WEBVTT

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Back in 2003,

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the UK government carried out a survey.

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And it was a survey that measured
levels of numeracy

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in the population.

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And they were shocked to find out

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that for every 100 working age
adults in the country,

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47 of them lacked Level 1 numeracy skills.

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Now, Level 1 numeracy skills --
that's low-end GCSE score.

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It's the ability to deal with fractions,
percentages and decimals.

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So this figure prompted
a lot of hand-wringing in Whitehall.

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Policies were changed,

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investments were made,

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and then they ran
the survey again in 2011.

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So can you guess
what happened to this number?

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It went up to 49.

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(Laughter)

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And in fact, when I reported
this figure in the FT,

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one of our readers joked and said,

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"This figure is only shocking
to 51 percent of the population."

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(Laughter)

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But I preferred, actually,
the reaction of a schoolchild

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when I presented
at a school this information,

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who raised their hand and said,

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"How do we know that the person
who made that number

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isn't one of the 49 percent either?"

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(Laughter)

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So clearly, there's a numeracy issue,

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because these are
important skills for life,

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and a lot of the changes
that we want to introduce in this century

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involve us becoming
more comfortable with numbers.

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Now, it's not just an English problem.

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OECD this year released some figures
looking at numeracy in young people,

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and leading the way, the USA --

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nearly 40 percent of young people
in the US have low numeracy.

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Now, England is there too,

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but there are seven OECD countries
with figures above 20 percent.

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That is a problem,
because it doesn't have to be that way.

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If you look at the far end of this graph,

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you can see the Netherlands and Korea
are in single figures.

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So there's definitely a numeracy
problem that we want to address.

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Now, as useful as studies like these are,

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I think we risk herding people
inadvertently into one of two categories;

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that there are two kinds of people:

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those people that are comfortable
with numbers, that can do numbers,

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and the people who can't.

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And what I'm trying
to talk about here today

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is to say that I believe
that is a false dichotomy.

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It's not an immutable pairing.

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I think you don't have to have
tremendously high levels of numeracy

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to be inspired by numbers,

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and that should be the starting point
to the journey ahead.

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And one of the ways in which
we can begin that journey, for me,

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is looking at statistics.

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Now, I am the first to acknowledge
that statistics has got somewhat

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of an image problem.

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(Laughter)

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It's the part of mathematics

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that even mathematicians
don't particularly like,

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because whereas the rest of maths
is all about precision and certainty,

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statistics is almost the reverse of that.

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But actually, I was a late convert
to the world of statistics myself.

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If you'd asked my undergraduate professors

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what two subjects would I be least likely
to excel in after university,

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they'd have told you statistics
and computer programming,

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and yet here I am, about to show you
some statistical graphics

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that I programmed.

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So what inspired that change in me?

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What made me think that statistics
was actually an interesting thing?

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It's really because
statistics are about us.

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If you look at the etymology
of the word statistics,

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it's the science of dealing with data

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about the state or the community
that we live in.

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So statistics are about us as a group,

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not us as individuals.

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And I think as social animals,

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we share this fascination about how
we as individuals relate to our groups,

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to our peers.

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And statistics in this way
are at their most powerful

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when they surprise us.

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And there's been some really wonderful
surveys carried out recently

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by Ipsos MORI in the last few years.

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They did a survey of over
1,000 adults in the UK,

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and said, for every 100 people
in England and Wales,

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how many of them are Muslim?

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Now the average answer from this survey,

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which was supposed to be representative
of the total population, was 24.

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That's what people thought.

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British people think 24 out of every 100
people in the country are Muslim.

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Now, official figures reveal
that figure to be about five.

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So there's this big variation
between what we think, our perception,

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and the reality as given by statistics.

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And I think that's interesting.

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What could possibly be causing
that misperception?

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And I was so thrilled with this study,

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I started to take questions out
in presentations. I was referring to it.

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Now, I did a presentation

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at St. Paul's School for Girls
in Hammersmith,

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and I had an audience rather like this,

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except it was comprised entirely
of sixth-form girls.

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And I said, "Girls,

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how many teenage girls do you think
the British public think

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get pregnant every year?"

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And the girls were apoplectic when I said

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the British public think that 15
out of every 100 teenage girls

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get pregnant in the year.

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And they had every right to be angry,

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because in fact, I'd have to have
closer to 200 dots

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before I could color one in,

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in terms of what
the official figures tell us.

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And rather like numeracy,
this is not just an English problem.

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Ipsos MORI expanded the survey
in recent years to go across the world.

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And so, they asked Saudi Arabians,

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for every 100 adults in your country,

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how many of them are overweight or obese?

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And the average answer from the Saudis
was just over a quarter.

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That's what they thought.

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Just over a quarter of adults
are overweight or obese.

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The official figures show, actually,
it's nearer to three-quarters.

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(Laughter)

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So again, a big variation.

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And I love this one: they asked in Japan,
they asked the Japanese,

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for every 100 Japanese people,

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how many of them live in rural areas?

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The average was about a 50-50 split,
just over halfway.

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They thought 56 out of every 100
Japanese people lived in rural areas.

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The official figure is seven.

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So extraordinary variations,
and surprising to some,

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but not surprising to people
who have read the work

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of Daniel Kahneman, for example,
the Nobel-winning economist.

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He and his colleague, Amos Tversky,
spent years researching this disjoint

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between what people perceive
and the reality,

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the fact that people are actually
pretty poor intuitive statisticians.

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And there are many reasons for this.

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Individual experiences, certainly,
can influence our perceptions,

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but so, too, can things like the media
reporting things by exception,

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rather than what's normal.

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Kahneman had a nice way
of referring to that.

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He said, "We can be blind
to the obvious" --

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so we've got the numbers wrong --

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"but we can be blind
to our blindness about it."

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And that has enormous
repercussions for decision making.

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So at the statistics office
while this was all going on,

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I thought this was really interesting.

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I said, this is clearly a global problem,

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but maybe geography is the issue here.

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These were questions that were all about,
how well do you know your country?

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So in this case, it's how well
do you know 64 million people?

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Not very well, it turns out.
I can't do that.

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So I had an idea,

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which was to think about
this same sort of approach

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but to think about it
in a very local sense.

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Is this a local?

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If we reframe the questions and say,

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how well do you know your local area,

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would your answers be any more accurate?

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So I devised a quiz:

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How well do you know your area?

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It's a simple Web app.

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You put in a post code

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and then it will ask you questions
based on census data

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for your local area.

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And I was very conscious
in designing this.

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I wanted to make it open
to the widest possible range of people,

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not just the 49 percent
who can get the numbers.

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I wanted everyone to engage with it.

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So for the design of the quiz,

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I was inspired by the isotypes

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of Otto Neurath from the 1920s and '30s.

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Now, these are methods
for representing numbers

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using repeating icons.

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And the numbers are there,
but they sit in the background.

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So it's a great way
of representing quantity

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without resorting to using terms
like "percentage,"

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"fractions" and "ratios."

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So here's the quiz.

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The layout of the quiz is,

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you have your repeating icons
on the left-hand side there,

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and a map showing you the area
we're asking you questions about

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on the right-hand side.

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There are seven questions.

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Each question, there's a possible answer
between zero and a hundred,

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and at the end of the quiz,

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you get an overall score
between zero and a hundred.

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And so because this is TEDxExeter,

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I thought we would have
a quick look at the quiz

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for the first few questions of Exeter.

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And so the first question is:

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For every 100 people,
how many are aged under 16?

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Now, I don't know Exeter very well
at all, so I had a guess at this,

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but it gives you an idea
of how this quiz works.

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You drag the slider
to highlight your icons,

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and then just click "Submit" to answer,

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and we animate away the difference
between your answer and reality.

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And it turns out, I was a pretty
terrible guess: five.

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How about the next question?

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This is asking about
what the average age is,

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so the age at which half
the population are younger

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and half the population are older.

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And I thought 35 -- that sounds
middle-aged to me.

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(Laughter)

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Actually, in Exeter,
it's incredibly young,

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and I had underestimated the impact
of the university in this area.

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The questions get harder
as you go through.

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So this one's now asking
about homeownership:

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For every 100 households, how many
are owned with a mortgage or loan?

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And I hedged my bets here,

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because I didn't want to be
more than 50 out on the answer.

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(Laughter)

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And actually, these get harder,
these questions,

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because when you're in an area,
when you're in a community,

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things like age -- there are clues
to whether a population is old or young.

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Just by looking around
the area, you can see it.

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Something like homeownership
is much more difficult to see,

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so we revert to our own heuristics,

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our own biases about how many people
we think own their own homes.

NOTE Paragraph

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Now the truth is,
when we published this quiz,

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the census data that it's based on
was already a few years old.

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We've had online applications
that allow you to put in a post code

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and get statistics back for years.

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So in some senses,

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this was all a little bit old
and not necessarily new.

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But I was interested to see
what reaction we might get

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by gamifying the data
in the way that we have,

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by using animation

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and playing on the fact
that people have their own preconceptions.

NOTE Paragraph

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It turns out, the reaction was, um ...

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was more than I could have hoped for.

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It was a long-held ambition of mine
to bring down a statistics website

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due to public demand.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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This URL contains the words
"statistics," "gov" and "UK,"

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which are three of people's least
favorite words in a URL.

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And the amazing thing about this
was that the website came down

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at quarter to 10 at night,

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because people were actually
engaging with this data

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of their own free will,

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using their own personal time.

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I was very interested to see

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that we got something like
a quarter of a million people

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playing the quiz within the space
of 48 hours of launching it.

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And it sparked an enormous discussion
online, on social media,

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which was largely dominated

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by people having fun
with their misconceptions,

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which is something that
I couldn't have hoped for any better,

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in some respects.

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I also liked the fact that people started
sending it to politicians.

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How well do you know the area
you claim to represent?

NOTE Paragraph

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(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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And then just to finish,

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going back to the two kinds of people,

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I thought it would be
really interesting to see

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how people who are good with numbers
would do on this quiz.

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The national statistician
of England and Wales, John Pullinger,

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you would expect he would be pretty good.

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He got 44 for his own area.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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Jeremy Paxman -- admittedly,
after a glass of wine -- 36.

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Even worse.

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It just shows you that the numbers
can inspire us all.

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They can surprise us all.

NOTE Paragraph

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So very often, we talk about statistics

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as being the science of uncertainty.

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My parting thought for today is:

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actually, statistics is the science of us.

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And that's why we should
be fascinated by numbers.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)