid, especially if it ends up being a false alarm,” said first author Dr Jiaming Liang, also from the Department of Engineering, who developed the underlying algorithms with Godsill.

There are several potential ways to monitor the space around a civilian airport. A typical drone surveillance solution can use a combination of several sensors, such as radar, radio frequency detectors and cameras, but it’s often expensive and labour-intensive to operate.

Using Bayesian statistical techniques, the Cambridge researchers built a solution that would only flag those drones which pose a threat and offer a way to prioritise them. Threat is defined as a drone that’s intending to enter restricted airspace or displays an unusual flying pattern.

“We need to know this before it happens, not after it happens,” said Godsill. “This way, if a drone is getting too close, it could be possible to warn the drone operator. For obvious safety reasons, it’s prohibited to disable a drone in civilian airspace, so the only option is to close the airspace. Our goal is to make sure airport authorities don’t have to do this unless the threat is a real one.”

̽��ֱ��software-based solution uses a stochastic, or random, model to determine the underlying intent of the drone, which can change dynamically over time. Most drones navigate using waypoints, meaning they travel from one point to the next, and a single journey is made of multiple points.

In tests using real radar data, the Cambridge-developed solution was able to identify drones before they reached their next waypoint. Based on a drone’s velocity, trajectory and other data, it was able to predict the probability of any given drone reaching the next waypoint in real time.

“In tests, our system was able to spot potential threats in seconds, but in a real scenario, those seconds or minutes can make the difference between an incident happening or not,” said Liang. “It could give time to warn incoming flights about the threat so that no one gets hurt.”

̽��ֱ��Cambridge researchers say their solution can be incorporated into existing surveillance systems, making it a cost-effective way of tracking the risk of drones ending up where they shouldn’t. ̽��ֱ��algorithms could, in principle, also be applied to other domains such as maritime safety, robotics and self-driving cars.

Reference:
Jiaming Liang et al. ‘Detection of Malicious Intent in Non-cooperative Drone Surveillance.’ Paper presented at the Sensor Signal Processing for Defence conference. Edinburgh, UK. 14-15 September 2021. https://sspd.eng.ed.ac.uk/

Researchers have developed a real-time approach that can help prevent incidents like the large-scale disruption at London’s Gatwick Airport in 2018, where possible drone sightings at the perimeter of the airport caused the cancellation of hundreds of flights.

While we don’t fully know what happened at Gatwick, the incident highlighted the potential risk drones can pose to the public if they are misused

Bashar Ahmad

Goh Rhy Yan via Unsplash

Drone and city skyline

Yes

How accurate were early expert predictions on COVID-19, and how did they compare to the public?

sc604 — Wed, 05 May 2021 18:00:00 +0000

Researchers from the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication surveyed 140 UK experts and 2,086 UK laypersons in April 2020 and asked them to make four quantitative predictions about the impact of COVID-19 by the end of 2020. Participants were also asked to indicate confidence in their predictions by providing upper and lower bounds of where they were 75% sure that the true answer would fall - for example, a participant would say they were 75% sure that the total number of infections would be between 300,000 and 800,000.

̽��ֱ��results, published in the journal PLOS ONE, demonstrate the difficulty in predicting the course of the pandemic, especially in its early days. While only 44% of predictions from the expert group fell within their own 75% confidence ranges, the non-expert group fared far worse, with only 12% of predictions falling within their ranges. Even when the non-expert group was restricted to those with high numeracy scores, only 16% of predictions fell within the ranges of values that they were 75% sure would contain the true outcomes.

“Experts perhaps didn’t predict as accurately as we hoped they might, but the fact that they were far more accurate than the non-expert group reminds us that they have expertise that’s worth listening to,” said Dr Gabriel Recchia from the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, the paper’s lead author. “Predicting the course of a brand-new disease like COVID-19 just a few months after it had first been identified is incredibly difficult, but the important thing is for experts to be able to acknowledge uncertainty and adapt their predictions as more data become available.”

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, social and traditional media have disseminated predictions from experts and non-experts about its expected magnitude.

Expert opinion is undoubtedly important in informing and advising those making individual and policy-level decisions. However, as the quality of expert intuition can vary drastically depending on the field of expertise and the type of judgment required, it is important to conduct domain-specific research to establish how good expert predictions really are, particularly in cases where they have the potential to shape public opinion or government policy.

“People mean different things by ‘expert’: these are not necessarily people working on COVID-19 or developing the models to inform the response,” said Recchia. “Many of the people approached to provide comment or make predictions have relevant expertise, but not necessarily the most relevant.” He noted that in the early COVID-19 pandemic, clinicians, epidemiologists, statisticians, and other individuals seen as experts by the media and the general public, were frequently asked to give off-the-cuff answers to questions about how bad the pandemic might get. “We wanted to test how accurate some of these predictions from people with this kind of expertise were, and importantly, see how they compared to the public.”

For the survey, participants were asked to predict how many people living in their country would have died and would have been infected by the end of 2020; they were also asked to predict infection fatality rates both for their country and worldwide.

Both the expert group and the non-expert group underestimated the total number of deaths and infections in the UK. ̽��ֱ��official UK death toll at 31 December was 75,346. ̽��ֱ��median prediction of the expert group was 30,000, while the median prediction for the non-expert group was 25,000.

For infection fatality rates, the median expert prediction was that 10 out of every 1,000 people with the virus worldwide would die from it, and 9.5 out of 1,000 people with the virus in the UK would die from it. ̽��ֱ��median non-expert response to the same questions was 50 out of 1,000 and 40 out of 1,000. ̽��ֱ��real infection fatality rate at the end of 2020—as best the researchers could determine, given the fact that the true number of infections remains difficult to estimate—was closer to 4.55 out of 1,000 worldwide and 11.8 out of 1,000 in the UK.

“There’s a temptation to look at any results that says experts are less accurate than we might hope and say we shouldn’t listen to them, but the fact that non-experts did so much worse shows that it remains important to listen to experts, as long as we keep in mind that what happens in the real world can surprise you,” said Recchia.

̽��ֱ��researchers caution that it is important to differentiate between research evaluating the forecasts of ‘experts’—individuals holding occupations or roles in subject-relevant fields, such as epidemiologists and statisticians—and research evaluating specific epidemiological models, although expert forecasts may well be informed by epidemiological models. Many COVID-19 models have been found to be reasonably accurate over the short term, but get less accurate as they try to predict outcomes further into the future.

Reference:
Gabriel Recchia, Alexandra L.J. Freeman, David Spiegelhalter. ‘How well did experts and laypeople forecast the size of the COVID-19 pandemic?’ PLOS ONE (2021). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0250935

Who made more accurate predictions about the course of the COVID-19 pandemic – experts or the public? A study from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has found that experts such as epidemiologists and statisticians made far more accurate predictions than the public, but both groups substantially underestimated the true extent of the pandemic.

Predicting the course of a brand-new disease like COVID-19 just a few months after it had first been identified is incredibly difficult, but the important thing is for experts to be able to acknowledge uncertainty and adapt their predictions as more data become available.

Gabriel Recchia

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Novel Coronavirus SARS-Cov-2

Yes

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Cambridge researchers awarded European Research Council funding

cg605 — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 17:14:16 +0000

Three hundred and twenty-seven mid-career researchers were today awarded Consolidator Grants by the ERC, totalling €655 million. ̽��ֱ��UK has 50 grantees in this year’s funding round. ̽��ֱ��funding is part of the EU’s current research and innovation programme, Horizon 2020.

̽��ֱ��ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded to outstanding researchers of any nationality and age, with at least seven and up to 12 years of experience after PhD, and a scientific track record showing great promise.

̽��ֱ��research projects proposed by the new grantees cover a wide range of topics in physical sciences and engineering, life sciences, as well as social sciences and humanities.

From the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, the following researchers were named as grantees: Professor Vasco Carvalho, Professor Tuomas Knowles, Dr Neel Krishnaswami, Professor Silvia Vignolini and Dr Kaisey Mandel.

Vasco Carvalho, Professor of Macroeconomics and Director of Cambridge-INET, Faculty of Economics

Project title: Micro Structure and Macro Outcomes.

What is your research about?

“Research under the project MICRO2MACRO takes as a starting point the organisation of production around supply chain networks and, within these networks, the increasing dominance of very large and central firms. This renders a small number of firms and technologies systemic in that they can influence aggregate economic performance.

“Within this broad agenda, MICRO2MACRO explores issues surrounding, first, market power and pro-competitive policies and, second, innovation, productivity and the diffusion of new technologies. ̽��ֱ��project also partners with one global financial institution to unlock relevant real-time, highly granular data that is necessary to study some of these questions.”

How do you feel about being named a grantee?

“I'm ecstatic. First, because it recognises the combined effort of colleagues around the world in developing a new micro-to-macro research agenda and understanding macroeconomic developments via a new lens. Second, because it provides the opportunity to inject otherwise scarce resources into early career researchers and PhD students, thereby adding to the human capital in this research area. Third, because it further highlights a decade of collective efforts at the Faculty of Economics here at Cambridge and helps ensure its continued growth as a hub for the development of new approaches to decades old questions in economics.”

Professor Tuomas Knowles, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry

Project title: Digital Protein Biophysics of Aggregation.

What is your research about?

“Our work is focused on understanding the basic molecular principles that govern the activity of proteins in health and disease. In particular we are interested in how proteins come together to form machinery and compartments that underpin the functions of a living cell, and what happens when these processes fail.

“ ̽��ֱ��ERC project is focused on understanding how proteins condense together to form functional liquid organelles, and how such compartments can gel and form irreversible protein aggregates associated with disease. Such problems have been challenging to study previously due to the very high heterogeneity of the structures that are formed which make observation by conventional bulk techniques challenging. We will be developing new single molecule approaches to study this phenomenon aggregate by aggregate and cell by cell, and in this way shed light on the connection between the physical and structural properties of protein assemblies and their biological activity.”

How do you feel about being named a grantee?

“I am truly delighted by this support of my research and that of my group, which will allow us to develop fundamentally new approaches for probing a process at the core of biological function and malfunction.”

Dr Neel Krishnaswami, Computer Laboratory

Project title: Foundations of Type Inference for Modern Programming Languages.

What is your research about?

“Many modern programming languages, whether industrial or academic, are typed. Each phrase in a program is classified by its type (for example, as strings or integers), and at compile-time programs are checked for consistent usage of types, in a process called type-checking. Thus, the expression ‘3 + 4’ will be accepted, since the + operator takes two numbers as arguments, but the expression ‘3 + ‘hello’’ will be rejected, as it makes no sense to add a number and a string. Though this is a simple idea, sophisticated type systems can track properties like algorithmic complexity and program correctness.

“In general, programmers must write annotations to tell computers which types to check. In theory, it is easy to demand enough annotations to trivialize type-checking, but this can easily make the annotation larger than the program itself! So, to transfer results from formal calculi to real programming languages, we need type inference algorithms, which reconstruct missing types from partially-annotated programs.

“In TypeFoundry, we will use recent developments in proof theory and formal semantics to identify the theoretical structure underpinning type inference.”

How do you feel about being named a grantee?

“Naturally, I am happy to find out that my research is valued in such concrete, material terms, and I'm delighted to have the opportunity to have the chance to support PhD students and postdocs working in this area. I also feel this shows off the best international character of science. I am an Indian-American researcher working in the UK, judged and funded by my European peers. Consequently, I keenly feel both the opportunity and responsibility to carry on the cosmopolitan tradition of scientific work.”

Professor Silvia Vignolini, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry

Project title: Sym-Bionic Matter: developing symbiotic relationships for light-matter interaction.

What is your research about?

“With this ERC grant I aim to develop new platforms and tools to study how different organisms build symbiotic interactions for light management and ‘evolve’ new symbiotic relationships, in which one of the organisms is replaced by an artificial material to generate a novel class of hybrid which I link to call ‘sym-BIonic matTEr’ – BiTe!”

How do you feel about being named a grantee?

“I was very excited to learn that I had been awarded an ERC grant and I look forward to starting the project. It’s an amazing opportunity for my team and me!

“When you receive the evaluation response, you get an email notification that invites you to log into the EU portal to see the outcome of the evaluation. In those few minutes that it takes to open the right form on the platform, I experienced pure panic! When I finally open the letter, I had to read it three times to convince myself that I had been awarded the grant! It was a great day!”

Dr Kaisey Mandel, Institute of Astronomy, Statistical Laboratory of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, Kavli Institute for Cosmology

Project title: Next-Generation Data-Driven Probabilistic Modelling of Type Ia Supernova SEDs in the Optical to Near-Infrared for Robust Cosmological Inference.

What is your research about?

“My research focuses on utilising exploding stars called Type Ia supernovae to measure cosmological distances for tracing the history of cosmic expansion.

“I lead a project to develop state-of-the-art statistical models and advanced, data-driven techniques for analysing observations of these supernovae in optical and near-infrared light to determine more precise and accurate distances.

“Applying these novel methods to supernova data from the Hubble Space Telescope, new ground-based surveys, and, in the near future, the Vera Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time, we will pursue new and improved constraints on the accelerating expansion of the Universe and the nature of dark energy.”

Five researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have won consolidator grants from the European Research Council (ERC), Europe’s premiere funding organisation for frontier research.

iStock.com/ BarrySheene

Yes

Ethnic minorities at much higher risk of homicide in England and Wales

fpjl2 — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 12:10:53 +0000

New research analysing racial disparities among murder victims across most of Britain over the last two decades shows that people of Asian ethnicity are on average twice as likely as White British people to be killed.

For Black people, however, the risk of homicide has been over five and a half times (5.6) higher than for White British people – on average – during the current century, and this disparity has been on the rise since 2015.

Researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology were surprised to find that official UK data did not include relative risk statistics by ethnicity, as is common in countries such as the US and Australia.

They argue that the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) should publish “relevant denominators with raw numerators” to help with public understanding of crime risk and police resourcing. ̽��ֱ��work is published as a research note in the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing.

“Through a series of straightforward calculations, we found substantial racial inequality in the risks of being murdered in England and Wales,” said co-author Professor Lawrence Sherman of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology.

“ ̽��ֱ��pandemic has given the public a crash course in statistics. It provides an opportunity to present all kinds of data in ways that have more meaning for the population as well as those on the front line of prevention,” Sherman said.

Billy Gazard, a crime statistician for the ONS, said: “We have outlined our plans for improving crime statistics for England and Wales in our July 2020 progress update. Within this update we committed to better addressing inequalities in victimisation and highlighting those groups in society that are at most risk of experiencing crime. We plan to carry out further analysis over the coming year, which will include looking at homicide victimisation rates by ethnicity.”

Cambridge criminologists went back over the last 20 years of annual figures using an approach now familiar to many through coronavirus statistics: rates of cases per 100,000 people. This provided a risk ratio for homicide rates by ethnicity in England and Wales.

̽��ֱ��researchers say that, to the best of their knowledge, theirs is the first comparison of ethnic group trends in UK homicide victimisation rates per 100,000 to be published in recent decades, if ever.

They found that homicide risk for White and Asian people has stayed relatively consistent since the turn of the millennium – around one in 100,000 for White people and a little over two in 100,000 for Asian people, consisting primarily of persons of South Asian descent. For Black people, however, risks have fluctuated dramatically over the last 20 years.

̽��ֱ��homicide victimisation rate for Black people was highest in the early noughties: almost 10 in 100,000 in 2001. It dropped by 69% between 2001 and 2012 to a low of 3 in 100,000 around 2013. Rates then began to climb again, rising seven times faster than for White people to reach over 5 in 100,000 last year.

When accounting for age, the disparity is starker still: for those aged 16 to 24, the 21st century average puts young Black people over ten and a half times (10.6) more likely than White people to be victims of homicide in England and Wales.

In fact, researchers point out that – per 100,000 people – the most recent data from 2018-19 puts the murder risk of young Black people 24 times higher than that of young White people.

̽��ֱ��criminologists found no correlation between changes in homicide risk for different ethnicities. As an example, they point to the last three years of data: the homicide rate for White people aged between 16-24 dropped by 57%, while for young Black people it increased by 31%.

“Policing requires reliable evidence, and changing levels of risk are a vital part of preventative policing,” said Sherman. “Our initial findings reveal risk inequalities at a national level, but they may be far greater or lower in local areas. We would encourage police forces to produce their own calculations of murder rates per 100,000.”

Sherman has long advocated for a more 'meaningful' approach to crime data. He has led on the development of the Cambridge Crime Harm Index: a classification system weighted by the impact of an offence on victims, rather than just counting crime numbers.

“Simple statistics show us that the risks of becoming a murder victim are far from equal,” added Sherman. “We need more data analysis of this nature to inform police resource allocation, and promote a more fact-informed dialogue with communities across the country.”

Calculations now familiar from coronavirus coverage – cases per 100,000 people – applied to ethnicity and homicide victimisation in the UK for the first time.

We need more data analysis of this nature to inform police resource allocation, and promote a more fact-informed dialogue with communities across the country

Lawrence Sherman

rudlavibizon

Met Police sign in South London

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Uncertainty about facts can be reported without damaging public trust in news – study

fpjl2 — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 16:33:08 +0000

̽��ֱ��numbers that drive headlines – those on Covid-19 infections, for example – contain significant levels of uncertainty: assumptions, limitations, extrapolations, and so on.

Experts and journalists have long assumed that revealing the 'noise' inherent in data confuses audiences and undermines trust, say ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers, despite this being little studied.

Now, new research has found that uncertainty around key facts and figures can be communicated in a way that maintains public trust in information and its source, even on contentious issues such as immigration and climate change.

Researchers say they hope the work, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, will encourage scientists and media to be bolder in reporting statistical uncertainties.

“Estimated numbers with major uncertainties get reported as absolutes,” said Dr Anne Marthe van der Bles, who led the new study while at Cambridge’s Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication.

“This can affect how the public views risk and human expertise, and it may produce negative sentiment if people end up feeling misled,” she said.

Co-author Sander van der Linden, director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, said: “Increasing accuracy when reporting a number by including an indication of its uncertainty provides the public with better information. In an era of fake news that might help foster trust.”

̽��ֱ��team of psychologists and mathematicians set out to see if they could get people much closer to the statistical 'truth' in a news-style online report without denting perceived trustworthiness.

They conducted five experiments involving a total of 5,780 participants, including a unique field experiment hosted by BBC News online, which displayed the uncertainty around a headline figure in different ways.

̽��ֱ��researchers got the best results when a figure was flagged as an estimate, and accompanied by the numerical range from which it had been derived, for example: '…the unemployment rate rose to an estimated 3.9% (between 3.7%–4.1%)'.

This format saw a marked increase in the feeling and understanding that the data held uncertainty, but little to no negative effect on levels of trust in the data itself, those who provided it (e.g. civil servants) or those reporting it (e.g. journalists).

“We hope these results help to reassure all communicators of facts and science that they can be more open and transparent about the limits of human knowledge,” said co-author Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, Chair of the Winton Centre at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Catherine Dennison, Welfare Programme Head at the Nuffield Foundation, said: “We are committed to building trust in evidence at a time when it is frequently called into question. This study provides helpful guidance on ensuring informative statistics are credibly communicated to the public.”

̽��ֱ��findings are published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Most experiment participants were recruited through the online crowdsourcing platform Prolific. They were given short, news-style texts on one of four topics: UK unemployment, UK immigration, Indian tiger populations, or climate change.

Uncertainty was presented as a single added word (e.g. ‘estimated’), a numerical range, a longer verbal caveat – 'there is uncertainty around this figure: it could be somewhat higher or lower' – or combination of these, as well as the ‘control’ of a standalone figure without uncertainty, typical of most news reporting.

They found that the added word did not register with people, and the longer caveat registered but significantly diminished trust – the researchers believe it was too ambiguous. Presenting the numerical range (from minimum to maximum) had the right balance of signaling uncertainty with little evidence for loss of trust.

Prior views on contested topics within news reports, such as migration, were included in the analysis. Although attitudes towards the issue mattered for how facts were viewed, when openness about data uncertainty was added it did not substantially reduce trust in either the numbers or the source.

̽��ֱ��team worked with the BBC to conduct a field experiment in October 2019, when figures were released about the UK labour market.

In the BBC’s online story, figures were either presented as usual, a ‘control’, or with some uncertainty – a verbal caveat or a numerical range – and a link to a brief survey. Findings from this 'real world' experiment matched those from the study’s other 'lab conditions' experiments.

“We recommend that journalists and those producing data give people the fuller picture,” said co-author Dr Alexandra Freeman, Executive Director of the Winton Centre.

“If a number is an estimate, let them know how precise that estimate is by putting a minimum and maximum in brackets afterwards.”

Sander van der Linden added: “Ultimately we’d like to see the cultivation of psychological comfort around the fact that knowledge and data always contain uncertainty.”

“Disinformation often appears definitive, and fake news plays on a sense of certainty,” he said.

“One way to help people navigate today’s post-truth news environment is by being honest about what we don’t know, such as the exact number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK. Our work suggests people can handle the truth.”

Last month, David Spiegelhalter launched a podcast about statistics, ‘Risky Talk’. In the first episode he discusses communicating climate change data with Sander van der Linden and Dr Emily Shuckburgh, leader of the ̽��ֱ��’s new climate initiative Cambridge Zero.

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A series of experiments – including one on the BBC News website – finds the use of numerical ranges in news reports helps us grasp the uncertainty of stats while maintaining trust in data and its sources.

Ultimately we’d like to see the cultivation of psychological comfort around the fact that knowledge and data always contain uncertainty

Sander van der Linden

Yes

Darwin Lectures go to extremes

sc604 — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 12:47:32 +0000

Each series of the Darwin College Lectures his built around a single theme, approached in a multi-disciplinary way, and each lecture is prepared for a general audience by a leading authority on his or her subject. ̽��ֱ��theme for this year’s lecture series, now in its 32^nd year, is ‘Extremes’. ̽��ֱ��lectures are free and open to the public, and are held on Friday evenings during Lent Term at Lady Mitchell Hall on the ̽��ֱ��’s Sidgwick Site.

̽��ֱ��first lecture of the 2017 series is ‘Extreme Weather’ and will be given by Darwin Fellow Dr Emily Shuckburgh, who is also deputy head of the Polar Oceans Team at the British Antarctic Survey. In her lecture, she will discuss the scientific evidence surrounding the causes and consequences of climate change and the prospects for the future. Dr Shuckburgh is co-author of a recently-published Ladybird book on Climate Change which has been written with co-authors HRH ̽��ֱ��Prince of Wales and Tony Juniper, former Executive Director of Friends of the Earth.

Next week’s speaker is Nassim Nicholas Taleb from New York ̽��ֱ��, and author of the bestseller ̽��ֱ��Black Swan. Taleb will speak on the theme of ‘Extreme Events and How to Live with Them.’ His research shows where conventional statistical tools fail, such as the conventional law of large numbers, and how robust statistics are not robust at all.

Other speakers this term include Professor David Runciman on Dealing with Extremism; ocean rower Roz Savage on her story of rowing solo across the Atlantic and Pacific; Professor Andy Fabian on Extremes of the Universe; Oxford’s Professor Sarah Harper on Extreme Ageing; and the BBC’s Lyse Doucet on reporting from extreme environments. Full details of the series are available at: www.dar.cam.ac.uk/lectures.

“We have again attracted a mix of outstanding speakers, representing the natural and the social sciences, as well as the humanities and the world beyond academia,” said Julius Weitzdörfer, who convened the series with Duncan Needham. “All of them are not only highly interesting people, but also excellent communicators.”

Admission to the lectures is free and open to all, however those interested in attending should arrive early in order to secure a place in the main hall (lectures start at 5.30pm). An adjacent overflow theatre (with a live TV feed) is provided for those who cannot be seated in the main hall.

From climate change and extending the human lifespan to political extremism and reporting from war zones, this year’s Darwin College Lecture Series will focus on some of the extremes faced by society.

Stuart Rankin

Antarctic waterfall

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

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