More or Less: Behind the Stats

It looks like homicides are on the rise - but better check the footnotes

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More or Less: Behind the Stats
Is Crime Rising?
It looks like homicides are on the rise - but better check the footnotes
24 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
Straws, women on boards, plus animals born each day
Measuring plastic pollution, female FTSE directors and counting animal offspring.
23 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
WS More or Less: Puerto Rico - statistics versus politics
Why some fear the statistics authority is about to lose its independence
10 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
Cancer screening, the Windrush Generation, Audiograms
Calculating the benefits and risks of breast screening. Plus, patchy citizenship data.
23 mins
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WS More or Less: Exposing the biases we have of the world
Statistician Hans Rosling’s family talk about the book they co-wrote about preconceptions
9 mins
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Abortion, modern slavery, math versus maths
The British abortion statistics gaining attention in Ireland's referendum debate
23 mins
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WS More or Less: Tulipmania mythology
What is the truth behind the 17th Century Dutch craze for Tulips?
11 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
Poverty, Progress 8 and how green is grass?
Are more working families in poverty? Plus exploring the new school league tables.
24 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
WS More or Less: James Comey - Basketball Superstar?
Does being very tall improve your chances of becoming a professional basketball player?
9 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
Forecasting rain, teabags and voter ID trials
How to read the weather forecast, plus measuring the amount of tea we drink.
23 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
WS More or Less: Australia Calling
Do one in seven businessmen throw out their underwear after wearing them once?
11 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
The High Street, Home Births and Harry Potter Wizardry
Is WH Smith really the worst shop on the High Street?
20 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
Counting Rough Sleepers
How do you count the number of people sleeping rough?
12 mins
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Infant Mortality, How to Reduce Exam Revision With Maths, London’s Murder Rate
Tim Harford explains how maths can help lazy students can reduce their revision workload
24 mins
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WS More or Less: How Many Animals are Born Every Day?
From penguins to nematodes - is it possible to count how many animals are born every day?
15 mins
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FIFA World Cup Extravaganza
How the ‘beautiful game’ has changed…through numbers.
8 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
How many words do you need to speak a language?
How many words do you need to speak a language and how many do native speakers use?
8 mins
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Running at the World Cup
Is it strange that Russian football players have run such big distances?
10 mins
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Are there more stars than grains of beach sand?
Stars vs Sand. We work out who wins the ultimate cosmic battle.
8 mins
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How to Cycle Really Fast
How much better are the pros than the rest of us and how effective is slipstreaming?
8 mins
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Should we have smaller families to save the planet?
Having one fewer child could be the biggest thing you do to reduce your carbon footprint
10 mins
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Getting Creative with Statistics
How big are your testicles and what does that mean?
8 mins
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Carbs, Sugar and the Truth
Does a baked potato contain the equivalent of 19 cubes of sugar?
8 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BONUS PODCAST: Economics with Subtitles - How Buying Cocaine Helps the Government
The surprising story of GDP and whether it's time to change how we measure our economy
28 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
Numbers Behind a Tweetstorm
How do you get a hashtag to trend around the world?
8 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BONUS PODCAST: Economics with Subtitles - Bracelets for Bullets
Why an Essex mum wanted her jewellery melted down and what it says about government debt
28 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
WS More or Less: Are Wildfires Really Burning More Land?
Are Wildfires in the United States and Southern Europe burning more land than before?
8 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BONUS PODCAST: Economics with Subtitles - How Condoms Can Cost a Week’s Wages
Inflation can change your sex life – and pretty much everything else.
27 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
A no-frills life, automated fact-checking and Lord-of-the-Rings maths
What would have been the most efficient way to get to Mordor?
24 mins
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WS: More or Less - Automated fact-checking
Computer programmes are being developed to combat fake news.
8 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BONUS PODCAST: Economics with Subtitles - Coffins Full of Car Keys
Why we have interest rates, how we misunderstand them - and a curious coffin connection.
28 mins
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African Trade Tariffs; Alcohol Safe Limits; President Trump's Popularity
Tim Harford fact checks EU trade deals with Africa, and whether one drink is one too many
23 mins
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WS: More or Less - How well do you understand your world?
Tim Harford talks to Bobby Duffy about why we are often wrong about a lot of basic facts
8 mins
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Heart Age Calculator; Danish Sperm Imports; Counting Goats
Tim Harford questions the usefulness of a popular heart age calculator.
23 mins
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WS More or Less: The Safest Car in the World?
A listener asks whether his Volvo is the safest car on the road?
9 mins
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Male suicide, school ratings, are female tennis players treated unfairly by umpires?
Tim Harford with statistics on suicide, good schools and sexism in tennis. Plus goats
24 mins
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WS More or Less: DNA - Are You More Chimp or Neanderthal?
What is the difference between 96% similarity or sharing 20% of our DNA?
9 mins
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How Many Schoolchildren are Carers? Shareholder Income, and Museum Visitors Vs Football Fans
Tim Harford on child carers, shareholder income, football vs museums and dangerous sports
25 mins
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WS More or Less: Trump and the Puerto Rico Death Toll
How can we calculate excess mortality after a natural disaster?
8 mins
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Surviving the Battle of Britain; the World Cup and Domestic Violence; Buckfast and Arrests in Scotland
Tim Harford on Spitfire pilots, and whether football triggers violence in the home.
22 mins
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WS More of Less: Surviving the Battle of Britain
Were Spitfire pilots killed after an average of four weeks in the World War Two battle?
9 mins
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Loneliness; School Funding; Same-Sex Divorce.
Tim Harford on a BBC loneliness survey; school funding; same-sex divorce; loyal listeners
20 mins
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WS More or Less: Why are Lesbians More Likely to Divorce than Gay Men?
Tim Harford talks to economist Marina Ashdade about same-sex divorce statistics.
9 mins
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Loneliness, School Funding, Same-Sex Divorce
A BBC loneliness survey, school funding, same-sex divorce and the loyalty of listeners.
9 mins
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WS More or Less: Paul Romer and William Nordhaus’ Big Ideas
The economists tackling climate change and growth.
9 mins
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WS More or Less: Foreign Aid: Who’s the most generous?
In foreign aid terms what’s the best way of measuring how generous a country is?
8 mins
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WS More or Less: Vaccines - The importance of the herd and social media
What proportion of a population needs to be vaccinated to stop a disease spreading?
11 mins
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WS More or Less: Do Assassinations Work?
How likely are assassination attempts on heads of state to succeed?
8 mins
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WS More or Less: When’s a Kilogram Not a Kilogram?
Updating the kilogram.
9 mins
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WS More or Less: Are 90% of War Fatalities Civilians?
Xavier Zapata examines what the data tells us about the deadly impact of war on civilians
16 mins
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WS More or Less: Sex and Heart Attacks
Are women more likely to die from a heart attack than men?
8 mins
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WS More or Less: Dam Lies and Statistics
Are mega-dams really sustainable?
8 mins
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WS More or Less: Mission Impossible - Quantifiying Santa
What to look out for on Christmas Eve.
8 mins
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WS More or Less: Numbers of the Year Part 1
The numbers that made 2018.
8 mins
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WS More or Less: Numbers of the Year Part 2
Helena Merriman with numbers about water shortage, plastic recycling and American jobs.
8 mins
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Sugar, Outdoors Play and Planets
Tim Harford on sugar, train fares, children's outdoors play and Earth's closest neighbour
28 mins
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WS More or Less: The Mathematics of Fever
We look at the numbers behind body temperature – what is normal?
10 mins
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Intersex Numbers, Fact-Checking Facebook, Jack Bogle
Tim Harford asks whether 1.7% of people are intersex, and examines false claims about MPs
30 mins
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WS More or Less: Close Encounters of a Planetary Kind
Which planet is closest to Earth?
9 mins
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Domestic Violence, Jobs, Easter Snowfall
Tim Harford on domestic violence, employment numbers, and the chance of a white Easter.
23 mins
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WS More or Less: Is Suicide Seasonal?
Tim Harford asks which times of the year are riskiest for suicide.
9 mins
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Holocaust Deniers; Venezuelan Hyperinflation; Tinder Likes
Tim Harford on Holocaust deniers; food prices in Venezuela, and dating app statistics
28 mins
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WS More or Less: You have 15,000 likes!
A listener doubts her popularity on the dating app Tinder. We investigate the numbers.
9 mins
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Teen Suicide; Brexit Business Moves; Wood-Burner Pollution
Tim Harford finds untrue a recent report that there is a 'suicidal generation' of teens.
28 mins
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WS More or Less: From the archives: Groundhogs and Kings
Assessing the accuracy of a Groundhog; How many English people have right royal relatives?
18 mins
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Climate Change, Victorian Diseases, Alcohol
Tim Harford on climate change, Victorian diseases, maths mistakes and alcohol consumption
23 mins
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WS More or Less: When maths mistakes really matter
Tim Harford talks to Matt Parker on how simple maths mistakes can cause big problems.
9 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
How To Make Your Art Work More Valuable
Die, sell on a sunny day, place your work a third of the way through the auction.
9 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
Insectageddon
Could insects go extinct in one hundred years?
12 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
The gender gap in tech
Are women really less likely than men to be hired for jobs in tech?
9 mins
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Day light saving time and heart attacks
Does the sudden loss of an hour of sleep raise the risk of having a heart attack?
8 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
Is Mansa Musa the richest person of all time?
Is the West African king, Mansa Musa, the richest person who ever lived?
8 mins
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Chess cheats and the GOAT
What a statistical analysis of chess moves can teach us about this ancient game.
10 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
Rounding up the weed killer cancer conundrum
We examine the cancer-causing potential of the weed killer glyphosate
8 mins
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Where is Scotland’s highest village?
A battle is brewing in the Southern Scottish uplands between two rival villages.
8 mins
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The economic impact of mega sporting events
Major sports events and the benefits to the local economy.
8 mins
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Hottest Easter, Insects, Scottish villages
Should we be surprised Easter Monday was the hottest recorded?
27 mins
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Bernie Sanders and the cost of having a baby
Did Bernie Sanders get the cost of giving birth right?
9 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
Nurses, flatmates and cats
We look into sobering statistics about nurses and some curious claims about house-sharing
23 mins
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Avengers - Should we reverse the snap?
Exploring the economic impact of losing half the world’s population
10 mins
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Sex, coal, missing people and mice
Are we having less sex? And what happened to coal? (These items are unrelated.)
27 mins
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Sex Every Seven Seconds
We revisit some classic topics from past years
15 mins
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Heart deaths, Organised crime and Gender data gaps
Are more people dying from coronary disease? Plus how we need more economic data on women
27 mins
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Making music out of Money
A musical interpretation of a chart depicting the yield-curve of American bonds.
9 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
Eurovision and fact-checking Naomi Wolf
The stats behind making a successful song, plus misunderstanding Victorian court records.
24 mins
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WS More or Less: Florence Nightingale – recognising the nurse statistician
How collecting data about the dead led the famous nurse to promote better sanitation.
10 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
Hay Festival Special
What does it mean to say that the UK is the fifth largest economy in the world?
27 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
WS More or Less: Volcanoes versus humans
Does Mount Etna produce more carbon emissions than humans? We check the numbers.
9 mins
More or Less: Behind the Stats
Are married women flipping miserable?
Measuring happiness, university access in Scotland, plus will one in two get cancer?
23 mins
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WS More or Less: The things we fail to see
The hidden influences that a make a big difference to the way the world works.
9 mins
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WS More or Less: Dealing with the Numbers of Cancer
How one woman used statistics to help cope with cancer.
9 mins
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Questioning the Chernobyl disaster death count
We fact check the recent TV drama Chernobyl
15 mins
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Is nuclear power actually safer than you think?
We compare how deadly different forms of power generation are.
9 mins
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Two World Cups: Football and Cricket
We look at numbers involved with the two World Cups going on right now.
8 mins
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Zimbabwe’s economy: Are sanctions to blame?
We look at politicians’ claims that sanctions are to blame for Zimbabwe’s difficulties.
8 mins
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Missing women from drug trials
How medical testing on just men causes problems.
9 mins
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Pregnancy prohibitions – the evidence
Taking a statistical look at what expectant mothers should avoid.
8 mins
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The spread of fact-checking in Africa
With misinformation so easy to spread, how can it be stopped or challenged?
8 mins
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Immigrant Crime Rate in the US
Do immigrants commit more crime than native-born Americans in the United States?
8 mins
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Mice and mind blowing maths
Re-inserting a caveat and discussing a really cool numbers trick.
9 mins
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Exam grades, Chernobyl and Ethiopian trees
Was your A Level grade correct? Plus were 350m trees planted in one day in Ethiopia?
24 mins

Is Crime Rising?Is Crime Rising?

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Is Crime Rising?