大象传媒

Railways, Safety and Privatisation
Clapham, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield, Potters Bar. The list of tragic accidents on the railways in recent years is long.

More or Less this week examined claims that privatisation made them more dangerous.

Presenter Andrew Dilnot looks at both the explanations for those disasters - plausibly linking them to the break up of British Railways - and at the statistical trends before and after privatisation. Is the story what it seems?

And we returned to the inquiry by the Royal Statistical Society into the risks of new drug trials on healthy volunteers, to try to find out if the baseline risk, calculated by working out how often similar trials go wrong, will ever be told to volunteers.

At the moment, it looks as if the risk of serious adverse reaction for certain types of trial could be anywhere between about 1 in 50 and 1 in 2000.

Number Prejudices
Plus, our continuing investigation - not quite scientific, admittedly - into number stereotypes. They are a bloke thing, as everyone knows.

Or are they? Our reporter challenged the prejudices.

And listen to More or Less from the archives on what happened when we followed the International Passenger Survey teams as they monitored migration. The item can be heard three minutes into the programme.