Why you should love statistics | Alan Smith
Think you're good at guessing stats? Guess again. Whether we consider ourselves math people or not, our ability to understand and work with numbers is terribly limited, says data visualization...
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Back in 2003, the UK government carried out a survey. And it was a survey that measured levels of numeracy in the population. And they were shocked to find out that for every 100 working age adults in the country, 47 of them lacked Level 1 numeracy skills. Now, Level 1 numeracy skills -- that's low-end GCSE score. It's the ability to deal with fractions, percentages and decimals. So this figure prompted a lot of hand-wringing in Whitehall. Policies were changed, investments were made, and then they ran the survey again in 2011. So can you guess what happened to this number? It went up to 49. (Laughter) And in fact, when I reported this figure in the FT, one of our readers joked and said, "This figure is only shocking to 51 percent of...
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Back in 2003, the UK government carried out a survey. And it was a survey that measured levels of numeracy in the population. And they were shocked to find out that for every 100 working age adults in the country, 47 of them lacked Level 1 numeracy skills. Now, Level 1 numeracy skills -- that's low-end GCSE score. It's the ability to deal with fractions, percentages and decimals. So this figure prompted a lot of hand-wringing in Whitehall. Policies were changed, investments were made, and then they ran the survey again in 2011. So can you guess what happened to this number? It went up to 49. (Laughter) And in fact, when I reported this figure in the FT, one of our readers joked and said, "This figure is only shocking to 51 percent of...
