Stats + Stories

Sharon Hessney is a veteran K-12 math teacher and writer, moderator, and coordinator of What's Going On With this Graph? WGOWTG is a free, weekly online feature, is a partnership of the New York Times Learning Network and the American Statistical Association.

David Spiegelhalter is Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, and President of the Royal Statistical Society.

Lisa LaVange and Ron Wasserstein appear in this episode. Lisa LaVange, PhD, is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Biostatistics in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her role as associate chair, she coordinates development of the data science curriculum at the Gillings School. She is also director of the department’s Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center (CSCC), overseeing faculty, staff, and students involved in large-scale clinical trials and epidemiological studies coordinated by the center. Dr. LaVange is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and is the 2018 ASA President. She is also former president of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society (ENAR-IBS) and former IBS Board member. She is instructor for a graduate course in statistical leadership and a guest lecturer in the clinical trials course, both at UNC. Ronald L. (Ron) Wasserstein is the executive director of the American Statistical Association (ASA). Wasserstein assumed the ASA’s top staff leadership post in August 2007. Prior to joining the ASA, Wasserstein was a mathematics and statistics department faculty member and administrator at Washburn University in Topeka, Kan., from 1984–2007. During his last seven years at the school, he served as the university’s vice president for academic affairs.

Megan Price is the executive director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), and designs strategies and methods for statistical analysis of human rights data for projects in a variety of locations including Guatemala, Colombia, and Syria. She has contributed analyses submitted as evidence in two court cases in Guatemala and has served as the lead statistician and author on three UN reports documenting deaths in Syria. Megan is a member of the Technical Advisory Board for the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, on the Board of Directors for Tor, and a Research Fellow at the Carnegie Mellon University Center for Human Rights Science. She is the Human Rights Editor for the Statistical Journal of the International Association for Official Statistics (IAOS) and on the editorial board of Significance Magazine. Before she was executive director at HRDAG, Megan was the director of research there.

Stephen T. Ziliak is Professor of Economics at Roosevelt University and Conjoint Professor of Business and Law at the University of Newcastle-Australia. A major contributor to the American Statistical Association “Statement on Statistical Significance and P-values” (2016) he is probably best known for his book (with Deirdre N. McCloskey) on The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (2008), showing the damage done by a culture of mindless significance testing, the history of wrong turns, and the benefits which could be enjoyed by returning to Bayesian and Guinnessometric roots.

Brad Efron is Max H. Stein Professor of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Statistics at Stanford University, and Professor of Biostatistics with the Department of Biomedical Data Science in the Stanford School of Medicine; he serves as Co-director of the undergraduate Mathematical and Computational Sciences Program administered by the Department of Statistics. He has held visiting faculty appointments at Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Imperial College, London. He has been recognized with the 2018 International Prize in Statistics.

Jonny Jacobsen is a Paris based English journalist. Studying for an MA in Data Journalism. Still tracking French politics, culture, international affairs.

Mark Hansen is a professor of journalism where he also serves as the Director of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Founded in 2012, the Brown Institute is a bi-coastal collaboration between Columbia Journalism School and the School of Engineering at Stanford University -- its mission is to explore the interplay between technology and story.  Prior to joining Columbia, Hansen was a Professor in the Department of Statistics at UCLA. In addition to his technical work, Hansen also has an active art practice involving the presentation of data for the public. His work with the Office for Creative Research has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, the London Science Museum, the Cartier Foundation in Paris, and the lobbies of the New York Times building and the Public Theater (permanent displays) in Manhattan. Hansen holds a BS in Applied Math from the University of California, Davis, and a PhD and MA in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Matt Dempsey is the data editor at the Houston Chronicle. He worked on projects involving wildfires, state pensions, and the chemical industry. His passion for public records frequently leads to disclosure of data from all levels of government. His series Chemical Breakdown won the 2016 IRE Innovation award and the National Press Foundation's "Feddie" award. His work was a key part of the Chronicle's Pulitzer Prize finalist entry for Breaking News.

Mark Glickman, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, is Senior Lecturer on Statistics at Harvard University, and Senior Statistician at the Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research, a VA Center of Innovation.  He is well-known for his work in games and sports, having created the Glicko and Glicko-2 rating systems that are widely used in online gaming.  Mark co-organizes the biannual New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports, has been Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, and has been the chair of the US Chess Ratings Committee since 1992.  More recently, Mark has embarked on projects in music analytics.  His work on authorship attribution of Lennon-McCartney songs has received widespread media coverage.