Death or cake?
The Herald tells us
Most women are more scared of public speaking than they are of death, it has been revealed.
Researchers who polled 2,000 women found many are far more at ease with meeting their maker than they are of standing in a room talking to an audience hanging on their every word
On the other hand experience in teaching suggests that a fairly large fraction of women would, given the choice, prefer public speaking to failing a university course.
Since this is a survey commissioned by a London tourist attraction, and they aren’t providing any information about the survey methods, it’s hard to tell why the results are the way they are. All we can really tell is that it’s the sort of research where asking if the results are true is missing the point.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Tangentially relevant, but too amazing to miss: imagine you were on stage about to play a piano concerto and the orchestra started a different one
10 years ago