Summer 2009

From the Chair

New members

Sci Comm news

Eurochat

Feature: The day CERN was more popular than NASA

Feature: Biding time

Feature: The importance
of good design

Feature: From around the world

Event Report: The
numbers game

Event Report: When lives are on the line

Event Report: The new media officers

Event Report: Achieving global coverage

Interview: Ian Sample,
The Guardian

Stempra newsletter

EVENT REPORT: The numbers game; all you wanted to know about statistics

Speaker: David Hand, Professor of Statistics at Imperial College London and President of the Royal Statistical Society

Statistics are a way of seeing things you can’t actually see – by providing structure and showing the relationships between numbers. David Hand, Professor of Statistics at Imperial College London and President of the Royal Statistical Society, warned the group of science press officers at the Wellcome Trust in March that – when stats are involved – their subject needs extra care.

Interpretation of stats papers is a challenge. For example, it can be easy to make an error, or not to take care with accuracy when equating fractions to percentages. Professor Hand ran through the common mistakes, explained how to avoid them and laid bare sample sizes, accuracy of estimates, regression to the mean and the perils of self-selecting surveys.  
 
Professor Hand advised caution when using the word average because, he explained, it does have different meanings. Average can be a mean when figures are added and divided, but can also be a median figure used to describe half of other figures above it and half below. Using mean or median makes a difference to how results are interpreted.

He used an example of baseball players’ salaries in the US to show how it’s possible to create an inaccurate conclusion by inferring meaning from data that isn’t as ‘average’ as it appears.
 
The session was so useful that Stempra members have asked for more, and someone mentioned P values… Look out for a second more in-depth event later in the year. If you’d like to read more about statistics, Professor Hand recommended a guide he had prepared earlier: David J. Hand, Statistics: A very short introduction, Oxford University Press, ISBN13: 9780199233564

Hazel Lambert
Senior Press Officer, Medical Research Council
and Stempra committee member
Hazel@stempra.org.uk

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