More or Less

On this week’s More or Less, Ruth Alexander looks at the numbers involved with the two world cups that are going on at the moment.

Are more men than women watching the Women’s World Cup and how accurate is the Cricket World Cup rule of thumb that suggests if you double the score after 30 overs you get a good estimate of the final innings total?

Producer: Richard Vadon

Image: Cricket World Cup Trophy 2019

We questioned the death count of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in last week’s More or Less podcast. In the end, Professor Jim Smith of Portsmouth University came up with an estimate of 15,000 deaths.

But we wondered how deadly nuclear power is overall when compared to other energy sources? Dr Hannah Ritchie of the University of Oxford joins Charlotte McDonald to explore.

Image:Chernobyl nuclear plant, October 1st 1986

The recent TV miniseries ‘Chernobyl’ has stirred up debate online about the accuracy of its portrayal of the explosion at a nuclear power plant in the former Soviet state of Ukraine. We fact-check the programme and try and explain why it so hard to say how many people will die because of the Chernobyl disaster.

Image: Chernobyl nuclear power plant a few weeks after the disaster.

How one woman used statistics to help cope with cancer.

The hidden influences that a make a big difference to the way the world works.

Are married women flipping miserable?

Professor Paul Dolan told an audience at the Hay Festival that when married women are asked if they are happy – if their husbands were out of the room – they admitted to being miserable. Unfortunately, this was due to a misunderstanding of the American Time Use Survey which had a category called ‘Spouse Absent’. It turns out this does not mean that a husband has left the room while a wife is being surveyed, it means that the husband is living away from home at the moment – perhaps serving abroad with the military. So what can we say about the happiness of people who are married, single, with or without children?

Arguing over university access in Scotland

Jo Swinson, the Liberal Democrat MP, was accused of using inaccurate statistics in a recent edition of BBC Question Time. She compared the numbers of people going to university in an area in Glasgow with an area in her own constituency, to raise a point about inequalities in Scottish education. Many people were cross about this especially those in the SNP, such as First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon and Deputy First Minister John Swinney. Education researcher Lucy Hunter Blackburn joins us to look at what she described as the strangest political argument she's seen over the years.

Do One in Two people get cancer?

Channel 4’s The Great British Bake Off recently ran a celebrity series raising money for charity. It ran with the statistics that one in two people will get cancer in their lifetime. Many listeners were surprised by this high number. We find out why this is.

The Hidden Half

Broadcaster Michael Blastland has written a book called ‘The Hidden Half’ about the things we fail to see when measuring things. Tim Harford sits down with him to talk about counting sheep and economic productivity.

Does Mount Etna produce more carbon emissions than humans? We check the numbers.

This week More or Less goes to meet an army of loyal listeners – and a rebellious clique of disloyal ones – at the Hay Festival.

Tim Harford and Ruth Alexander ask which country is the richest. Plus, we pose a multiple choice question about multiple choice questions.

And we’re joined by Professor David Spiegelhalter, who uses statistics to understand the behaviour of one of the world's most dangerous serial killers.

How collecting data about the dead led the famous nurse to promote better sanitation.

The stats behind making a successful song, plus misunderstanding Victorian court records.