WS More or Less: The story of average
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 11 April 2016
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the 1600s astronomers were coming up with measurements to help sailors read their maps with a compass. But with all the observations of the skies they were making, how do they choose the best number? We tell the story of how astronomers started to find the average from a group of numbers. By the 1800s, one Belgian astronomer began to apply this to all sorts of social and national statistics – and the ‘Average Man’ was born.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Tim here, this is the shorter World Service version of more or less, first broadcast on the 8th of April 2016. |
| 0:08.0 | This program is about the invention of the very idea of average. |
| 0:12.0 | It's a great topic, but if you've heard the longer |
| 0:14.8 | version of our show, you will also have heard this item. |
| 0:18.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, |
| 0:23.2 | we're the program that looks for the truth behind the numbers in news, |
| 0:26.5 | in life, and in politics. |
| 0:28.3 | And I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:30.3 | When you're out at sea in a boat, |
| 0:32.0 | with no landmarks to judge where you are, how do you work out which direction to go? |
| 0:37.0 | More than 500 years ago, it had become standard practice for sailors in Europe to use a compass to find north as a way to read their maps. |
| 0:45.0 | One of the first things that people learned as they began to take records as they discovered that |
| 0:54.0 | true north found by looking at the pole star |
| 0:57.6 | is different from magnetic north. |
| 1:00.0 | This is Stephen Stiglare, |
| 1:02.0 | a statistician who's written many books on the history of statistics. |
| 1:06.0 | And if you are out on the seas, a little bit of a difference can make the difference between ending up on a shoal or going safely into the |
| 1:15.3 | harbour. And so this is a crucial question. Can you arm a captain of a ship with information that will allow that captain to correct for the difference |
| 1:25.4 | between magnetic and true north. |
| 1:29.1 | But navigators came to realize that the problem was trickier than that. You see, Magnetic North isn't only different |
| 1:35.1 | from true North, but the degree of difference depends on where you are, doesn't it, Charlotte? |
| 1:40.6 | It does. This led to various people trying to work out this difference at different |
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