Stats + Stories

When an individual is admitted to a hospital they are quite often hooked up to a pan plea of monitoring devices all designed to help the doctors and nurses caring for them meet their medical needs. Increasingly hospitals are exploring how machine learning can help them better monitor patient vital signs and that’s a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Glen Wright Colopy. Colopy c...

Being able to effectively communicate data is becoming an increasingly important part of a journalists job, so much so that news outlets are expanding their staffs to include data scientists and statisticians and that is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Robert Cuffe. Cuffe is the head of statistics for BBC news. Before that he worked on HIV drug trials at GlaxoSmithKline a...

With the 2020 U-S presidential election all but upon us, media are rife with prognostications about which way voters are going to swing. Will reliably red states stay red or will voters produce a blue wave that crashes across the country? Will economic uncertainty trump concerns over COVID 19? Is political polarization really as set-in-stone as some have suggested? Understanding voter behavior is...

Delia North is the Dean and Head of the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at University of KwaZulu Natal. She has over 25 years’ experience in the teaching and design of Statistics curricula at university. Her passion for teaching Statistics has resulted in her becoming a leading figure in South African Statistics Education circles, evidenced by being Theme Chair, Topic Chair,...

The US Census Bureau is conducting its annual count of the American population this year. Concerns have emerged about this particular census and these have included potential impact of a citizenship question. The shortening of the window for the count, the deadline for reports for reapportionment. All of these concerns might translate into miscounts that impact allocation of federal funds of repre...

There are a lot of facts and figures to sift through when it comes to the COVID 19 pandemic – there are death rates and infection rates to consider, as well as the paths of infection in a particular community. Investigating the pandemic is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guests Ron Fricker and Steve Rigdon. Dr. Ronald D. Fricker, Jr. is a Professor of Statistics and the Associa...

If you’ve been following the news much then you may have noticed reporters beginning to explore how COVID is impacting crime rates around the country. Police commissioners are even appearing on newscasts trying to explain how various COVID measures may have changed the kinds of crimes they’re seeing in their cities. One of the problems becomes tying those changes directly to COVID and of course, a...

Statistics is generally a field not known for its humor, at least to the broad public. Which is a shame because humor is a way to make complicated subjects – like statistics or big data – accessible to general audiences. The intersection of humor and stats is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Timandra Harkness, coming to you from the annual meeting of the Royal Statistical...

We live at a curious moment, when data and information from a variety of sources overwhelm our senses and when there are people who are working to manipulate some of that data, spreading disinformation and discord. This has led to a skepticism and distrust of data that can make it difficult to find common ground and which, when it comes to public health, may make us all less safe. Overcoming that...

There's a lot of statistical information shared every day in news stories. Everything from COVID cases to economic data is Quantified help us better understand our world. But do news presentations really help us do that? And what do statisticians think about the way journalists are covering their work, that’s the topic behind this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Megan Higgs and Ashley Stee...

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 abo...

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 g...

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. Journali...

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 st...

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 o...

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 wi...

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 i...

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...

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 Ame...

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 foc...

When reporters cover mass shootings news outlets often struggle to find ways to cover the event that won’t inspire others to do the same thing. Something similar follows in the wake of a suicide. Journalists don’t always cover suicides in their communities but when they do one of the concerns is whether that coverage might lead to a spike in suicides after the story is out. The media’s influence o...

Across the country, protesters are taking to the streets to fight against police brutality and systemic racism. The use of force by police departments as well as the seeming militarization of many has been a concern of activists for some time. Another concern has been the use of big data in the use of surveillance technologies by departments to conduct predictive policing. Advocates for the approa...

As researchers and medical professionals struggle to get a handle on the COVID-19 pandemic, journalists struggle to tell the pandemic’s story with many news outlets increasingly turning to info graphics and data visualizations to help them do so. Visualizing data for news is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Harry Stevens. Harry Stevens joined The Washington Post as a graph...

As the COVID 19 death toll continues to rise, researchers and public health professionals around the world are working to understand just how prevalent the disease is. News stories of the last several months have talked about contact tracing and featured images of drive through COVID testing. One of the issues that has come up with testing is whether we should test people who don’t show signs of i...

Luke Bornn (@LukeBornn) is currently Vice President, Strategy and Analytics for the Sacramento Kings . Prior to joining the Kings, Bornn served as Head of Analytics for A.S. Roma of the Italian Serie A Football League, where he worked closely with managers, coaches and sports scientists to measure and evaluate athletes and performance. In addition to his work with soccer and basketball teams, the...