Stats + Stories

The news landscape is continuously in flux as new media technologies are developed and audience needs shift. This mix of new tech and new needs, has made it important that audiences be able to understand quantitive information. A research project between Knology and PBS NewsHour is studying just how people consume news and numbers. That project is the focus of this episode of Stats & Stories with guests Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein and Laura Santhanam. Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein is a linguistic anthropologist who leads the media research at Knology, as well as Associate Editor of Public Anthropologies at American Anthropologist. They lead Knology's participatory collaborations with news organizations, including PBS NewsHour. Their research interests center on the relationship between scientific authority and questions of epistemic and probabilistic certainty. Their doctoral research focused on media circulation and socialization into the global community of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Laura Santhanam is the Health Reporter and Coordinating Producer for Polling for the PBS NewsHour, where she has also worked as the Data Producer. Santhanam uses narrative and numbers to tell stories. Her work at the NewsHour merged her career as a newspaper reporter at the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the Arizona Republic with her work as a media analyst at Pew Research Center. She previously worked as a senior climate researcher at Media Matters for America, where she wrote blogs that examined climate change and managed data-driven projects on the media’s coverage of issues related to energy and the environment.

A recent blog post in The Hill stated, “reliable research on data and crime is more valuable than ever.” With more and more headlines about spiking crime rates, the question has to be asked. Do data back that up? Who better to answer that question than our guests who coordinate agencies to give us an accurate assessment of these questions, Nancy La Vigne Alexis Piquero. Nancy La Vigne is the Director of the National Institute of Justice. She’s a nationally recognized criminal justice policy expert and former nonprofit executive whose expertise ranges from policing and corrections reform to reentry, criminal justice technologies and evidence-based criminal justice practices. Alexis Piquero is the Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. He leads the Bureau’s activities on a range of data collection on matters related to crime and the justice system. Piquero is a nationally and internationally recognized criminologist with more than 25 years of experience.

Death happens in medical settings for all kinds of reasons. However, when a death is unexpected, it can leave loved ones grieving and investigators wondering whether it was a case of medical misconduct, or medical murder. When investigators decide to bring a case to trial, they often rely on statistics to make their argument. The Royal Statistical Society released a report this year about such cases, which is the focus of this episode of stats and stories with guest William C. Thompson. William C. Thompson is Professor Emeritus of Criminology, Law, and Society; Psychology and Social Behavior at the UCI School of Social Ecology interested in human factors associated with forensic science evidence, including contextual and cognitive bias in forensic analysis and the communication of scientific findings to lawyers and juries. He has written about the strengths and limitations of various types of forensic science evidence, particularly DNA evidence, and about the ability of lay juries to evaluate evidence.

With Brexit and the United Kingdom’s severing of many formal connections to the European Union have come economic shocks. Trade between the two has become more complicated. Travel has become more difficult. The labor market could also take a beating because of Brexit and that’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Kristina Sargent. Sargent is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Middlebury College. Her research is focused on macroeconomic modeling, usually in search & matching and international migration. Her current work focuses on the relationships between migration and labor markets, women's labor force participation, the gig economy, and the impacts of trade and automation on labor markets.

There’s an idea in soccer that getting a red card and being down a player can actually make a team stronger. That going from 11 to 10 players forces a team to fight harder to protect their end and to hustle more quickly to score goals. But does that idea actually hold up on the pitch? Does the team actually become harder to beat? That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Mat Dowsett. Dowsett is a Senior Expert in Lean Six Sigma with Roboyo, a global company specializing in automation and process improvement. In his free time, he is fond of the statistics side of process improvement and as a sports lover enjoys using statistics to answer tricky problems or to explore well-known myths. He recently authored an article in Significance about whether red cards can actually make soccer teams tougher.

Researchers have spent decades trying to understand why some messages stick with audiences while others are ignored. They’ve experimented with humor and anger, trying to figure out what emotions fuel engagement. Narrative connection is increasingly seen as a conduit to persuasion and that’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest John Tchernev. Tchernev is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication at Miami University. Before academia, Tchernev worked in Los Angeles on shows like Reba, Class of 3000, and Futurama. His research examines the persuasive power of narratives and satire, audience psychology, and media multitasking.

Researchers around the world are tracking misinformation and disinformation as they move through media ecosystems. The explosion of disinformation in particular is not an accident. In fact, one researcher argues that it has been weaponized by some on the right to erode democracy. That claim is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Dr. Francesca Tripodi. Dr. Francesca Tripodi is a sociologist and media scholar whose research examines the relationship between social media, political partisanship, and democratic participation, revealing how Google and Wikipedia are manipulated for political gains. She is an assistant professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), a senior faculty researcher with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute. In 2019, Dr. Tripodi testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on her research, explaining how search processes are gamed to maximize exposure and drive ideologically based queries. Her research has been covered by The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Columbia Journalism Review, Wired, The Guardian, and The Neiman Journalism Lab.

The International Prize in Statistics is one of the most prestigious prizes in the field. Awarded every two years at the ISI World Statistics Congress, it’s designed to recognize a single statistician or a team of statisticians for a significant body of work. This year’s winner is C.R. Rao, professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Research Professor at the University at Buffalo. Rao’s created and been honored for a number of contributions to the statistical world in his over 75-year career. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, with our guests Sreenivas Rao Jammalamadaka and Krishna Kumar. Jammalamadaka is a distinguished professor in U.C. Santa Barbara’s Department of Statistics and Applied Probability. Kumar is a management consultant in business analytics and consulting economist. The two wrote letters supporting C.R. Rao’s nomination for the International Prize in Statistics.

Three billion, that’s how many birds the United States and Canada have lost since 1970. That decline shows up among threatened species as well as among birds we might find in our backyards like sparrows or woodpeckers. One way scientists track the size and health of bird populations is through bird banding and that’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Dave Russel Our guest today is Dave Russell.  Russell is an Associate Teaching Professor in Miami University’s Department of Biology and co-founder of the Avian Research and Education Institute. He’s also a master bird bander, which means he can work with federally protected birds and train others to become bird banders.

As we prepare to mark Earth Day 2023, many of us are also coming to terms with the latest climate report from the IPCC which said the world is on the brink of catastrophic warming. News like that can make it hard for individuals to know what they can do to have an impact on the environment. One movement suggests we can all help with conservation efforts by planting local that’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Doug Tallamy. Doug Tallamy is the T. A. Baker Professor of Agriculture in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, where he has authored 111 research publications and has taught insect related courses for 41 years. Chief among his research goals is to better understand the many ways insects interact with plants and how such interactions determine the diversity of animal communities. His books include Bringing Nature Home, The Living Landscape, co-authored with Rick Darke, Nature's Best Hope, a New York Times Best Seller, The Nature of Oaks, winner of the American Horticultural Society’s 2022 book award. In 2021 he cofounded Homegrown National Park with Michelle Alfandari. His awards include recognition from The Garden Writer’s Association, Audubon, The National Wildlife Federation, Allegheny College, Ecoforesters, The Garden Club of America and The American Horticultural Association.