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What are the odds?
Mar. 17th, 2007 03:47 pmOne of the millions of things which annoys me at work is when a journalist almost proudly proclaims that he is useless at maths (female journalists usually have the common sense to keep quiet about it).
This all harks back to the tradition in English schools that to learn anything practical that might be used "in trade" is undesirable. Read English Literature so that you can natter about Thomas Hardy over the differ table, but learn how numbers work? O h no dear. "I need to take off my shoes and socks if a number goes above 10!" (guffaw, guffaw).
So, anyhoo,
A while ago I laid into a certain "expert" witness ( I can't even bring myself to name this person, but I do hope that he is stripped of his knighthood and profesorship) who stated that the chance of there being two cot deaths in the same family was one in 73 million, thus completely misunderstanding the concept of conditional probability (it depends on your starting point mate), and contributing to the wrongful conviction (later merely deemed "unsafe") of solicitor Sally Clark. The calculation, by the way, was off by a factor of more than 300,000.
Did anyone in the court question the original mathematical statement? No. Not the judge, not the defense lawyers. Presumably, they too, were too busy at university learning a lot of useless stuff and not learning something that might have kept Sally Clark from three years' wrongful incarceration.
And now, she's dead. I wonder what odds our expert witness would like to come up with here. What are the chances of a woman having two children who died from cot deaths dying herself at the age of 42? Cor, if the first was 73m to 1, then this one must be out of the stratosphere.
Luckily, few readers of this blog will be innumerate. What continues to frighten me is that so many people "out there" are not only innumerate, but they embrace it. I mean, I might not understand engineering, but I don't go round saying that it's not worth knowing about. And I certainly don't look to take the stand to testify on the way a motor engine works, just because I drive a car.
This all harks back to the tradition in English schools that to learn anything practical that might be used "in trade" is undesirable. Read English Literature so that you can natter about Thomas Hardy over the differ table, but learn how numbers work? O h no dear. "I need to take off my shoes and socks if a number goes above 10!" (guffaw, guffaw).
So, anyhoo,
A while ago I laid into a certain "expert" witness ( I can't even bring myself to name this person, but I do hope that he is stripped of his knighthood and profesorship) who stated that the chance of there being two cot deaths in the same family was one in 73 million, thus completely misunderstanding the concept of conditional probability (it depends on your starting point mate), and contributing to the wrongful conviction (later merely deemed "unsafe") of solicitor Sally Clark. The calculation, by the way, was off by a factor of more than 300,000.
Did anyone in the court question the original mathematical statement? No. Not the judge, not the defense lawyers. Presumably, they too, were too busy at university learning a lot of useless stuff and not learning something that might have kept Sally Clark from three years' wrongful incarceration.
And now, she's dead. I wonder what odds our expert witness would like to come up with here. What are the chances of a woman having two children who died from cot deaths dying herself at the age of 42? Cor, if the first was 73m to 1, then this one must be out of the stratosphere.
Luckily, few readers of this blog will be innumerate. What continues to frighten me is that so many people "out there" are not only innumerate, but they embrace it. I mean, I might not understand engineering, but I don't go round saying that it's not worth knowing about. And I certainly don't look to take the stand to testify on the way a motor engine works, just because I drive a car.
