Posts written by Stephanie Budgett (3)

Do you shout at the morning radio when a story about a medical “risk” is distorted, exaggerated, mangled out of all recognition? You are not alone. Kevin McConway and David Spiegelhalter, writing in Significance, a quarterly magazine published by the Royal Statistical Society, have come up with a checklist for scoring media stories about medical risks. Their mnemonic checklist comprises 12 items and is called the ‘John Humphrys’ scale, said Mr Humphrys being a well-known UK radio and television presenter.

They assign one point for every ‘yes’ and do a test on a story about magnetic fields and asthma, and another about TV and length of life. The article, called Score and Ignore: A radio listener’s guide to ignoring health stories, is here.

Could form the basis of a useful classroom resource.

Here is an interesting blog post on the heated debate about the link between soda consumption and obesity in the US.

What sort of risk taker are you and why do you take the risks you do? You can find out more by participating in what aims to be the biggest ever study of the science of risk.

The Big Risk Test, developed by academics at the University of Cambridge, aims to be the biggest study of risk ever undertaken. Professor David Spiegelhalter and Dr Mike Aitken explain what the test is about and what they hope it will reveal here.

Take the test here.