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McDonald's Monopoly competition is back this month offering a chance to win expensive prizes, all for the price of a Big Mac. Given you could become tens of thousands of dollars richer by simply going on a Macca's run, McDonald's Monopoly games have in the past been subject to cheating and a multimillion-dollar scandal. But for those who prefer to play fair, what are your chances of actually snaring a prize?

People use imprecise words to describe the chance of events all the time - "It's likely to rain," or "There's a real possibility they'll launch before us," or "It's doubtful the nurses will strike." Not only are such probabilistic terms subjective, but they also can have widely different interpretations. One person's "pretty likely" is another's "far from certain." Our research shows just how broad these gaps in understanding can be and the types of problems that can flow from these differences in interpretation.

In this case, because pancreatic cancer is relatively rare, the impressive-sounding 50% reduction doesn't amount to very much. According to the American Cancer Society, a 60-year-old man has a 0.41% (1 in 241) chance of developing pancreatic cancer during the next ten years. (Risk varies greatly with age and is much lower at younger ages.) So cutting that risk in half might bring it down to about 0.2% (1 in 480). It's a 50% drop, sure, but the risk was already very small to begin with. In this case, it's more helpful to news and health care consumers to describe it as a 0.2 percentage point reduction. And then there are the harms of regular aspirin use; the Yale news release that the tweet links to doesn't mention any. But taking aspirin regularly isn't a harmless intervention - far from it. It's well known that taking aspirin every day can cause serious bleeding in the gastrointestinal system and, less frequently, in the brain. That's why guidelines for aspirin use in cardiovascular disease prevention don't recommend it for people at low risk of a heart attack. The potential benefits may be outweighed by the risks of a serious bleed.

As an epidemiologist, I am interested in disease - and more specifically, who in a population currently has or might get that disease. What is their age, sex, or socioeconomic status? Where do they live? What can people do to limit their chances of getting sick? Questions exploring whether something is likely to happen or not can be answered with quantitative research. By counting and measuring, we quantify (measure) a phenomenon in our world, and present the results through percentages and averages. We use statistics to help interpret the significance of the results. While this approach is very important, it can't tell us everything about a disease and peoples' experiences of it. That's where qualitative data becomes important.

An introduction to a set of deep dive articles an important issue....When we tell people that we work at the intersection of statistics and human rights, the reaction is often surprise. Everyone knows that lawyers and journalists think about human rights problems … but statisticians? Yet, documenting and proving human rights abuses frequently involves the need for quantification. In the case of war crimes and genocide, guilt or innocence can hinge on questions of whether violence was systematic and widespread or one group was targeted at a differential rate compared to others. Similar issues can arise in assessing violations of civil, social, and economic rights. Sometimes the questions can be answered through simple tabulations, but often, more-complex methods of data collection and analysis are required.

Maths quiz. If you take a Covid test that only gives a false positive one time in every 1,000, what's the chance that you've actually got Covid? Surely it's 99.9%, right? No! The correct answer is: you have no idea. You don't have enough information to make the judgment.

Today's Examine dives into the maths. We'll look at the best estimates on catching and being injured by COVID-19, the chances of being harmed by the AstraZeneca vaccine, and the other broader risks and benefits. Hopefully, at the end of this, you are armed to make a better decision.

These are uncertain times. The US presidential campaign has been divisive, there is disagreement over Brexit, jitters over China's economy and technology is disrupting traditional labour markets. What is the best way to weather all that uncertainty?