Stats + Stories

The US Census Bureau is conducting its annual count of the American population this year. Concerns have emerged about this particular census and these have included potential impact of a citizenship question. The shortening of the window for the count, the deadline for reports for reapportionment. All of these concerns might translate into miscounts that impact allocation of federal funds of representation in our legislative branch. The current status of the 2020 Census is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Rob Santos Robert Santos is vice president & chief methodologist at the Urban Institute as well as President-Elect of American Statistical Association. He has over 40 years of experience designing research and evaluation studies as well as sample surveys. His expertise includes quantitative and qualitative research design, sampling, survey operations, and statistical analysis; specialty areas include Hispanics, blacks, undocumented immigrants, and other disadvantaged populations.

There are a lot of facts and figures to sift through when it comes to the COVID 19 pandemic – there are death rates and infection rates to consider, as well as the paths of infection in a particular community. Investigating the pandemic is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guests Ron Fricker and Steve Rigdon. Dr. Ronald D. Fricker, Jr. is a Professor of Statistics and the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Administration in the Virginia Tech College of Science. He holds a PhD and an MA in Statistics from Yale University, an MS in Operations Research from The George Washington University, and a bachelor’s degree from the United States Naval Academy.  He is the author of Introduction to Statistical Methods for Biosurveillance published by Cambridge University Press and co-author with Dr. Steve Rigdon of Monitoring the Health of Populations by Tracking Disease Outbreaks and Epidemics: Saving Humanity from the Next Plague published by the American Statistical Association and CRC Press. Dr. Fricker is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Steve Rigdon is a Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Saint Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice where he teaches about Baysian statistical methods. His research interests include Biosurveillance; models for election prediction; quality; survival analysis.

If you’ve been following the news much then you may have noticed reporters beginning to explore how COVID is impacting crime rates around the country. Police commissioners are even appearing on newscasts trying to explain how various COVID measures may have changed the kinds of crimes they’re seeing in their cities. One of the problems becomes tying those changes directly to COVID and of course, a long-standing issue when it comes to crime rates is understanding how we measure crime in the first place. Measuring crime is the focus of this episode of Stats and 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.

Statistics is generally a field not known for its humor, at least to the broad public. Which is a shame because humor is a way to make complicated subjects – like statistics or big data – accessible to general audiences. The intersection of humor and stats is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Timandra Harkness, coming to you from the annual meeting of the Royal Statistical Society with guest host Brian Tarran. Harkness writes and presents BBC Radio 4 documentaries including the series FutureProofing and How To Disagree, and Are You A Numbers Person? for BBC World Service. She formed the UK’s first comedy science double-act with neuroscientist Dr. Helen Pilcher, and has performed scientific and mathematical comedy from Adelaide (Australia) to Pittsburgh PA with partners including Stand Up Mathematician Matt Parker and Socrates the rat. Her latest solo show, Take A Risk, hit the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe with randomized audience participation and an electric shock machine. A fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, she’s a founder member of their Special Interest Group on Data Ethics. Timandra’s book Big Data: does size matter? was published by Bloomsbury Sigma in 2016.

We live at a curious moment, when data and information from a variety of sources overwhelm our senses and when there are people who are working to manipulate some of that data, spreading disinformation and discord. This has led to a skepticism and distrust of data that can make it difficult to find common ground and which, when it comes to public health, may make us all less safe. Overcoming that distrust and helping people see how the world adds up is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Tim Harford coming to you virtually live from the RSS International conference, with guest host Significance Magazine editor Brain Tarran. Harford is an economist, journalist and broadcaster. He is author of "How To Make the World Add Up", "Messy", and the million-selling "The Undercover Economist". Tim is a senior columnist at the Financial Times, and the presenter of Radio 4's "More or Less", the iTunes-topping series "Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy", and the new podcast "Cautionary Tales". Tim has spoken at TED, PopTech and the Sydney Opera House. He is an associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. Tim was made an OBE for services to improving economic understanding in the New Year honors of 2019.

There's a lot of statistical information shared every day in news stories. Everything from COVID cases to economic data is Quantified help us better understand our world. But do news presentations really help us do that? And what do statisticians think about the way journalists are covering their work, that’s the topic behind this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Megan Higgs and Ashley Steel. Megan Higgs is a statistician, freelancer, and owner of Critical Inference. She has experience in academic research and teaching, as well as consulting and scientific collaboration in many disciplines. She believes in the importance of raising awareness about limitations of current uses of statistical methods and inference in scientific practice and communication. Ashley Steel is a statistician and quantitative ecologist with experience in academia, government and international organizations. She wrote “The Truth About Science: A Curriculum for Developing Young Scientists” which guides middle school students through the process of conducting research. She also designed and taught a course on statistical thinking at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she is affiliate faculty. Passionate about the value of probabilistic thinking in every-day decision making, she volunteers at science fairs and supports teachers in understanding statistics.

Alison Hedley has a PhD in Communication and Culture and holds a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University. Her current research addresses the history of data visualization in popular journalism, focusing especially on Victorian and Edwardian Britain. She is editor of the Yellow Nineties Personography, a biographical database about authors and artists of the 1890s, and author of the forthcoming book Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885-1918 (University of Toronto Press). Timestamps What makes Florence Nightingale compelling? 1:30 What was the context of data in this era? 3:06 Skepticism of early visualization 5:45 Design Rhetoric 9:00 Population Journalism 13:27 What is visualization literacy? 22:20

Recent COVID-forced move to online instruction for both K through 12 and higher-ed has come an intense discussion of best teaching practices in digital spaces. While the focus has been on teaching online, the conversation has foregrounded long-standing debates over pedagogy and practice in education. Understanding what works in the classroom is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Ellen Yezierski. Dr. Ellen Yezierski is the Professor of Chemistry and Director of Teaching Excellence at Miami University. Yezierski became familiar with the challenges of actively engaging students in large classes while pursuing her Ph.D. in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. She has worked to integrate her research on the particulate nature of matter and conceptual change to improve teaching in large lecture courses. Her research interests include inquiry instruction, teacher change, and the effects of high school teacher professional development on teachers and their students. Timestamps What is the Centre for Teach Excellence At Miami 1:35 What drew you into helping people teach better? 2:37 Have we gotten better? 4:10 How do people learn? 6:15 How do you define effectiveness? 7:40 What can be done about a fear of science? 11:10 How does learning change with more skill? 14:45 Online learning in the COVID-19 world 18:12 How to recruit good STEM teachers? 23:11 Building trust with students 25:40

Journalism in the United States is imagined as a public good, an institution that aids in the maintenance of democracy as it holds people in power accountable for their actions. Journalists are also tasked with helping citizens understand how their communities are run. However, that’s becoming increasingly difficult as local new rooms around the country shrink or are shuttered completely. Journalism and news deserts are the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Tom Stites Stites is a seasoned writer, editor and entrepreneur with a passion for strengthening journalism and democracy.  Currently he is a consulting editor for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the founder and president of the Banyan Project  which aims to strengthen democracy by pioneering a sustainable and easily replicable new model for Web journalism. As an editor he has supervised reporting that has won an array of major journalism awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes; as an entrepreneur he has been the founding publisher of two print magazines and three Web publications.

Almost every day we seem to get new data about the COVID crisis. Whether it’s infection rates, death rates, testing rates, false-negative rates, there’s a lot of information to cull through. Making sense of COVID data is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with Megan Price and Maria Gargiulo. Megan Price is the Executive Director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, Price designs strategies and methods for statistical analysis of human rights data for projects in a variety of locations including Guatemala, Colombia, and Syria. Her work in Guatemala includes serving as the lead statistician on a project in which she analyzed documents from the National Police Archive; she has also contributed analyses submitted as evidence in two court cases in Guatemala. Her work in Syria includes serving as the lead statistician and author on three reports, commissioned by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR), on documented deaths in that country. @StatMegan Maria Gargiulo is a statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. She has conducted field research on intimate partner violence in Nicaragua and was a Civic Digital Fellow at the United States Census Bureau. She holds a B.S. in statistics and data science and Spanish literature from Yale University. She is also an avid tea drinker. You can find her on Twitter @thegargiulian. Timestamps 2:55 What’s the reaction been? 11:10 How important is the information in supporting these decisions. 14:30 What stories are we missing? 18:14 Schools and Covid 23:30 How to Make Sense of all of the COVID data