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BBC Radio 4

Tim Harford and the More or Less team try to make sense of the statistics which surround us. From BBC Radio 4

More or Less: Behind the Stats

Tim Harford looks at some of the numbers in the news. This week:

Is it true that interest payments on the UK’s national debt are equivalent to £240 per month for everyone in the country?

Reform UK claim that Afghan migrants are 22 times more likely to be convicted of sex offences. Is that number correct?

We try to make sense of a claim that one in 10 women are being driven to leave work by their menopause symptoms.

And we investigate a claim comparing the speed of a snail and the war in Ukraine.

If you’ve seen a number you think we should look at, email the team: moreorless@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Tim Harford
Reporter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Nicholas Barrett
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Maria Ogundele
Sound mix: James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon

Are Afghan nationals more likely to be convicted of sexual offences?

Hollywood has given sharks a terrible reputation. But in reality, the finned fish should be far more scared of us, than we of them.

Millions of sharks are killed in fishing nets and lines every year.

One statistical claim seems to sum up the scale of this slaughter – that 100 million sharks are killed every year, or roughly 11,000 per hour.

But how was this figure calculated, and what exactly does it mean?

We go straight to the source and speak to the researcher who worked it out, Dr Boris Worm, a professor in marine conservation at Dalhousie University in Canada.

Presenter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Nicholas Barrett
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production coordinator: Brenda Brown
Sound mix: Annie Gardiner
Editor: Richard Vadon

Do 11,000 sharks die every hour?

Fully autonomous cars are here. In a handful of cities across the US and China, robotaxis are transporting human passengers around town, but with no human behind the wheel.

Loyal Listener Amberish wrote in to More or Less to ask about a couple of safety statistics he’d seen regarding these self-driving cars on social media. These claimed that Waymo self-driving taxis were five times safer than human drivers in the US, and that Tesla’s self-driving cars are 10 times safer. 

But, are these claims true? 

We speak to Mark MacCarthy, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution Center for Technology Innovation, to find out.

If you’ve seen some numbers you think we should look at, email the team: moreorless@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Nicholas Barrett
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown
Sound mix: Neil Churchill
Editor: Richard Vadon

Are self-driving cars safer than cars with drivers?

Are office temperatures set too low in the summer for women to be comfortable? 

This idea has featured in news headlines and comedy videos which describe the summer as a “women’s winter”.

But is there evidence behind the claims of a gender bias in air conditioning? 

To find out, we speak to Gail Brager, Director of the Center for Environmental Design Research at UC Berkeley, and Boris Kingma, a senior researcher at TNO, the Netherlands Applied Research Institute.

Presenter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Nicholas Barrett
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Rosie Strawbridge
Sound mix: James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon

Do women feel the cold more than men?

In early July, the Mediterranean Sea experienced a marine heatwave. The surface of the water reached temperatures of 30 degrees in some places. 
A social media post at the time claimed that some of these sea temperatures were so different to the normal sea temperature at this time of year, that the sea was experiencing a “1-in-216,000,000,000-year sea temperature anomaly”. 
This would suggest that the likelihood of the event was on a timescale far longer than the amount of time the entire universe has existed. 
Is the claim true? Dr Jules Kajtar, a physical oceanographer from the National Oceanography Centre, takes a look at the statistics. 
We heard about this story because a listener spotted it and emailed the team. Get in touch if you’ve seen a number you think we should look at. moreorless@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Lizzy McNeill
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Rosie Strawbridge 
Sound mix: Neil Churchill
Editor: Richard Vadon

How weird was the Med Sea heatwave?

On Friday 1st August the US Bureau of Labor Statistics put out their job report data for August. It included revisions to their estimates for the jobs created in May and June which stated there were 258,000 fewer jobs than they had previously estimated.
This news was not received well by the White House. President Trump fired the head of the bureau, Erika McEntarfer, calling the numbers ‘phony, rigged, a scam’ and spreading conspiracy theories that McEntarfer had fudged the data. 
We speak to economist Michael Strain from the American Enterprise Institute, to understand why the revisions happened and the potential consequences of throwing doubt on one of the US’s most important statistical agencies.
If you’ve seen a number in the news you think we should take a look at, email the team: moreorless@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Lizzy McNeill 
Series Producer: Tom Colls
Production Co-ordinator: Rosie Strawbridge
Sound mix: Neil Churchill
Editor: Sam Bonham

Why it matters that Trump fired data chief

In June 2022 the United States Supreme Court passed what became known as ‘the Dobbs decision’. In doing so they overturned the long standing constitutional right for women to access abortion in the US. 
 
Since then a number of states have banned abortion completely with many others having highly prohibitive rules. You’d expect the numbers of abortions to go down. They haven’t. 
 
How is it possible that more people are accessing abortions in a post Dobbs society and why is it not true that states which have total bans have zero abortions per year?
 
 
Presenter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Lizzy McNeill
Series Producer: Tom Colls
Production Co-ordinator: Rosie Strawbridge
Studio Manager: Neil Churchill
Editor: Richard Vadon, Bridget Harney.

Are abortion numbers rising in the US?

We’re living through boom-times for Artificial Intelligence, with more and more of us using AI assistants like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Grok and Copilot to do basic research and writing tasks. 

But what is the environmental impact of these technologies? 

Many listeners have got in touch with More or Less to ask us to investigate various claims about the energy and water use of AI.

One claim in particular has caught your attention - the idea that the equivalent of a small bottle of drinking water is consumed by computer processors every time you ask an AI a question, or get it to write a simple email. 

So, where does that claim come from, and is it true?

Reporter: Paul Connolly
Producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown
Sound mix: Donald McDonald
Editor: Richard Vadon

Does a single AI query use a bottle of water?

In the midst of the television coverage of Soccer Aid, a celebrity soccer match organised by Unicef, the audience was told that “one in six children around the world are currently living through war”. 

Listener Isla got in touch with More or Less to ask whether the claim was correct, so we tracked down the source to an organisation called the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

Research director Siri Aas Rustad tells us how they worked out a figure for the number of children living near to a “conflict” and the big differences between that and something most people would think of as “war”.

If you’ve seen a number you think we should look at, email the team on moreorless@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Nicholas Barrett
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown
Sound mix: Giles Aspen 
Editor: Richard Vadon

Are one in six children living through war?

Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news and in life. This week:

Is the secret to halving obesity rates really just a matter of cutting back on one fizzy drink a day?

How many new babies in the City of London have a foreign-born parent? And since fewer than one baby a week is actually born in the City of London, how much should we care?

Electricity in the UK is more expensive than almost anywhere else. Why? And is it anything to do with wind turbines?

And we help out rival Radio 4 programme Start the Week with a claim about churches.

If you’ve seen a number in the news you think we should take a look at, email the team: moreorless@bbc.co.uk

More or Less is produced in partnership with the Open University.

Presenter: Tim Harford
Reporter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Nicholas Barrett and Nathan Gower
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown
Sound Mix: James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon

Show less

Can drinking one less bottle of coke a day halve obesity?

How did an edition of More or Less from 2017 end up influencing the choice of official names for extremely large numbers? We tell the tale of how an interview between presenter Tim Harford and maths whizz Rob Eastaway did just that. Also featuring Professor Richard Brown, head of metrology at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory.

Presenter: Tim Harford
Producer: Jon Bithrey
Editor: Richard Vadon
Production Coordinator: Janet Staples
Sound Engineer: James Beard

Image: Large number, Credit: Getty Images

How we shook the world of very large numbers

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