Charlotte McDonald
speaker
483 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2012
last heard 11 Jun
Charlotte McDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There have also been calls to make Hollywood films more diverse in general.
More ethnic minorities, people with disabilities or from the LGBTQI community.
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service.
I'm Charlotte MacDonald and today we're going on a journey to discover how statistics can be used to investigate a mystery.
In 2014, Lawrence Mower, a journalist with the Palm Beach Post in Florida, became suspicious about his state lottery.
A lottery is a competition where if you buy a ticket, you have the chance of winning a big cash prize, but the odds are normally stacked against you and it's very hard to win.
Lawrence got hold of a list of Florida's lottery winners.
That included people who were winning prizes of more than 600 US dollars on scratch cards, as well as games where you have to match numbers to a lottery draw.
People weren't just winning a few times.
I mean, the same individuals kept winning prizes again and again and again and again.
One person claimed 252 winning tickets.
I mean, what are the chances of people winning the lottery on such a regular basis?
Lawrence managed to track down some of these winners and ask them, how had they won so often?
But being suspicious wasn't enough.
Lawrence enlisted the help of statisticians to look at the probabilities of winning multiple times.
It turned out that his hunch was right.
Investigators found that the man who claimed the most lottery wins, 252, was in fact doing it on behalf of other people who didn't want their details known to the authorities.
He was being paid a fee to claim it.
But in a lot of people's cases, we don't know if it was anything more than luck.
Showing 381–400 of 483 · page 20 of 25
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