The lecture that Mike Granaas spoke about was by Arnold Barnett at MIT. It
is a great lecture, and is still available in audio. One of my favorite
lines is a comment to the effect that "There are only two things that I
object to in this ratio--the numerator and the denominator." At 03:20 PM
1/25/01 -0600, Mike Granaas wrote:
>
>One of the Chance lectures (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance) from about 2
>years ago spoke about this. The example I remember had to do with the
>safety of airtravel. Specifically the speaker translated the probability
>of dying in an airplane accident into "one flight per day for xxx years"
>(I think the xxx was in the low thousands).
>
>A few years back there was a tv news special "are we scaring ourselves to
>death", or something like that. The interesting part is the post-show
>discussion where they translated various risk factors into "days of life
>expectency lost." They took some of the issues of the day (pesticides on
>apple trees) and compared them to some everyday activities (driving) and
>some known health hazzards (smoking, poverty).
>
>This is the flavor that I would be considering.
>
>Michael
>
>On Thu, 25 Jan 2001, Arthur J Kendall wrote:
>
>> We are currently looking at how quantitative risk assessment is used.
>Doses can be in micrograms, morbidity can be in rates per hundred thousand
>exposed, mortality in 10 million exposed, and so forth. In this context, we
>are looking for citations, suggestions, URL's, etc. that address the issue
>of presenting to a LAY audience how to grasp the meaning of large and small
>numbers, e.g., 3E9, 1.4E-9, billions, millions, billionths, and millionths.
>The numerate community can be asked to recall how to deal with these
>numbers, but we will be addressing a lay audience and want to give them some
>help.
>>
>>
>>
>
>*******************************************************************
>Michael M. Granaas
>Associate Professor [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Department of Psychology
>University of South Dakota Phone: (605) 677-5295
>Vermillion, SD 57069 FAX: (605) 677-6604
>*******************************************************************
>All views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily
>reflect those of the University of South Dakota, or the South
>Dakota Board of Regents.
>
>
>
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