Stats + Stories

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.

Twitter can be cacophonous at times – one a given day, serious analysis of the situation in Afghanistan, news stories about climate change, and Parry Gripp’s Music for Cat Piano Volume 1 can all compete for a user’s attention. This has only become more clear during the COVID 19 pandemic as it seems almost everyone is tweeting about the disease, with varying levels of expertise. However, there have been some experts who’ve been able to tweet through the noise, we’ll talk with one of them on this Royal Statistical Society edition of Stats and Stories with guest Natalie E. Dean. Dr. Natalie Dean (@nataliexdean) is an assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health. She received her PhD in Biostatistics from Harvard University, and previously worked as a consultant for the WHO’s HIV Department and as faculty at the University of Florida. Her primary research area is infectious disease epidemiology and study design, with a focus on developing innovative trial and observational study designs for evaluating vaccines during public health emergencies. She has previously worked on Ebola, Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and now COVID-19. She received the 2020 Provost Excellent Award for Assistant Professors at the University of Florida. In addition to research, she has been active in public engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is verified on Twitter with over 100k followers and has authored pieces in outlets such as the Washington Post, New York Times, and Stat News.

The tenure track process at American universities is a grind – one shaped by the old adage to “Publish or perish.” But if a junior faculty member manages to successfully navigate the process – publishing as expected, learning to manage a classroom, participating in service – then they’re rewarded with tenure. Tenure is an almost permanent employment relationship at universities that’s designed to give faculty the freedom – because of their job security to pursue any area of inquiry they feel drawn to. The problem, of course, is that not everyone makes it through that grind. A growing body of research shows that women, though they receive more than 50-percent of all PhDs, are not making it through the tenure track process in the same numbers. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, Dr. Michelle Cardel is an obesity and nutrition scientist, registered dietitian, the Director of Global Clinical Research & Nutrition at WW International, Inc. (formerly Weight Watchers) and a faculty member at the University of Florida (UF) College of Medicine, where she is also an Associate Director for the Center for Integrative Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases. Her research is focused on three areas, (1) assessing the effects of psychosocial factors, including low social status and food insecurity, on eating behavior and obesity-related disease, (2) the development and implementation of effective healthy lifestyle interventions with a focus on underserved populations, and (3) improving gender equity within academia. Leslie McClure is Professor & Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. Dr. McClure does work to try to understand disparities in health, particularly racial and geographic disparities, and the role that the environment plays in them. Her methodological expertise is in the design and analysis of multicenter trials, as well as issues of multiplicity in clinical trials. She is currently the Director of the Coordinating Center for the Diabetes LEAD Network, and the Director of the Data Coordinating Center for the Connecting the Dots: Autism Center of Excellence. In addition to her research, Dr. McClure is passionate about increasing diversity in the mathematical sciences and devotes considerable time to mentoring younger scientists. Dr. McClure also Chaired the ASA’s Task Force on Sexual Harassment and Assault, which led the way in developing policies surrounding sexual misconduct for professional organizations. (Previously on How Where You Live Affects Your Health)

Talking about statistics with my journalism colleagues is the basis of what brings this show together. But speaking about, and communicating statistical work with journalists, and understanding our interdisciplinary relationship in the era of fake news and misinformation is more important than ever. That's the focus of this week’s episode of Stats and Short Stories with guest Kevin McConway. Kevin McConway is an Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics at the Open University in the UK, where he taught statistics, mainly to adult students in a wide range of disciplines. He has researched collaboratively across natural and social science. Kevin has developed a strong interest and involvement in statistics in the media. In particular, he was an adviser for eleven years and an occasional contributor to the BBC radio program More or Less, which aims to support the public understanding of numbers in the news. He has worked with and helped train journalists in understanding and communicating statistics, often through the UK’s Science Media Centre where he is a member of the advisory committee. He tweets on @kjm2.

Being able to read and write is necessary to be successful in work, at home, and in civic life. Do parallel skills associated with critical reasoning from numbers and data carry similar weight? What do you need to know to be an informed consumer of numeric information, and to use such information? That's the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Iddo Gal. Iddo Gal is an Associate Professor and past-Chair, Dept. of Human Services, University of Haifa, Israel, with an MA in Personnel Psychology from Tel-Aviv University and a PhD in Cognitive Psychology, University of Pennsylvania. Gal enjoys multidisciplinary interests that span two fields of research and applied practice: the first being teaching/learning and assessment of adult numeracy and statistical literacy, and systemic aspects of developing related functional competencies; and the second being managerial issues in service organizations, in particular empowerment of frontline workers and empowerment of clients of service organizations, and related issues such as service satisfaction, customer complaints, and accessibility of services to diverse populations.