More or Less

This is the first in the new series of the programme. Tim Harford has been busy felling some ash tree statistics. He asks whether the UK could lose 30% of our woodland trees and did the ash die back disease really kill 90% of ash trees in Denmark?

There's not an obvious link between chocolate and Nobel prizes, but this did not stop news outlets around the world reporting the amount of chocolate a country consumes influences the number of Nobel prizes they will win.

This week Ruth Alexander looks at the other winner the US elections. Blogger and pioneer of aggregated polling, Nate Silver, predicted the outcome of the vote in every state one better than 2008. Others who have tried similar methods have also done well. Is this the dawn of a new era of poll prediction or just luck?

Conrad Black has claimed that 99.5% of prosecution cases in America end up in convictions. Is it really this high? We try to estimate how this compares to the number of convictions in other parts of the world.

This week six scientists and one ex-government official were sentenced to prison for multiple manslaughter following the L’Aquila earthquake in Italy. Part of the case against them was the falsely reassuring comments they made before the earthquake struck. Will this deter scientists from giving advice in the future?

Professor Al Roth tells Tim Harford about the work for which he has just been awarded the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Predicting the global population: does anyone really know what’s going to happen?