Charlotte MacDonald
speaker
1,889 appearances
62 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard Apr 2025
Charlotte MacDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Even if you use the figures the French Embassy gave us, London's still only the 23rd biggest French city, which doesn't make for a sexy headline.
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It's true that the unemployment rate is lower here in the UK than in France, but are taxes really lower?
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But there's one final thing here.
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People are leaving France, and in greater numbers than ever before.
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In a recent article in the New York Times, it was argued that this number had risen 60% since 2000, another sign of France's decline.
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So London isn't France's sixth city, and it possibly isn't even in the top 60.
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And perhaps rumours of France's decline are just a little bit exaggerated.
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This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service.
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I'm Charlotte McDonald.
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This week, can statistics help find the missing Malaysia Airlines plane?
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In the spring of 1943, the Second World War was raging, and German U-boats were sinking ships in the Atlantic.
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Desperate to find the Nazi submarines before they could strike, the American and British developed a model to find them, using what is called Bayesian statistics, named after an 18th century British Presbyterian minister called Thomas Bayes.
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This type of thinking allows you to assess various scenarios at once, even contradictory ones.
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The probability of each being true is brought together to give you the most likely solution.
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And if you find new information, you can revise your model easily.
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Mathematicians working for the American and British navies thought about the different scenarios of where the U-boats could be.
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They then devised a method of assigning a probability to each one to work out the most probable location of the submarines, adapting their model as they went along.
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Today, those methods are still being used to find everything from missing people to missing planes.
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So could techniques from the Second World War be used to help find the missing Malaysia Airlines plane?
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Showing 661–680 of 1,889 · page 34 of 95
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