Stats + Stories

In 2016, the Australian government launched a program it said would make tracking welfare benefits easier. Instead, it falsely told hundreds of thousands of Australians they owed the government money, with some of those individuals taking their own lives as a result. Australia's robodebt tragedy is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guests Noel Cressie and Dennis Trewin. Noel Cressie is Distinguished Professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and Director of its Centre for Environmental Informatics, which is a vibrant interdisciplinary group doing research in spatio-temporal statistics, satellite remote sensing, and broader fields of environmental science; he is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Missouri and Affiliate at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the USA. Noel grew up in Western Australia, received a PhD from Princeton University, and shared a career between the US and Australia. He is author and co-author of four books, three of them on spatial and spatio-temporal statistics, and of more than 300 peer-reviewed publications. His recent research involves hunting for atmospheric-carbon-dioxide sources around the world and focusing on Antarctica’s environmental future. He has won a number of awards, including the Fisher Award and Lectureship from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS), the Pitman Medal from the Statistical Society of Australia, the Barnett Award from the Royal Statistical Society, and the Matheron Award and Lecture from the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences. Noel is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, of the Royal Society of New South Wales, and of a number of other learned societies. Dennis Trewin is a pioneer of social statistics that are leading to meaningful measurement of social capital in Australia. He was the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics between 2000 and 2007, and held other senior appointments in Australia such as Electoral Commissioner and an Adjunct Professor at Swinburne University. Dennis is also a member of the Committee charged with responsibility for producing an independent report on the State of the Environment.

The civil war in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, which lasted from November 2020 to November 2022, left as many as 600 thousand people dead. The war fought by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front on one side and Ethiopian and Eritrean forces on the other also had a devastating impact on the health-system in Tigray revealed using data collected by Tigray health workers and analyzed by their global health research collaborators.. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, with guests James J. Cochran and Mulugeta Gebregziabher. James J. Cochran is associate dean for research with the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College. He is also a professor of statistics and the Rogers-Spivey Research Fellow. Mulugeta Gebregziabher is professor of biostatistics and vice chair for academic programmes at the Medical University of South Carolina. He is a health scientist investigator and methods core leader with the Health Equity and Rural Outreach Innovation Center of Veterans Affairs Health Services Research & Development, and director of the Region IV Public Health Training Center for South Carolina. The views expressed in this episode only represent the opinions of Gebregziabher and Cochran and not any institutions they represent. “We acknowledge the brave efforts of the Tigray health workers and our global health research collaborators.”

Athletes around the world are preparing to live out their Olympic dreams in Paris this summer. Many of those athletes have been competing in national and world championships before participating in Olympic trials in order to join their national teams. But how can an athlete be sure they’re peaking at the right time? How can they know whether adding an additional element to a routine or changing the angle of a throw will give them an advantage over the competition? Well, there’s data for that and that’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, with guest Daniel Webb Dan Webb is the Director of Performance Analytics at the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) in Colorado Springs and accomplished leader in performance analytics and sports science, using innovative data science and statistical modeling methods to solve challenging performance problems. Dan has led efforts to develop and implement cutting-edge solutions to model and predict Olympic-level performance, enabling data-informed decision-making for both the USOPC and NGBs. Under Dan's leadership, the Performance Innovation department continues to provide integrated and sustained competitive advantages for Team USA by deriving insights from data to improve athlete performance and optimize training, competition, and resource allocation strategies.

Dennis Trewin is a pioneer of social statistics that are leading to meaningful measurement of social capital in Australia. He was the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics between 2000 and 2007, and held other senior appointments in Australia such as Electoral Commissioner and an Adjunct Professor at Swinburne University. Dennis is also a member of the Committee charged with responsibility for producing an independent report on the State of the Environment.

We leave data behind as we travel across the internet, our preferences and purchases transforming into a veritable goldmine of information for companies hoping to convince us to buy their new product or service. We often imagine this data mining and tracking as an invention of the so-called information age, but Victorians were tracking and mining data too. That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with Dr. James Hanley Hanley is a professor of biostatistics in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University. His work has received several awards including the Statistical Society of Canada Award for Impact of Applied and Collaborative Work and the Canadian Society of Epidemiology and Biostatistics: Lifetime Achievement Award.

When a gene in the human body goes bad, it can cause illness and disease. Scientists have been working for decades to develop therapies to address faulty genes. In the U.S. gene therapy has been approved as a treatment for illnesses such as cancer, hemophilia, AIDS. However, as researchers explore treatment possibilities. The ethics and costs of such treatments remain a concern. A new book aims to provide an overview of the state of gene therapy development which is the focus of this episode of Stat+Stories with guests Avery McIntosh and Oleksandr Sverdlov. Dr. McIntosh is a drug developer working in rare diseases at Pfizer. He has managed teams of statisticians across study phases and in a variety of drug types and disease areas, including neurology, ophthalmology, infectious disease/ global health, hematology, and oncology. He has published peer-reviewed articles on various topics in drug development and biostatistics, including development of cell and gene therapies and qualification of digital endpoints in neurological diseases. Dr. Sverdlov is a Neuroscience Disease Area Statistical Lead at Novartis. He has been actively involved in methodological research and applications of innovative statistical approaches in drug development. He has co-authored over forty refereed articles, edited two monographs, and co-authored a book ``Mathematical and Statistical Skills in the Biopharmaceutical Industry: A Pragmatic Approach''. His most recent work involves design and analysis of clinical trials evaluating novel digital technologies.

Pandemic Education History | Stats + Short Stories Episode 332 by The Stats + Stories Team

We’ve always said that data science is a gateway to other fields on this show. From climate change to medical research, knowledge around numbers can be useful in just about every aspect of life. This is why we’ve brought back Kobi Abayomi to talk about his journey using data to get into the music industry on this episodes of Stats+Short Stories Dr. Kobi Abayomi is the head of science for Gumball Demand Acceleration, a software service company for digital media. Dr. Abayomi was the first and founding Senior Vice President of Data Science at Warner Music Group. He has led data science groups at Barnes and Noble education and Warner media. As a consultant, he has worked with the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank, the Innocence Project in the New York City Department of Education. He also serves on the Data Science Advisory Council at Seton Hall University where he holds an appointment in the mathematics and computer science department. Kobi, thank you so much for being here today.

Community leaders regularly make decisions that impact the lives of community members. From where green space will be located to what businesses to approve to what public health interventions to put in place. There’s a growing recognition that such decisions should be informed by data that come from the community itself. Community analytics are the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Kathy Ensor. Kathy Ensor is a leading national voice in statistics and data science and a recognized expert in the methodological development and application of statistics to advance wisdom, knowledge, and innovation. She is the Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice University and director of the Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems. She served as chair of the Department of Statistics from 1999 through 2013 and is the creator of the Kinder Institute’s Urban Data Platform. Ensor’s research specializes in understanding dependent data and developing computational statistical methods to solve practical problems. Ensor served as the 117th president of the American Statistical Association (ASA), heading the ASA board of directors, and has represented the statistics profession on numerous national boards. She is a fellow of the ASA and AAAS and was inducted into the Texas A&M College of Science Academy of Distinguished Former Students in 2021. Ensor holds a BSE and MS in mathematics from Arkansas State University and a PhD in statistics from Texas A&M University.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hospital mortality rates in the US were on the decline in the early 2000s, even as total hospitalizations rose. This came after a 1999 U.S. Institute of Medicine report that suggested tens of thousands of individuals died in hospitals unnecessarily each year. The report focused attention on patient safety in modern hospitals. About 70 years earlier, an organization in the American South was also concerned with patient outcomes. That's the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Melissa Thomasson. Melissa Thomasson is an American economist. She is the Julian Lange Professor of Economics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she has also been the chair of the Department of Economics. She studies economic history, focusing on the evolution of health insurance and health care in the United States.