Stats + Stories

According to the U.S. State Department, three-fifths of global GDP, three-quarters of world trade, and 90 percent of official development assistance can be accounted for in 38 countries. Those countries are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development – or OECD. Founded in 1961 and headquartered in Paris, the OECD’s goals include stimulating global economic growth by providing a forum for intergovernmental collaboration. It’s also the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Steve MacFeely. Steve MacFeely is, chief statistician at the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development and adjunct professor at University College Cork. MacFeely joined OECD in August of last year as chief statistician and director of statistics and the data directorate. Before joining the organization, MacFeely served as Director of Data and Analytics at the World Health Organization and as Director of Statistics and Information at U-N Trade and Development. He has also served as the Deputy Director-General at the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in Ireland.

When people think of public goods, they most likely think of things like parks or schools. But official statistics are also a kind of public good. They help us understand things like housing prices, the costs of goods and the spread of disease. However, this data infrastructure is under threat around the world. The work of official statisticians and the obstacles they face, is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Erika Groshen. Groshen is a senior economics advisor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and research fellow at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. From 2013 to 2017 she served as the 14th commissioner of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the principal federal agency responsible for measuring labor market activity, working conditions and inflation. She's an expert on official statistics, authoring an article in 2021 pondering their future.

Lisa LaVange is the 2018 President of the American Statistical Association and she is PhD, is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Biostatistics { add link to dept } in the Gillings School of Global Public Health { add link to Gillings SPH } at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also director of the department’s Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center (CSCC), overseeing faculty, staff, and students involved in large-scale clinical trials and epidemiological studies coordinated by the center. Ronald L. (Ron) Wasserstein is the executive director of the American Statistical Association (ASA). Wasserstein assumed the ASA’s top staff leadership post in August 2007. Prior to joining the ASA, Wasserstein was a mathematics and statistics department faculty member and administrator at Washburn University in Topeka, Kan., from 1984–2007. During his last seven years at the school, he served as the university’s vice president for academic affairs.

Chart Spark | Stats + Stories Episode 359 by The Stats + Stories Team

The use of force by police has been in the news a lot lately, in connection to everything from protests on college campuses to the death of individuals during arrests. There’s no singular, shared definition of what use of force is according to the National Institute of Justice. A local police department will set a standard, but that threshold for when an office should use force varies from place to place. Having no standard set of rules or definitions makes it difficult for researchers to study the issue. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Claire Kelling. Claire Kelling is an assistant professor of statistics at Carleton College. She’s an expert on data and statistics in relation to police use of force and says her work sits "at the intersection of criminology and spatial statistics". Kelling organized the 2023 Ingram Olkin Forum on Statistical Challenges in the Analysis of Police Use of Force. Five articles from that forum appeared in a special themed section of December’s issue of Chance including several authored or co-authored by Kelling.

The COVID pandemic has complicated everything from school to work to grocery shopping. The need to physically distance from people not in our homes has made it difficult to maintain friendships or causal relationships while being stuck at home with a significant other for months on end can make even the biggest house seem tiny. COVID’s impact on relationships and sex is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Debby Herbenick. Herbenick is a sex educator, sex advice columnist, author, research scientist, children's book author, blogger, television personality, professor, and human sexuality expert in the media. Dr. Herbenick is a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health and was lead investigator of the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior.

Sports analytics is a booming industry with new technologies allowing for the parsing of ever more sophisticated statistics. Analysts can now examine the height and the force of a gymnast tumbling pass, the probability of going for it on a 4th down in football, actually working out, and the arc of the best swing for a baseball player. Analytics are also used in the conditioning of athletes, particularly for all the baseball players preparing for the start of the MLB's spring training. Analytics is the focus of this episode of stats and stories with guest Alexandre Andorra. Alexandre Andorra is a Senior Applied Scientist for the Miami Marlins as well a Bayesian modeler at the PyMC Labs consultancy firm that he cofounded as well as the host the podcast dedicated to Bayesian inference “Learning Bayesian Statistics” His areas of expertise include Hierarchical Models, Gaussian Processes and Causal Inference.

Are you ready to register for a 100-mile race that includes 60,000 feet of elevation gain? How about a 3000-mile race cycling across the United States in the race across America? These endurance competitions and events are amazing athletic achievements, and women are competing in these events in ever-increasing numbers. These amazing feats and the factors that have hindered and enhanced the participation of women in these endurance sports is the focus of today's stats and stories with guest Claire McKay Bowen. Claire McKay Bowen (she/her) is a senior fellow and leads the Data Governance and Privacy Practice Area at the Urban Institute. Her research focuses on developing technical and policy solutions to safely expand access to confidential data for advancing evidence-based policy-making. She also has an interest in improving science communication and ensuring everyone is responsibly represented in data. In 2024, she became an American Statistical Association Fellow “for her significant contributions in the field of statistical data privacy, leadership activities in support of the profession, and commitment to mentoring the next generation of statisticians and data scientists.” Further, she is a member of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee and several other data governance and data privacy committees as well as an adjunct professor at Stonehill College.

Dr. Rose Marie Ward is a professor in Miami University's Department of Kinesiology & Health. She studies college student health, with a focus on both addictive/harmful behaviors (alcohol use, disordered eating, unsafe and unwanted sexual behavior) and prosocial activities (women’s leadership, life satisfaction, scholastic achievement, exercise, and athleticism).

About 5.4 million Americans live with some form of paralysis. Sometimes that's just a temporary loss of mobility, but for the Americans whose paralysis is caused by a spinal cord injury, that loss of movement is often permanent, as there's no biological way to heal an injured spinal cord. There are efforts to see if technology might be able to help these individuals regain use of their limbs, and that's the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Dr. David Friedenberg. Dr. Friedenberg is a Principal Data Science and Neurotechnology and the Team Lead for Machine Learning/AI in the Health Analytics group at Battelle. He's the Principal Investigator on several neurotechnology efforts developing new AI-powered technologies to help improve the lives of people living with motor impairments due to neurological injuries like spinal cord injuries and stroke. An experienced data scientist with consulting experience across several disciplines he is passionate about developing AI/ML-driven solutions to challenging problems for the betterment of humanity.