Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Statistician and risk communication expert, knighted for services to statistics, known for explaining COVID-19 data and promoting evidence understanding.
On the island
Eight records
is Leonard Cohen. I've been listening to him since I was fifteen, so for more than fifty years. And I finally got to see him on one of his final tours. And he was as good as ever. I love his clever lyrics and I love the wry humour that he developed, especially as he got older.
Dragostea Din TeiFavourite
If you ask my friends and their family, they'll tell you that I do quite like to have a drink and dance around to loud, raucous rock music. And I've got a particular fondness for sort of Euro trash. And this is a prime example by a Moldavian group. And I call it Numa Numa because I can't pronounce its real name. You know, back in 2007, we made a Christmas video at home. My daughter worked out a dance routine and I filmed everybody and put it together and it's on YouTube and it's really funny. And recently, my other daughter's 39th birthday, we all did the dance routine again, like something out of Bollywood. I just love dancing to this one.
As a kid I was obsessed with with numbers and cars and things like that. But then became a teenager I became obsessed with pop music. And this is one of my first singles I bought from Fleetwood Mac. It was six and six at the time. And that was about two hours work on the petrol pumps, which is where I was earning some money at the time. So you had to think a lot before you bought a single track in those days.
This is a song by a Portuguese group, Madrids, which is sort of post-Fardo or something, and they're singing in Portuguese. I've no idea what they're singing about, and I don't want to know. It's just that the woman's got the most beautiful voice I think I've heard. And it reflects the fact that I think a number of the songs I'm choosing today are not in English, and I don't know what they're talking about. But I do love the emotion expressed in the music.
If I Should Fall from Grace with God
I developed a huge liking in my 30s to what you might call punk folk or heavy folk bands like the Levellers or the Pogues. And in fact, you know, when I met my current partner Kate, our first date was to go to a Pogues gig at Wembley Arena. And she liked it. So passed the test and we're still together. And so this is the Pogues.
Beim Schlafengehen (from Four Last Songs)
Oh god, this is tough. This is a song from Richard Strauss's four last songs, Jesse Norman. After Danny died, I listened to this again and again and again and again. And I've hardly been able to listen to it since.
This is yet another female voice singing sadly in a foreign language. This is Ebau Madich from Bach's St. Matthew Passion. I'm a latecomer to that piece of music, but I've been completely overwhelmed by it. And there's a cliché that mathematicians like Bach, and I just fulfil that cliché.
When Father Papered the Parlour
When the kids were young, we did long car journeys down to the West Country and other places. And we used to play on cassette tapes in those days, you know, what you might call novelty songs. And we had a huge, huge supply of these. And I've just chosen one, a particular favourite, that we all used to sing along to as the car drove along when father papered the parlour.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:02You've referred to statisticians as evidence policemen. Tell me more about that and your approach to the job.
I think it's a statistician's job to work out what the data can tell us about a particular about how the world works. And that means weighing it up, looking at its quality and making a judgment about it. So perhaps evidence judiciary would be a better phrase.
Presenter asks
3:28You've said that numbers are often treated as cold hard facts, but we should acknowledge how uncertain they can be. Why is that important?
I don't think that numbers are just cold facts about the world. We have to take into account that they can be used to influence our emotions. They can be used to manipulate us… They do not speak for themselves. We imbue them with meaning.
Presenter asks
6:48What surprised you most from your pandemic data analysis?
I think the one I might choose is that the pandemic has been a net life-saver for younger people… That's 300 fewer families mourning the death of a young person because of the pandemic. Now, that's because young people were essentially locked up… And none of those families know who they are.
The keepsakes
The book
Bear Grylls
I would like to take The Survival Guide by Bear Grylls. I mean, I've never watched any of Bear Grylls programmes, I'm not particularly interested, but if I'm going to be on this island, I want to try to make the best of it. And I said I'm pretty second rate at practical things, but I do like to have a go. I love being in my shed messing around, but I like to follow instructions.
The luxury
Unlimited supply of killer Sudoku extremes (on paper with pencil)
I think I'd need to have an unlimited supply of killer Sudokus extremes. But I need them on paper with a pencil because then, haha, am I allowed to do this? I can use the back to write and to draw and to keep some sort of record of what's going on.
Presenter asks
7:43You said you were slow to admit the seriousness of the virus because you're optimistic. How easy is it to factor your own biases into your work?
I think it's very important that we have to acknowledge that we can never take an objective view about evidence. We always bring our personalities into it. And mine is, unfortunately, very optimistic… I was terribly over-optimistic at the start of this pandemic and didn't take it seriously enough.
Presenter asks
19:09Your son Danny was diagnosed with retinoblastoma. How did you realise something was wrong?
Very easily, when you used to take a photograph with a flash camera, people's eyes used to turn up red, and one of his eyes was red, and the other was white. I tell anybody, if they ever see that, get your child immediately seen because that's one characteristic of cancer of the eye… we knew he wasn't going to survive. And so we stopped treatment. So we could take him home. We could be at home with him and he could die in our arms at home.
Presenter asks
24:10Are there two different versions of you, before and after Danny's death?
Yeah, yeah. In a way, I became a lot bolder… once you genuinely feel that, although it's impossible, you never feel the same again. I'm not scared of dying. I'm not scared of failing. I don't care anymore. Nothing can be as bad… I started climbing mountains as well.
“I think it's a statistician's job to work out what the data can tell us about a particular about how the world works. And that means weighing it up, looking at its quality and making a judgment about it. So perhaps evidence judiciary would be a better phrase.”
“My parents were curious. They were very energetic and very enterprising… He became an escapologist. This required him to be handcuffed and then sewn into a sack and then nailed down into a coffin. And that had petrol thrown all over it, and then the whole lot set on fire. And he burst out. In the end, his mum got him to stop doing it.”
“And when he died, you know, we dressed him up in his Virgil Tracy Thunderbird suit. And my older daughter, Kate, who's 14 at the time, then sat with him all the next day while a hundred people came to see him… And then the funeral, again, we did it ourselves. I was influenced by the Natural Death Handbook. I built his coffin with my men's group. And then another team decorated the outside… we just walked down the street with this enormous procession with his uncle playing Danny Boy on the violin.”
“I went to the audition, everyone was hugely younger than me, but I went down in full Cambridge academic dress suit. Black shoes, suit, mortarboard, OBE, the whole lot. And I said, I'm Professor Risk. I demand to tackle the big red balls. This is a professional obligation.”