Stats + Stories

Scientific publications drive science, well that's stating the obvious, isn't it, but the form and way it's processed is historic. It's historic in the sense that there are journals that are gatekeepers, their editors that are sending out submissions to reviewers, who are then providing comments, and then it's almost that it's set in stone and locked in place for the future. But there are challenges to this and one of the challenges is the focus of this episode of Stats+Short Stories with guest Alexandra Freeman. Alexandra Freeman is the Executive Director of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, a role she took up in 2016. She previously spent 16 years working for the BBC, primarily a producer and director for BBC Science. Alexandra is passionate about bringing science to the widest possible audience. Along with working in television she has also helped develop content for computer games, social media and websites, as well as formal learning resources

This has been a year for numbers. COVID states have been a collective obsession. Vote percentages surprising. Hours spent online ... unending. The Royal Statistical Society has run the numbers and has voted for its Stats of the Year. That’s the focus of this episode Stats and Stories with guest Jennifer Rogers. Rogers is an experienced statistical consultant who has a special interest in the development and application of novel statistical methodologies, particularly in medicine, although her portfolio of clients cuts across a wide variety of applications. She works alongside other statisticians, clinicians, computer scientists, industry experts and regulators. Rogers is Vice President for Statistical Research and Consultancy at PHASTAR, a global contract research organisation. Rogers directs the statistical research strategy, helping the company stay at the cutting edge of new methodological advances. Rogers also regularly works with journalists to improve the reporting of statistics in the media. She is a popular statistics presenter and can often be heard on the Radio or seen on TV screens. She has made a number of appearances on BBC Radio 4's More or Less and appeared on series 42 of BBC Watchdog where she presented their "Best or Worst" segment.

Communicating risk is difficult at any time but during a pandemic, communicating risk well can be what keeps a disease from spreading, as one public health official has put it, like wildfire. During the COVID 19 pandemic, experts, journalists, and elected officials have all been working to find the most effective way to communicate risk to the public. Helping people understand their risks of infection – or of infecting others – can be the thing that gets them to follow mask mandates or other public health advisories. Effectively communicating risk in COVID 19 is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guests Alexandra Freeman and Claudia Schneider Alexandra Freeman is the Executive Director of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, a role she took up in 2016. She previously spent 16 years working for the BBC, primarily a producer and director for BBC Science. Alexandra is passionate about bringing science to the widest possible audience. Along with working in television she has also helped develop content for computer games, social media and websites, as well as formal learning resources. Claudia Schneider is a postdoctoral research associate with the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory. At the Winton Centre she studies the communication of uncertainty about evidence to various stakeholders, particularly the unquantified ‘quality of the underlying work’. Claudia received her PhD in Psychology from Columbia University and also held a graduate research scholar position at Princeton University. Her research focus lies at the intersection of decision science and applied social psychology. Her work uses a combination of methods ranging from quantitative laboratory surveys to field studies in diverse cultural and social settings.

Data can be powerful and persuasive rhetorical tools for nonprofits as they explain the work they day and ask for monetary support from various entities, but not all nonprofits can afford to hire a statistician to crunch numbers for them. An organization in the UK is working to meet the statistical needs of nonprofits and is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Robert Mastrodomenico. 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.

Cities and small towns across America once woke up to their local newspaper on their doorstep. Over the last several decades, though, those newspapers have begun to disappear a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study showing that disappearance has heralded the rise of news deserts in the United States. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Penelope Abernathy. Penelope Muse Abernathy is a former executive at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, is the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina. A journalism professional with more than 30 years of experience as a reporter, editor and senior media business executive, she specializes in preserving quality journalism by helping news organizations succeed economically in the digital environment.  Her research focuses on the implications of the digital revolution for news organizations, the information needs of communities and the emergence of news deserts in the United States. She is author of “News Deserts and Ghost Newspapers: Will Local News Survive?” — a major 2020 report that documents the state of local journalism, what is as stake for our democracy, and the possibility of reviving the local news landscape, and she is the lead co-author of “The Strategic Digital Media Entrepreneur” (Wiley Blackwell: 2018), which explores in-depth the emerging business models of successful media enterprises.

Of all places to look for statistics, who’d have thought a settlement house would be a place that you would find insight into data of their communities. However, that’s the focus of this episode of Stats+Short Stories with guest Sharon Lohr. Lohr researches and writes about statistics: where they come from, how to interpret them, and how to tell the good statistics from the bad. After receiving her Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Sharon taught for 25 years at the University of Minnesota and Arizona State University, where she was Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Statistics. As a Vice President at Westat, she developed survey designs and statistical analysis methods for use in transportation, public health, crime measurement, and education. She now does freelance statistical consulting and writing. See the feature article about Sharon in the September 2018 issue of Amstat News.

When an individual is admitted to a hospital they are quite often hooked up to a pan plea of monitoring devices all designed to help the doctors and nurses caring for them meet their medical needs. Increasingly hospitals are exploring how machine learning can help them better monitor patient vital signs and that’s a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Glen Wright Colopy. Colopy completed his PhD at the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering in 2018. His primary research interests are in probabilistic modeling, time series analysis, and stochastic optimization. He has been doing research in healthcare since 2011, and  Glen's primary machine learning goal is to provide presentations that people can enjoy and learn from. His most recent public project is the "Philosophy of Data Science" series which investigates the role of scientific reasoning in practical data science.

Being able to effectively communicate data is becoming an increasingly important part of a journalists job, so much so that news outlets are expanding their staffs to include data scientists and statisticians and that is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Robert Cuffe. Cuffe is the head of statistics for BBC news. Before that he worked on HIV drug trials at GlaxoSmithKline and is head of statistics at ViiV Health Care. Cuffe is a statistical ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society and was chairman of the UK pharmaceutical statistician’s industry body PSI where he worked with the Science Media Center to set up a briefing service for the Lay Science Press. His research interests deal primarily with health statistics and the general communication of statistics as a whole.

With the 2020 U-S presidential election all but upon us, media are rife with prognostications about which way voters are going to swing. Will reliably red states stay red or will voters produce a blue wave that crashes across the country? Will economic uncertainty trump concerns over COVID 19? Is political polarization really as set-in-stone as some have suggested? Understanding voter behavior is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics with guest Andrew Gelman. Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. He has received the Outstanding Statistical Application award three times from the American Statistical Association, the award for best article published in the American Political Science Review, and the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies award for outstanding contributions by a person under the age of 40. His research interests include a wide range of topics, including: why it is rational to vote, why campaign polls are so variable when elections are so predictable and why redistricting is good for democracy among various others.

Delia North is the Dean and Head of the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at University of KwaZulu Natal. She has over 25 years’ experience in the teaching and design of Statistics curricula at university. Her passion for teaching Statistics has resulted in her becoming a leading figure in South African Statistics Education circles, evidenced by being Theme Chair, Topic Chair, Session Organizer and Guest Speaker at various international conferences on Statistics Education. She is a member of the South African Statistical Association (SASA) executive committee, chairs the SASA Education Committee and is on a Council member of the International Statistical Association.