Bacon Sandwiches - Professor David Spiegelhalter explores the risk

Рет қаралды 18,660

13 жыл бұрын

'20% greater risk of getting bowel cancer if you eat bacon sandwiches!', said some news headlines a little while ago.
We're all used to news reports which aim to shock us with eye-catching numbers. But how worried should we actually be by statistics such as this?
Professor David Spiegelhalter loves analysing headlines to find out what - if any - truth there is in them! Using a straightforward numerical approach he shows us how to work out what is really being said so we can decide for ourselves what the risk is in eating bacon sandwiches, and whether we need to stop eating them or not.
This video forms part of a set of free online mathematics education resources designed to help school students develop a better understanding of how to interpret statistics and how to evaluate risk. For accompanying resources, see
maths.org/MathsHealth
nrich.maths.org/12168
David Spiegelhalter is Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge. The resources were created by the Millennium Mathematics Project (maths.org) at the University of Cambridge, originally for our Motivate programme, and development was funded by a grant from the Wellcome Trust.

Пікірлер: 11

@AK47-666 Жыл бұрын

Awesome thanks a lot.

@Wantedpersona202 8 жыл бұрын

Great video and explanation

@azza123456789099999 9 жыл бұрын

Awesome vid!

@michaelbacon3477 4 жыл бұрын

I especially like this

@castello544 8 жыл бұрын

So if I eat 2 bacon sandwiches a week .....:) love it

@deafgiftroblox5240 8 жыл бұрын

so they are actually just trying to scare us

@Autotrope 8 жыл бұрын

+DeafgiftROBLOX the scientists who made the finding, no. The media, yes (probably). It's still a very real finding and a real statistic worth reporting, it's just that the 20% figure is misleading when you don't realise it's actually more like 1% in absolute terms. Let's say 100 million people (about 1/3 of the United States) eat bacon regularly. Out of those, 1 million (which is 1% in absolute terms) will get bowel cancer as a direct result of the bacon. That's a lot. Though consider also that 5 million of them would have got bowel cancer anyway.

@FelipeV3444 8 жыл бұрын

+Autotrope Do you have the sources of the actual paper by the scientists rather than the BBC news? I haven't found any sources related to the WHO for this claims, just blogs and news. Am I missing something?

@kenShuttleworth 8 жыл бұрын

You overestimate the risk, because the absolute risk of 1 in 18 or approx 5% is inclusive of people who eat bacon sandwiches. The risk to people who do not eat bacon sandwiches is probably nearer 4% as the majority of people eat bacon.

@isaiahvalencia5954 6 жыл бұрын

no lol