Living with risk and uncertainty — we're all going to die (sometime)

12:21, Tue 18 Jan 2011

This lecture, was hosted by the Department of Statistics, by David J Spiegelhalter OBE, FRS (Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, University of Cambridge). Past experience and probability theory can be used to check the odds of your football team winning or judge the risks of activities such as riding motorcycles, taking illegal drugs, going into hospital or just living. Things get more difficult when we don't fully understand what is going on, like early on in the swine-flu epidemic, or when we are dealing with huge complexity, as in climate change. Then it can be helpful to admit what we don't know.

(MP4 format, 251 MB)

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