American Statistical Association

I'm Rosemary Pennington.

Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism, and Film, as well as the American Statistical Association.

Joining me are regular panelists, John Baylor, Chair of Miami Statistics Department, and Richard Campbell, former Chair of Media, Journalism, and Film.

Our guest today is Joel Greenhouse.

Greenhouse is a professor in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University.

He's an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.

Last year, Greenhouse co-authored a study examining the association between suicide rates in the U.S. and the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why.

The program centered upon the suicide of a teenage girl and recently released its final season.

He's a respected guy.

He was vice president of the, I think, American Statistical Society.

And so when Musgrave comes up with his paper that he wrote with graduate students at the University of Michigan, it's published in the National Tax Journal in 1951.

Tucker really attacks Musgrave on methodological assumptions made by Musgrave about the income basis and about the incidence of various taxes.

These reforms made off of her suggestions and presentations were then codified in the British Public Health Act of 1875, which established legal requirements for sewers, clean running water, and regulated building codes.

Florence then became the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society, was also named an honorary member of the American Statistical Association as her recommendations made their way across the pond and started to save, you know, countless American lives as well.

Over the course of her lifetime, Florence would write over 200 books, pamphlets and articles.

did all that despite being born wealthy and encouraged for years to not work ever she could have easily lived a life of leisure that's what her mom wanted her to do could have married some other wealthy dude increased the family fortune you know just supervised governesses and a house staff who would raise her kids cook the family meals keep their lavish estates sparkling clean and And instead, she chose to go into a war zone, literal war zone, and work in a hospital covered in actual shit.

I'm John Baylor.

Stats and Stories is a production of the American Statistical Association, as well as Miami University's Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film.

I'm joined by Rosemary Pennington, chair of the Department of Media, Journalism and Film.

Our guest today is Baroness Alexandra Freeman of Steventon, British science communicator, life peer, and former television producer.

Alex, thank you so much for joining us today.

It's been an absolute pleasure.

Stats and Stories is a partnership between the American Statistical Association and Miami University's Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism, and Film.

You can listen to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or other places where you find podcasts.

And we know that this is true even among scientists who rely on rigorously collected data, that all of the data in the world will not override your own experience.

One of the ways of demonstrating that is one of my friends is Jessica Utz, who was the president of the American Statistical Association some years ago.

And she had been one of the evaluators of the Stargate program as a statistician.

So she talked about this a little bit at her presidential address in front of the collected statisticians of the world.

So the scientific analysis of the program.

So when the Stargate program was declassified, one of the two people asked to evaluate the program was statistician Jessica Utz, the head of the American Statistical Association at the time of this writing.

She concluded, so she's American Statistical Association.

So if anybody knows anything about stats, it would be the head of it, you know? She concluded, using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established.

Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted.

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to Practical Significance, a podcast to inspire listeners with compelling stories from statistics and data science, and to propel data-driven careers forward.

Here are your hosts, the ASA's Associate Executive Director, Donna Lalonde, and Executive Director, Ron Wasserstein.

Well, welcome everyone to the September issue of Practical Significance.

We are very excited to be here, and we have a guest who may be unfamiliar to our community, and so we're really delighted to be able to have a conversation with Megan Parker.

So Megan, you and I have chatted.

Our community is really interested in being good partners.

You've mentioned the notion of timeliness, right? But are there other ways that you can see statisticians and data scientists, so ASA members, building their working relationship with journalists? What does that look like? So timeliness for sure, but other things that you can share with us.

Yeah, I think, you know, the gold standard is and, and has always been the opportunity to build face-to-face personal relationships, right, of trust, because that's what it comes down to.