Dr Hannah Fry

speaker

62 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2013 last heard Dec 2013

Dr Hannah Fry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · Numbers of the year · 27 Dec 2013 podcast

No, I don't think so.

I mean, these are very, very small numbers of answers.

I mean, they're sort of amusing outliers, effectively.

And I don't think it takes away from the fact that the census still provides us with just the most comprehensive overview of the social make-up of Britain as it stands.

More or Less · Egypt: Biggest protest in history? · 13 Jul 2013 podcast

I think you have to take every crowd estimation number with a huge heap of salt.

It's very rare that you have the report of a crowd size where there isn't some incentive to exaggerate one way or the other.

So if you take the London Stop the War protest in February 2007, the police claimed that there were 10,000 protesters.

Meanwhile, the organisers, their estimate was 60,000, so six times the amount.

Now, if you have a picture of a crowd, you can slice it into sections, count how many people appear in each square, and then just multiply by the number of squares.

A very, very simple and old technique to count the number of people in a crowd.

But if a crowd is moving... Of course, it makes it a huge problem.

So if a crowd's moving, there are a couple of different techniques.

So you can, for instance, be there at the site, be on kind of a main route into or out of a march, and then count the number of people that pass you.

But obviously you're going to miss people who join the march later, who leave the march after you, and so on.

So in any way, these ideas are going to be flawed.

Even with the pictures, even if you have a sort of perfect picture of the entire crowd...

There are people going to be obscured by buildings.

And even then, just counting such a large number of people is very, very difficult to do it without making errors.

Well, the problem with images is that if you take the Obama inauguration ceremony as an example, using exactly the same image, two different people analysed the image.

And this was a static crowd, so there's none of the problems of people moving in or out.

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