Stats + Stories

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.

Every year, statistics classes are filled with math averse students who white knuckle it to the end of the semester in the hopes of getting a passing grade. And the dream of forgetting about math and statistics for a little while. But what if it didn't have to be that way? What if instead of white knuckling it, students were actually excited about the subject; or, at the very least, not terrified of it? Two professors has been developing strategies to help students get over their fear of “sadisistics” and that's the focus of this special two part episode Stats and Stories Hunter Glanz is an Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Science at California Polytechnic State University. He maintains a passion for machine learning and statistical computing, and enjoys advancing education efforts in these areas. In particular, Cal Poly's courses in multiple computing languages give him the opportunity to connect students with exciting data science topics amidst a firm grounding in communication of statistical ideas. Rhys Jones is an internationally recognized expert in statistical literacy and education, known for his leadership in curriculum development, digital learning, and student engagement. Originally trained in biochemistry and immunology, he transitioned to focus on making statistics more accessible and engaging for students and teachers across various education levels.

An entire industry has grown up around nutrition and health. People pushing everything from shakes, to meal kits, to special diets. While some of the claims surrounding such products can be questionable at best, the field of nutrition science is growing. Filled with researchers who are working to truly understand the science of food that is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Michelle Cardel. Dr. Cardel is an obesity and nutrition scientist, registered dietitian, the Director of Global Clinical Research & Nutrition at WW International, Inc. (formerly Weight Watchers) and a faculty member at the University of Florida (UF) College of Medicine, where she is also an Associate Director for the Center for Integrative Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases. Her research is focused on three areas, assessing the effects of psychosocial factors, including low social status and food insecurity, on eating behavior and obesity-related disease, the development and implementation of effective healthy lifestyle interventions with a focus on underserved populations, and improving gender equity within academia.

In a commencement speech in 2016, Atul Gawande told the crowd that science is a, "commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation." In the last ten years that understanding of science has become muddied for the public. Social media has helped fuel the rise of conspiracy theories built upon so-called alternative facts as people claiming to be experts spout anti-science ideas. Communicating scientific ideas was already difficult, but it's become even more difficult in this environment. Science communication is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, with guest Ionica Smeets. Ionica Smeets is, chair of the science communication and society research group at Leiden University. She's also chair of the board of The National Centre of Expertise on Science and Society of The Netherlands. Her research lies in the gap between experts and the public when it comes to science communication, with special interest in the problems that occur when those groups communicate and what scientists can do about those problems. Smeets is the author of a number of journal articles on this topic and engaged in science communication for the public when she worked on a Dutch TV show about math. She's also the co-creator of a children's book called Maths and Life.

More than 15 years ago, Thomas Friedman wrote, “I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.” Today's Stats+Stories episode will be a conversation about how a small shift in temperatures can lead to large changes in extreme weather events with guest Brett Falk. Dr. Falk is a research professor in computer and Information Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Crypto and Society Lab. He is the author of a recent CHANCE article "Why Will a Small Increase in Global Temperature Lead to a Large Increase in the Number of Heat Waves? Truncation and Extreme Events".

Earth day was launched in 1970 in the aftermath of several environmental disasters in the publication of Rachel Carson Silent Spring. It was designed to help raise awareness of environmental issues and has since grown into a global event. With this year's Earth Day taking out a particular urgency in light of the most recent UN Climate Report. But what goes into the scientific research that informs some this activism? What statistical tools are used to better understand the health of our environment. That's the focus of this episode of staffs and stories with guest Philip Dixon. Philip Dixon is a professor of statistics at Iowa State University. Dixon research interests include developing and evaluating statistical methods to answer interesting biological questions. Some of his current projects are developing non-parametric estimates of prediction distributions, modeling physical activity data, and developing model-based visualizations of species composition data.

According to the U.S. State Department, three-fifths of global GDP, three-quarters of world trade, and 90 percent of official development assistance can be accounted for in 38 countries. Those countries are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development – or OECD. Founded in 1961 and headquartered in Paris, the OECD's goals include stimulating global economic growth by providing a forum for intergovernmental collaboration. It's also the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Steve MacFeely. Steve MacFeely is, chief statistician at the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development and adjunct professor at University College Cork. MacFeely joined OECD in August of last year as chief statistician and director of statistics and the data directorate. Before joining the organization, MacFeely served as Director of Data and Analytics at the World Health Organization and as Director of Statistics and Information at U-N Trade and Development. He has also served as the Deputy Director-General at the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in Ireland.

When people think of public goods, they most likely think of things like parks or schools. But official statistics are also a kind of public good. They help us understand things like housing prices, the costs of goods and the spread of disease. However, this data infrastructure is under threat around the world. The work of official statisticians and the obstacles they face, is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Erika Groshen. Groshen is a senior economics advisor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and research fellow at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. From 2013 to 2017 she served as the 14th commissioner of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the principal federal agency responsible for measuring labor market activity, working conditions and inflation. She's an expert on official statistics, authoring an article in 2021 pondering their future.

Lisa LaVange is the 2018 President of the American Statistical Association and she is PhD, is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Biostatistics { add link to dept } in the Gillings School of Global Public Health { add link to Gillings SPH } at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 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. 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.

Chart Spark | Stats + Stories Episode 359 by The Stats + Stories Team

The use of force by police has been in the news a lot lately, in connection to everything from protests on college campuses to the death of individuals during arrests. There's no singular, shared definition of what use of force is according to the National Institute of Justice. A local police department will set a standard, but that threshold for when an office should use force varies from place to place. Having no standard set of rules or definitions makes it difficult for researchers to study the issue. That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Claire Kelling. Claire Kelling is an assistant professor of statistics at Carleton College. She's an expert on data and statistics in relation to police use of force and says her work sits "at the intersection of criminology and spatial statistics". Kelling organized the 2023 Ingram Olkin Forum on Statistical Challenges in the Analysis of Police Use of Force. Five articles from that forum appeared in a special themed section of December's issue of Chance including several authored or co-authored by Kelling.

The COVID pandemic has complicated everything from school to work to grocery shopping. The need to physically distance from people not in our homes has made it difficult to maintain friendships or causal relationships while being stuck at home with a significant other for months on end can make even the biggest house seem tiny. COVID's impact on relationships and sex is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Debby Herbenick. Herbenick is a sex educator, sex advice columnist, author, research scientist, children's book author, blogger, television personality, professor, and human sexuality expert in the media. Dr. Herbenick is a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health and was lead investigator of the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior.

Sports analytics is a booming industry with new technologies allowing for the parsing of ever more sophisticated statistics. Analysts can now examine the height and the force of a gymnast tumbling pass, the probability of going for it on a 4th down in football, actually working out, and the arc of the best swing for a baseball player. Analytics are also used in the conditioning of athletes, particularly for all the baseball players preparing for the start of the MLB's spring training. Analytics is the focus of this episode of stats and stories with guest Alexandre Andorra. Alexandre Andorra is a Senior Applied Scientist for the Miami Marlins as well a Bayesian modeler at the PyMC Labs consultancy firm that he cofounded as well as the host the podcast dedicated to Bayesian inference “Learning Bayesian Statistics” His areas of expertise include Hierarchical Models, Gaussian Processes and Causal Inference.

Are you ready to register for a 100-mile race that includes 60,000 feet of elevation gain? How about a 3000-mile race cycling across the United States in the race across America? These endurance competitions and events are amazing athletic achievements, and women are competing in these events in ever-increasing numbers. These amazing feats and the factors that have hindered and enhanced the participation of women in these endurance sports is the focus of today's stats and stories with guest Claire McKay Bowen. Claire McKay Bowen (she/her) is a senior fellow and leads the Data Governance and Privacy Practice Area at the Urban Institute. Her research focuses on developing technical and policy solutions to safely expand access to confidential data for advancing evidence-based policy-making. She also has an interest in improving science communication and ensuring everyone is responsibly represented in data. In 2024, she became an American Statistical Association Fellow “for her significant contributions in the field of statistical data privacy, leadership activities in support of the profession, and commitment to mentoring the next generation of statisticians and data scientists.” Further, she is a member of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee and several other data governance and data privacy committees as well as an adjunct professor at Stonehill College.

Dr. Rose Marie Ward is a professor in Miami University's Department of Kinesiology & Health. She studies college student health, with a focus on both addictive/harmful behaviors (alcohol use, disordered eating, unsafe and unwanted sexual behavior) and prosocial activities (women's leadership, life satisfaction, scholastic achievement, exercise, and athleticism).

About 5.4 million Americans live with some form of paralysis. Sometimes that's just a temporary loss of mobility, but for the Americans whose paralysis is caused by a spinal cord injury, that loss of movement is often permanent, as there's no biological way to heal an injured spinal cord. There are efforts to see if technology might be able to help these individuals regain use of their limbs, and that's the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Dr. David Friedenberg. Dr. Friedenberg is a Principal Data Science and Neurotechnology and the Team Lead for Machine Learning/AI in the Health Analytics group at Battelle. He's the Principal Investigator on several neurotechnology efforts developing new AI-powered technologies to help improve the lives of people living with motor impairments due to neurological injuries like spinal cord injuries and stroke. An experienced data scientist with consulting experience across several disciplines he is passionate about developing AI/ML-driven solutions to challenging problems for the betterment of humanity.

Glenn Platt ​(@glennplatt) is the C. Michael Armstrong Professor of Network Technology & Management & Director of Interactive Media Studies at Miami University​​. He is interested in social media marketing, digital media and e-Commerce​​. He is also the faculty ​sponsor of the Esports team at Miami.

Artists of today are still making albums, however with so much emphasis being put on streaming charts how many of today's album streams are being made up by a few hit tracks? That distinction is the focus of today's episode of Stats and Stories with guest Chris Dalla Riva. Chris Dalla Riva is an analyst for the music streaming service Audiomack by day while spending his nights writing and recording music and writing about music for his newsletter Can't Get Much Higher.

For decades, college athletes could not make any money from their sports identities. In 2021 the NCAA passed an interim name image and likeness policy which now grants athletes control over those indentities. They can now be paid for autographs, personal appearances, and endorsements. The economic impact of the NCAA name image and likeness changes are the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with gues Emily Giambalvo. Emily Giambalvo is a sports reporter focusing on data-driven projects with the enterprise and investigations team. She covered University of Maryland football and men's basketball from 2018 to 2023, and she has contributed to The Post's coverage of the Olympics, gymnastics and national college sports. Emily grew up in South Carolina and graduated from the University of Georgia.

The blue ice giants in our outer solar system have unusual magnetic fields, missing what we understand as traditional north-south poles. For decades, scientists have been trying to understand why while also puzzling out what the planets are made of under their atmospheres. Some have suggested the planets may experience diamond rain others that their mantles consist of a mix of slushy water and ammonia. A new study has suggested the planets' have layered interiors that generate their magnetic fields. The secret lives of ice giants are the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories. Burkhard Militzer is a Professor in the Astronomy department at University of California Berkeley. His research interests include mineral physics, Interiors of giant planets, planet formation, materials at high pressure, equation of state calculations, Quantum Monte Carlo, path integral Monte Carlo, density functional methods.

Linda J. Young is Chief Mathematical Statistician and Director of Research and Development of USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service . She oversees efforts to continually improve the methodology underpinning the Agency's collection and dissemination of data on every facet of U.S. agriculture. She works on the surveys designed to characterize agricultural activity in the US.

After Hurricane Helene left a path of destruction from Florida through North Carolina in 2024 you may not expect to see a lot of little Helene's in kindergarten rosters 6 years from now. But what names are emerging, and why? Will popular songs or singers be influencing name choices? If so, will lots of little Taylors be on our hypothetical kindergarten roster 6 years in the future. What influences baby names and what has changed over the decades is the focus of today's episode of Stats and Stories with guest Chris Dalla Riva talking about his story in Significance magazine. Chris Dalla Riva is an analyst for the music streaming service Audiomack by day while spending his nights writing and recording music and writing about music for his newsletter Can't Get Much Higher.

Trees have long been imagined as the earth's lungs inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling the oxygen needed to support life. That life, too, is important for sustaining the earth. One scholar suggests that the animals that fill the planet's landscapes serve as earth's heart and arteries without them, the earth would be little more than a barren rock. The way that animals make our world is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, Joe Roman is a conservation biologist, marine ecologist, and editor 'n' chief of Eat The Invaders. Winner of the 2012 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award for Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act, Roman has written for the New York Times, Science, Audubon, New Scientist, Slate, and other publications. Like many of the animals he studies, Roman is a free-range biologist. He has worked at Harvard University, Duke University Marine Lab, University of Iceland, University of Havana, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the University of Vermont, where he is a fellow and writer in residence at the Gund Institute for Environment.

Jill Leyland represents the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) on the UK National Statistician's “Advisory Panel on Consumer Prices – Stakeholder”. Together with John Astin she wrote the 2015 paper “Towards a Household Inflation Index” (since updated) which the ONS used as a starting point for the development of the Household Costs Indices. From 2009 to 2012 she was a Vice President of the RSS. She chaired its committee which developed RSS policy towards official statistics from 2008 to 2012 and its organising committee for the Excellence in Official Statistics Award from 2010 to 2016. Jill was awarded the Society's West Medal for services to Official Statistics in 2018. She has been an Expert Witness on inflation measurement and is a Fellow of the Society of Professional Economists. In the past she worked, among other organisations, for the World Gold Council, the OECD, the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Government Statistical Service.

The costumes are ready and the annual opportunity to go out and harass your neighbors to get candy is once again upon us. Yes, it's time for Halloween. And along with Halloween comes the worry, the concern the fear that in fact, someone will be poisoning my kid's candy. This is something that has lived with us for decades and we have someone today that will help us investigate this mystery on this episode of Stats and Short Stories with guest Joel Best. Joel Best is a Professor Of Sociology And Criminal Justice At The University Of Delaware. His writing focuses on understanding how and why we become concerned with particular issues at particular moments in time–why we find ourselves worried about road rage one year, and identity theft a year or so later. He's written about the ways bad statistics creep into public debates, and about dubious fears, such as the mistaken belief that poisoned Halloween candy poses a serious threat to our kids. Check out his books Damned Lies and Statistics, More Damned Lies and Statistics, Stat-Spotting.

A journalist, statistician and sound engineer walk into a bar. Well, well, actually, to a studio to record a podcast. Comedians have been a source of great amusement and delight over generations. Popular comedians can earn a great deal from their live shows. In 2023 billboard reported that Kevin Hart earned 67, and a half 1 million dollars from 82 shows with 631,000 tickets sold. Comedies are also a popular genre for television and movies. One of the most successful shows, Seinfeld, created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David ran from 1989 to 1998. Have you ever noticed an echo of one of your favorite comedians from the past in the work of a comedian today that's the topic of this week's episode of Stats+Stories with guest Sachin Date. Sachin Date works for VitalEdge Technologies and has, over his career, worked in two research labs, three software companies including two product companies, and in a classroom. He has built and delivered all kinds of software including massively distributed discrete-time simulations, data science stacks, a new programming language, and dozens of mobile apps, including the world's first Napster app for Blackberries. Along the way, Sachin taught 100 liberal arts majors how to program in BASIC and built a mobile applications practice from scratch.

Powerball, Mega Millions Cash for Life and more. Missouri offers many games of chance that have potential benefits for the players and guaranteed benefits for the State. In fact, the Missouri Lottery has contributed about 3 to 4% of the annual State funding for public education in the State of Missouri, more than 8 billion dollars to the State since 1986. These games describe the chances that a player will win a given game, often using calculations common in a probability class, such as permutations and combinations. So what happens if you check the calculations and you find that the calculations are not correct. A tale of lottery calculations, checked and fixed, is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories. Dr. Matthew McIntosh is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Missouri. Before transitioning into academia, Dr. McIntosh spent nearly three decades in clinical research, bringing valuable real-world insights to his teaching and research. In the Spring of 2023, he developed the Keno Project, an initiative aimed at correcting the displayed odds of winning the Keno lottery game in state lotteries, with a focus on engaging undergraduate students in statistical research. The project's first manuscript has been accepted for publication in Significance magazine. His research interests include power analysis, sample size determination, and promoting undergraduate research in statistics. Dr. McIntosh's recent publications in sample size calculations focus on multiple linear regression and multivariate one-sided hypothesis tests. In 2018, outside his university work, Dr. McIntosh created statisticsmatt, a YouTube channel that offers tutorials and educational content for both undergraduate and graduate statistics students.  Joseph is a senior studying Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Mathematics at the University of Missouri. Since his sophomore year, he has contributed to the Keno Project, using statistical models to derive accurate odds for the lottery game Keno, addressing discrepancies often found on state lottery playslips and websites. His work, which has been accepted for publication in Significance magazine, marks a key milestone in his academic journey. As an active member of the Mizzou Racing team, Joseph helps design and build a formula-style car from the ground up, gaining hands-on experience in motorsport engineering. This aligns with his goal of pursuing a career in motorsport, with the ultimate aim of working in Formula 1. He has also completed several engineering internships, honing his technical skills in various areas of the field.  Gary G. McIntosh, CLU has for the past 15 years of semi-retirement, has dedicated his efforts to establishing Allen County's Your Community Foundation, where he currently serves as an active advisor. His team focuses on fostering community engagement and promoting growth through education and collaboration.He has held leadership roles in several organizations, including the Jaycees, Chamber of Commerce, and as both City and County Commissioner. He has also served as an at-large board member for School District 257 and as a trustee for Allen Community College.

How important is it for businesses to increase their profits each year or offer fair wages to workers of all types? How do you think businesses are doing in these areas or, even in other areas, such as operating in a way that is sustainable for the environment and the planet? A Gallup poll of more than 5700 people provided responses to these questions and it was natural to ask how these questions might be connected and whether the pattern of connection differed between groups. Using networks to understand the connection between opinions about how businesses function is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guests Dr. Moinak Bhaduri and Bahareh Zahirodini. Dr. Moinak Bhaduri is an assistant professor at Bently University and studies spatio-temporal Poisson processes and others like the self-exciting Hawkes or log Dr. Gaussian Cox processes that are natural generalizations. His primary interest includes developing change-detection algorithms in systems modeled by these stochastic processes, especially through trend permutations. His research has found applications in computer science, finance, reliability and repairable systems, geoscience, and oceanography. Follow some of Moinak's work using the links below. Bahareh Zahirodini, MSBA, is a research assistant working alongside Dr. Moinak Bhaduri at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Bentley University in Massachusetts. Her research interests lie in financial modeling with an emphasis on social issues. Bahareh served as a research and teaching assistant and as a trading room analyst at the Hughey Center for Financial Services at Bentley. (10/10/2024)

James J. Cochran is associate dean for research with the University of Alabama's Culverhouse College. He is also professor of statistics and the Rogers-Spivey Research Fellow. Ryan McNeill is the London-based deputy editor for the Reuters global data team. During his more than 10 years at Reuters, he has worked on investigations revealing underground markets for adopted children, America's failure to prepare for sea-level rise, failures by governments across the US to stop the spread of antibiotic resistant infections, the scale of Africa's illicit gold flows to Dubai, how and where humans are raising the risk of zoonotic spillover around the globe, and ethnic cleansing in Sudan. In 2024, he was part of teams that won two Overseas Press Club of America Awards, using satellite imagery and remote sensing methods to document human rights violations – such as the burning of villages and documentation of mass graves in Darfur – and reveal how humans are raising the risk of another global pandemic.

A long pass down the sideline is caught in bounds. Or was it? The referees ruled it a catch, but the opposing team was unconvinced. In the NFL there's a way to challenge a referee call that comes with a potential risk which is the focus of this week's episode of Stats+Stories. Dr. Mike Orkin is a Professor of Statistics Emeritus at California State University, where he was a professor and chair of the statistics department for many years before becoming a consultant and a nationally known authority on probability and gambling games. Since then he has appeared in numerous forms of media ranging from CBS Evening News, NBC's Dateline, a Google Tech Talk series as well as authored serval books.

Bo Li, is an associate professor in Sport Leadership and Management department. He teaches sport administration, sport marketing and sport public relations. His research has been mainly focused on sport digital media and branding. He has previously co-edited the book Sport and the Pandemic: Perspectives on Covid-19's Impact on the Sport Industry, Sport Administration, and Governance and Administration of Global Sport Business. His research interests lie in the intersection of digital media, mass media, branding, and consumer behaviors. Specifically, my scholarship aims to advance our understanding of how various forms of media are used to connect with customers at different levels. He has authored over 40 peer-reviewed academic manuscripts. His works have been published in leading academic journals including Sport Management Review, Communication & Sport, Journal of Media, Culture, and Society, International Journal of Sport Marketing and Sponsorship, International Journal of Sport Communication, Sport Marketing Quarterly, International Journal of Sport Finance and Journal of Sport Media. (9/18/2024)

Wendy Martinez has been serving as the Director of the Mathematical Statistics Research Center at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for six years. Prior to this, she served in several research positions throughout the Department of Defense. She held the position of Science and Technology Program Officer at the Office of Naval Research, where she established a research portfolio comprised of academia and industry performers developing data science products for the future Navy and Marine Corps. She was honored by the American Statistical Association when she received the ASA Founders Award at the JSM 2017 conference. Wendy is also proud and grateful to have been elected as the 2020 ASA President.

Sports generate a lot of data among them individual player metrics, team performance data, and specific game statistics. And there are a lot of tools to crunch all those numbers. Learning to use them can be a challenge and is the focus of many sport analytics classes offered in the United States. We hear about one professor's approach to teaching sports stats in this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories with guest Mark Glickman. Glickman is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Senior Lecturer on Statistics in the Harvard University Department of Statistics, and Senior Statistician at the Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research. His research interests are primarily in the areas of statistical models for rating competitors in games and sports, and in statistical methods applied to problems in health services research. He served as an elected member of the American Statistical Association's Board of Directors as representative of the Council of Sections Governing Board from 2019 to 2021.

It's that time of year again. The summer is still in full swing, but it's time to get bookbags on backs and butts in seats to start the new school year. To celebrate we're rolling out another Stats+Stories throwback episode where we are going to dip into the vault and highlight some great episodes you might have missed. From Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel talking about new ways to teach statistics, to Helaine Alessio on problems that come to online test proctoring and finally Dashiell Young-Saver who is Texas based high school stats teacher on a mission to get students excited about the subject. Thank you for listening and come back next week for a new episode of Stats+Stories about sports statistics and good luck to all of our academic audience members.

Randomized Response Polling | Stats + Short Stories Episode 340 by The Stats + Stories Team

The democratic engine of the United States relies on accurate and reliable data to function. A year-long study of the 13 federal agencies involved in U.S. data collection, including the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the National Center for Education Statistics suggests that the nation's statistics are at risk. The study was produced by the American Statistical Association in partnership with George Mason University and supported by the Sloan Foundation and is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories. Constance (Connie) Citro is a senior scholar with the Committee on National Statistics and an independent consultant in which capacity she worked on the project that produced A Nation's Data at Risk. She was previously CNSTAT director from 2004-2017 and senior study director from 1986-2003. Citro was an American Statistical Association/National Science Foundation/Census Bureau research fellow and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. She served as president of the Association of Public Data Users and its representative to the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, edited the Window on Washington column for Chance magazine, and served on the Advisory Committee of the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology. In 2018, the American Statistical Association established the Links Lecture Award in honor of Citro, Robert Groves, and Fritz Scheuren. She will give the 32nd Morris Hansen Lecture in September 2024. Jonathan Auerbach is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at George Mason University. His research covers a wide range of topics at the intersection of statistics and public policy, including urban analytics, open data, and official statistics. His methodological interests include the analysis of longitudinal data, particularly for data science and causal inference. He is the current president of the Washington Statistical Society and the former science policy fellow at the American Statistical Association

One thing that we always value at Stat+Stories is the story of, “How did we get here?”. Today's episode follows our colleague, from work that she did in the federal government to now leading the charge at a biocomplexity institute. That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Short Stories. Stephanie Shipp is a research professor at the Biocomplexity Institute, University of Virginia. She co-founded and led the Social and Decision Analytics Division in 2013, starting at Virginia Tech and moving to the University of Virginia in 2018. Dr. Shipp's work spans topics related to using all data to advance policy, the science of data science, community analytics, and innovation. She leads and engages in local, state, and federal projects to assess data quality and the ethical use of new and traditional data sources. She is leading the development of the Curated Data Enterprise (CDE) that aligns with the Census Bureau's modernization and transformation and their Statistical Products First approach. She is a member of the American Statistical Association's Committee on Professional Ethics, Symposium on Data Science and Statistics (SDSS) Committee, and the Professional Issues and Visibility Council. She is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow, and an American Statistical Association (ASA) Fellow. She received the ASA Founder's award in 2022.

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. 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.

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.

More than 27 million individuals are the victims of human trafficking globally that's according to the US State Department. The 2022 United Nations report on global trafficking suggests that 39 percent of trafficking is associated with sexual exploitation, while also noting that's likely an underestimate. An initiative at the University of Alabama is working to develop methods for finding evidence of trafficking online, that's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Nickolas Freeman. Freeman, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Operations Management in the Department of Information Systems, Statistics, and Management Science. Dr. Freeman is also an Associate Editor for INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics (IJAA). He is an active member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) and earned their Certified Analytics Professional (CAP) certification in 2014. He is also a member of the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS). Dr. Freeman is an active researcher with interests that include healthcare operations management, supply chain risk management, and applied analytics. He has several publications in journals including Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (MSOM), Production & Operations Management (POMS), Omega, the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR), and INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics (formerly Interfaces), and IISE Transactions (formerly IIE Transactions).

Journalists are often tasked with making complicated information accessible to a wide audience. Given mere minutes or inches to communicate information that might have taken a researcher pages to explain. Financial data can be particularly tricky to translate as it can require not only a comfort level with numbers but also some understanding of financial markets or economic principles. Reporting on financial information is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Alan Smith. Alan Smith (@theboysmithy) leads the Finanical Times' newsroom team of data reporters and visual journalists. A data visualisation specialist, his TEDx talk Why You Should Love Statistics was featured on TED.com in 2017. Alan is the author of How Charts Work, a handbook on designing with data using the Finanical Times' principles. He is also Honorary Professor of Practice at UCL's Social Data Institute. Before he joined the Finanical Times', he was head of digital content at the UK Office for National Statistics where he was awarded an OBE in 2011 for services to official statistics.

How do you learn about what's going on in the world? Did a news headline grab your attention? Did a news story report on recent research? What do you need to know to be a critical consumer of the news you read? If you are looking to start developing your data self-defense and critical news consumption skills, this book is for you! It reflects a long-term collaboration between a statistician and a journalist to shed light on the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. The only prerequisite for enjoying this book is an interest in developing the skills and insights for better understanding news stories that incorporate quantitative information.

As you reach the end of a long day with an excess of stress how do you recharge? Have you found that a long stroll in the sun or through the woods can provide this renewal? Walking in nature is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Dr. Altea Lorenzo-Arribas. Dr. Altea Lorenzo-Arribas is a socio-economic statistician at Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland (BioSS) working in collaboration with researchers at the Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institutions. She is an elected council member of the Royal Statistical Society and secretary of the History of Statistics Section, as well as a member of the Women Committee of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, and the Spanish Biostatistics Network (Biostatnet). She is passionate about uncovering the hidden stories of women in the history of statistics, and firmly believes in the need for a more equal, diverse and inclusive discipline.