Stats + Stories

The information age has been rife with more misinformation than any other time in human history. With the dissemination and spread of fakes news is at an all-time high, can people be trained to spot and pre-bunk misinformation and fake news. That’s what we’re here to learn about on today’s episode of Stats and Short Stories with guest Sander van der Linden. Sander van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology in Society in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab. His research interests center around the psychology of human judgment, communication, and decision-making. In particular, he is interested in the influence and persuasion process and how people gain resistance to persuasion (by misinformation) through psychological inoculation. He is also interested in the psychology of fake news, media effects, and belief systems (e.g., conspiracy theories), as well as the emergence of social norms and networks, attitudes and polarization, reasoning about evidence, and the public understanding of risk and uncertainty. In all of this work, he looks at how these factors shape human cooperation and conflict in real-world collective action problems such as climate change and sustainability, public health, and the spread of misinformation.

Social media are complicated. With some research suggesting they're important spaces for digital community building and other scholars pointing out how social media can serve to actually disconnect people from one another. A growing concern among both academics in the public is the ways in which misinformation and conspiracies move through social media networks. That is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Sander van der Linden. Sander van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology in Society in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab. His research interests center around the psychology of human judgment, communication, and decision-making. In particular, he is interested in the influence and persuasion process and how people gain resistance to persuasion (by misinformation) through psychological inoculation. He is also interested in the psychology of fake news, media effects, and belief systems (e.g., conspiracy theories), as well as the emergence of social norms and networks, attitudes and polarization, reasoning about evidence, and the public understanding of risk and uncertainty. In all of this work, he looks at how these factors shape human cooperation and conflict in real-world collective action problems such as climate change and sustainability, public health, and the spread of misinformation.

There's a lot of conversation happening about the ethical uses of data and statistics how much weight should we put on numbers at all? How thoroughly should we investigate the methodologies used to create them? And who has access to the data? A special issue of chance focuses on statistics and data science for good and that is the topic of this episode of Stats and Stories with guests Caitlin Augustin and Matt Brems. Caitlin Augustin (@augustincaitlin) is a Senior Director at Datakind and is responsible for delivering DataKind's core offerings, ensuring that high-quality, impactful data science interventions are created in partnership with social sector leaders. Prior to DataKind, Caitlin worked as a research scientist at a digital education company and as an engineering professor at NYU. A lifelong volunteer, she's engaged with Central Florida's nonprofit community and the organizer of the Orlando Lady Developers Meetup.  Matt Brems is Managing Partner + Principal Data Scientist at BetaVector, a data science consultancy. His full-time professional data work spans computer vision, finance, education, consumer-packaged goods, and politics and he earned General Assembly's 2019 "Distinguished Faculty Member of the Year" award. Matt is passionate about mentoring folks in data and tech careers and volunteers for Statistics Without Borders as well as currently serves on their Executive Committee as the Marketing & Communications Director.

The costumes are ready and the annual opportunity to go out and harass your neighbors to get candy is once again upon us. Yes, it's time for Halloween. And along with Halloween comes the worry, the concern the fear that in fact, someone will be poisoning my kid’s candy. This is something that has lived with us for decades and we have someone today that will help us investigate this mystery on this episode of Stats and Short Stories with guest Joel Best. Joel Best is a Professor Of Sociology And Criminal Justice At The University Of Delaware. His writing focuses on understanding how and why we become concerned with particular issues at particular moments in time–why we find ourselves worried about road rage one year, and identity theft a year or so later. He’s written about the ways bad statistics creep into public debates, and about dubious fears, such as the mistaken belief that poisoned Halloween candy poses a serious threat to our kids. Check out his books Damned Lies and Statistics, More Damned Lies and Statistics, Stat-Spotting.

With the ubiquity of technology in our lives have come concerns over privacy, security, and surveillance. These are particularly potent in relation to what's come to be called Big Data. Navigating the complicated terrain is a constant conversation in some sectors of the tech industry, as well as academia. And it's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with Christoph Kurz. Kurtz is a postdoc at the department of health economics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His research includes statistical methods for health economics and health policy, especially Basie and methods and causal inference. Recently, he's focused on privacy research because of the increased requirements demanded by EU legislators regarding the handling and processing of health data. Kurtz has authored a piece for Significance magazine about the concept of differential privacy.

The issue of income inequality is one Americans continually wrestle with the COVID 19 pandemic bringing to light how housing, health, and general wellbeing are impacted by the unequal distribution of wealth. Income inequality in the United States is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Joseph Gastwirth. Dr. Gastwirth is a Professor of Statistics and Economics at George Washington University. Over the course of his career he has written over 300 peer-reviewed articles, which have appeared in the Annals of Statistics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Econometrica, Review of Economics and Statistics, Statistical Science, Annals of Human Genetics, Human Heredity, Jurimetrics and Statistics and Public Policy. His research has covered a variety of topics in statistical methodology and applications. Of special note are: his early work on order and non-parametric statistics, his research on estimating measures of economic inequality, fairness and discrimination and on the role of statistical evidence in jury discriminations, equal employment and other types of legal cases. The American Statistical Association awarded him Noether Award for his contributions to nonparametric statistics in 2012 and the Karl E. Peace Award for outstanding statistical contributions for the betterment of society in 2019.

The health of the world's oceans is a growing concern but measuring ocean health is a complicated undertaking. Some people studying the issue focus on pollution, while others look at the health of corals or marine mammals. One project attempts to take a comprehensive picture of the health of oceans in order to provide information about Oceanic vital signs to stakeholders. The Ocean Health Index is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guests Lelys Bravo and Julia Stewart Lowndes. Lelys Bravo is a Statistics Professor at the Department of Statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before that she was a member of the Science Steering Committee of the Biospherical Aspects of the Hydrological Cycle project from the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP) and Lead author of the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment report. Her research interests include spatial and temporal analysis of environmental data, including the development of risk assessment methods to evaluate the impacts of natural hazards under potential climate change. Julia Stewart Lowndes is a marine ecologist, data scientist, and Senior Fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California Santa Barbara. She champions kinder, better science in less time through open data science and teamwork. As a marine data scientist, Mozilla Fellow, and Senior Fellow at NCEAS, she has 7+ years designing and leading programs to empower science teams with skillsets and mindsets for reproducible research, empowering researchers with existing open tools and communities. She has been building communities of practice in this space since 2013 with the Ocean Health Index.

The COVID pandemic put many Sports on hold during 2020, but with the industry roaring back with the 2021 Summer Olympics as well as World Cup qualifier matches sports, and sports statistics, are back. Which is the perfect timing for the unveiling of the Royal Statistical Society's 2021 Sports Statistic of the Year. Robert Mastrodomenico is a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society as well as owner and founder of his statistical consulting company Global Sports Statistics. He is also the Chair of RSS’ Statisticians for Society initiative since its inception in 2017. He is also an RSS Statistical Ambassador, which involves regular work with the media in assisting with their reporting of statistical issues.

Newsrooms all over the world are embracing data journalism – looking for unique and thoughtful ways to use data to tell stories about their communities. But is every newsroom handling data as carefully as it should be? What safeguards are in place ensure journalists are using data in ethical ways? That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Irineo Cabreros. Cabreros (@cabrerosic) is an associate statistician at the RAND Corporation. At RAND he has worked on projects in health care, education, fairness and equity, military personnel, substance use, incarceration, and insurance industries. He is a passionate science communicator who has written for Slate Magazine as an AAAS Mass Media Fellow. His research interests include causal inference, algorithmic equity, experimental design, survey sampling, high-dimensional statistics, latent variable modeling, and statistical genetics with his focuses areas including Labor Markets, Modeling and Simulation, Racial Equity and Survey Research Methodology among many others.

At Stats+Stories we're lucky to have listeners who put up with John's bad jokes and our general shenanigans. In fact, you've listened to 199 discussions of the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. To mark our 100th episode we asked you to submit statistical headlines and a haiku won. For 200 we took to Twitter using the #MemeMedianMode hashtag and this time those that rose to the top actually memes. Today we're talking to the creators of our top two. Nynke Krol (@krol_nynke) is a statistician at statistics Netherlands who also submitted a stance mean that caused both, John and Rosemary, to actually laughed out loud when they saw her take on data normality. Eric Daza (@ericjdaza) is a data scientist statistician who focuses on digital health, he submitted several means to our mean, median, mode contest, including one that made me flashback to my first graduate class in research methods, on causation/correlation.