The benefits of teaching the statistics of risk analysis.<\/p>\n
Probability lessons may teach children how to weigh life\u2019s odds and be winners<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cYou can tick off story after story that\u2019s probably interesting to the people it happened to, but not statistically unusual at all. There was a recent story about a family in Gloucestershire with three children all born on January 29. We were contacted by a journalist and asked what are the chances of this happening.<\/p>\n \u201cThe chances are about one in 135,000, or seven in a million. But there are a million families with three children in the UK. So it\u2019s almost certain that this family is not unique and when the story went online, someone wrote in and said, \u2018I was born on the same day as my two brothers\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n [\u2026]<\/p>\n The unfounded scare over the MMR vaccine, and outlandish claims of success for alternative medicines, were prime examples.\u201cOne must think all the time of what is not<\/em> being reported \u2013 the dog that didn\u2019t bark. When we see a hole-in-one video on YouTube we are sensible enough to know that this has been selected out of millions of shots that missed. We need to think the same way every time we hear of someone claiming that some new treatment has cured them.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n via<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The benefits of teaching the statistics of risk analysis. Probability lessons may teach children how to weigh life\u2019s odds and be winners \u201cYou can tick off story after story that\u2019s probably interesting to the people it happened to, but not … Continue reading