If we want cutting-edge R&D, we must rethink our attitude to failure If we want cutting-edge R&D, we must rethink our attitude A likely centre-piece of today’s Budget will be a new agency to fund high-risk, high-reward scientific research. Brainchild of the Prime Minister’s chief special adviser Dominic Cummings, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) is to be modelled after similar bodies in the US — most notably Darpa which has focused on defence related research. Darpa [...]
This country has not had enough of experts Michael Gove famously said that the “people in this country have had enough of experts”. Of course, that’s not the full story — at the time, Gove was specifically targeting experts who, he claimed, kept getting things wrong. But regardless, the “had enough of experts” quote went viral, and came to be viewed as something [...]
The government must boost data sharing if it is to keep up with industry Government as a whole can get a bad rap when different departments don’t work together properly, so we should give it credit for when it does things right. When a family member dies, the last thing you want is to have to tell all the different bits of government time and time again. Thankfully there [...]
Wanted: A new national statistician to restore the public’s faith in data May 10, 2019 The government has failed to find a new national statistician to oversee the UK’s numbers. And it’s not hard to see why – although the salary of £160k sounds attractive, data nerds can command much more in the private sector, without the additional headache of being in the public spotlight. The job of overseeing the UK’s [...]
How statisticians are trying to change the way we measure poverty September 17, 2018 We can judge the moral fibre of a society by how it treats its least well-off members. That sounds like a reasonably straightforward idea. But knowing who the poorest people are is not as easy as it sounds. The traditional measure of poverty in the UK has been to consider a household as being in [...]
How statisticians are trying to change the way we measure poverty September 17, 2018 We can judge the moral fibre of a society by how it treats its least well-off members. That sounds like a reasonably straightforward idea. But knowing who the poorest people are is not as easy as it sounds. The traditional measure of poverty in the UK has been to consider a household as being in [...]
