Stats + Stories

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

The work of health researchers is vitally important to the safety and well-being of people around the world, with the COVID-19 crisis making that all too clear. However, health researchers are facing a crisis of their own, a crisis of trust. It’s fueled partly by the proliferation of social media, the politicization of data, and the reluctance of some researchers to discuss their work. The issue of trust and health research is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Sandra Alba Sandra Alba, MSc, PhD, is an epidemiologist at KIT Royal Tropical Institute with a background in medical statistics. She has 15 years’ experience in the application of statistical and epidemiological methods to evaluate public health programs primarily low- and middle-income countries. At KIT Sandra has specialized in the application of statistical and epidemiological methods M&E and impact evaluations within multidisciplinary teams and in collaboration with local partners in Africa and Asia. Her areas of expertise include child health, malaria, WASH and TB. How did trust become such an issue? (1:44) Scientific vs. public debate (4:57) Cultural disconnects drives distrust (8:50) More certainty (11:45) Engaging nurses and doctors (16:30) COVID Vaccine (19:16) Work with TB (21:15)

The use of statistics to improve processes and business industry government and academia is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with Deming Lecturer Award winner Nicholas Fisher. Fisher left his position as Chief Research Scientist at CSIRO  in 2001 to found ValueMetrics Australia, an R&D consultancy that carries out R&D in Performance Measurement, in which area he has consulted to a wide variety of business, industry and Government clients in Australia and overseas. What got you into performance measurement? 1:00, How important is context in productivity measurements? 4:30, Measurements can affect behavior 9:12, How should journalist report of performance statistics 13:27, What advise would you give people studying performance 17:45, Who are some of the legends in this field 20:30

The data official statistical offices collect and generate are of vital importance to the work of national governments and international organizations. However, the work of collecting national data can be difficult and at times can be politicized, and as with so much over the last several months, the COVID pandemic has only shown how important national statistics are as well as how fraught their interpretation can be. Official statistics is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Gemma Van Halderen. Gemma Van Halderen is Director of the Statistics Division in the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). Prior to joining ESCAP in June 2018, Gemma was a member of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Executive Team, leading the transformation of ABS’ statistical programs and implementation of modernized statistical capabilities. She was responsible for transformation strategies and programs for data sharing, data integration and micro-data access including ABS’ contribution to the Australian Government’s Data Integration Partnership for Australia. Among her many responsibilities at different levels, in 2017, Gemma was seconded to the Commonwealth Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to prepare the Government’s response to a Productivity Commission Inquiry into Data Availability and Use.

Protestors have taken to streets across the U-S this summer in order to fight back against what they see as an unjust criminal justice system – one that treats People of Color in prejudicial and violent ways. The concern over racial bias in policing has long been a concern of activists, but there’s an increasing focus on other ways racial bias might influence decisions made in America’s courts and police stations. The statistics related to race and the criminal justice system is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories. Tarak Shah is a data scientist at HRDAG, where he cleans and processes data and fits models in order to understand evidence of human rights abuses. Prior to his position at HRDAG, he was the Assistant Director of Prospect Analysis at University of California, Berkeley, in the University Development and Alumni Relations, where he developed tools and analytics to support major gift fundraising. What spurred this research?(1:33) What is a risk assessment model? (2:12) What ore these tools suppose to do? (4:00) What is fairness? (5:18) What did you learn? (10:12) What is the takeaway for the layperson? (15:20) What’re some parallels to this work? (19:35) How do you make this interesting? (22:07) What’s the flow of your work, for reproducibility? (25:00)

What comes to mind at the start of summer? Backyard barbecues, quality time spent, and long drive. Transportation safety is the topic of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Joel Greenhouse Joel B. Greenhouse, Ph.D., is Professor of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.

Social media is always awash in pet videos and images, but since the COVID lockdowns it seems as though there is even more pet content to be found online as cats invade video conferences and dogs beg for even more walks. There are sometimes even calls in spaces such as Twitter for people to share pet images when someone’s having a bad day. The connection between pets and wellness is one of the focuses of this episode of Stats and Stories, with guest Allen McConnell. Allen McConnell is University Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Miami University. His research examines how relationships with family and pets affect health and well-being, how people decode others’ nonverbal displays, and how self-nature representations influence pro-environmental action with this work supported over the years by National Institutes of Health (NICHD and NIMH) and National Science Foundation grants. His research has been featured in a variety of popular press outlets such as ESPN, CBC, CNN, BBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, Atlantic Monthly, and Cosmopolitan. He has served as Editor in Chief of Social Psychological and Personality Science, Associate Editor of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and President of the Midwestern Psychological Association and of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. His Social Self blog at Psychology Today receives more than 10K unique views per post. How did you start studying pets? (1:25) Ways pets improve health (3:20) How do you do control groups when studying pet ownership? (5:40) What about the pets that cause stress? (8:15) Pets relationship with media (9:50) How does this fit into social/positive psychology? (12:12) How do you feel about the reporting around your work? (13:40) Divisions in pet ownership and how people view pets (16:10) Is there data like this around the world? (19:47) Nature’s impact on mental health (21:20)