Stats + Stories

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 c...

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...

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...

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 pl...

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...

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...

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...

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 Administra...

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 aca...

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,...

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 Hela...

Dr. James 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.

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 partn...

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-foun...

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...

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 h...

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 th...

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 f...

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...

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...

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 D...

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 g...

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 yea...

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...