Blog

Jan
2022

Getting More from your Survey Questions with Factor Analysis

Surveys can be a rich source of information, including not only factual questions, but asking about attitudes, behaviours, and activities.
Factor analysis is a statistical technique that combines questions that are related (correlated) into a smaller number of factors, to create more robust measures.
In this blog we show factor analysis in action.

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Dec
2020

Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine: Why the Uncertainty?

The preliminary results from phase III trials of COVID-19 vaccines have been reported in the media. The vaccine developed and trialled by Pfizer and BioNTech is reported to be 95% effective and Moderna's is 94.5% effective. Trial results of the vaccine being developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca show that it is 70% effective, but "with potential for that to rise to 90 per cent". In this blog we explore the reasons and implications of this uncertainty.

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Nov
2020

COVID-19 Vaccines: What Does 90% Effective Mean?

In the past few weeks, we’ve heard from multiple pharmaceutical companies that interim results of their Covid-19 vaccines are showing surprisingly good results. But what does 90% effective actually mean? How do we know what percentage of a population a vaccine is able to protect when we don’t know how many people may have been exposed to the virus?

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Oct
2020

What the A Level Grade Scandal Can Show Us about Algorithmic Bias

There are lots of ways in which artificial intelligence can be unfair in its decision making. In this blog we discuss this so-called "algorithmic bias", motivated by a particularly visible example that recently made the news - when UK A level grades were calculated using an algorithm since students were unable to sit exams due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Jan
2020

Capturing the Decade in a Statistic

With the start of 2020 and the end of a decade, the RSS released their Statistics of the Decade. These are stand-out statistics that the judging panel felt captured the spirit of some of the biggest issues of the last ten years.

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Dec
2019

2019 Statistics of the Year: 58% and 72.6 years

The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) has just announced the 2019 winners of its annual Statistics of the Year competition. One of the key goals of the RSS is for statistics to be used effectively in the public interest, providing evidence for the good of society. It is great to see bona fide statistics generating interest and debate.

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