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 Bailer, chair of Miami Statistics Department, and Richard Campbell, former chair of media, journalism, and film.

Our guest today is Andrew Gelman.

Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science, as well as director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University.

He's received the Outstanding Statistical Application Award three times.

from the American Statistical Association, the award for best article published in the American Political Science Review, and the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies Award.

for outstanding contributions by a person under the age of 40.

Her impressive work with war data eventually led to Florence becoming the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society.

She was also later made an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.

During the late 1850s, she wrote numerous pamphlets and letters lobbying for the implementation of a new format of hospital care for Britain's workhouses that resembled the new model recently adopted by the British Army.

These workhouses were quasi-prisons that proliferated in Britain in the 19th century as places where the poor and destitute were sent in an age before any structured system of welfare for the unemployed and ill.

He became his pamphleteer.

The American Statistical Association in rejecting Kinsey science stated critics are justified in their objections that many of the most interesting and provocative statements in the book.

are not based on the data presented therein, and it is not made clear to the reader on what evidence the statements are based.

Further, the conclusions drawn from the data presented in the book are often stated in much too bold and confident a manner.

Taken together, these objections amount to saying that much of the writing in the book falls below the level of good scientific writing.

The noted statistician John Tukey condemned the sampling procedure, stating that a random selection of three people would have been better than the group of 300 chosen by Mr. Kinsey.

The head of the American Statistical Association sent a bunch of guys, Turkey and three guys, to the Kinsey Institute to talk to them about their data.

First of all, Kinsey lied and he said he had a statistician.

was just luck.

The American Statistical Association addressed that explicitly in its 2016 statement.

A p-value doesn't measure the probability that the studied hypothesis is true or the probability that the data were produced by random chance alone.

That warning is doing real work.

The University of Virginia has a division of perceptual studies since the 1960s, looking at children with past life memories and birthmarks and physical deformities in their current body aligning with the death of this alleged previous life phenomenon.

I learned about Dr. Jessica Utz, who was the president of the American Statistical Association, so a highly credible woman, who wrote to Congress and the CIA in 1995, using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established.

That's what she concluded after looking at all the research on psychic abilities.

So there are these various phenomena.

Let's, you know, I want you to kind of take us through a census, no pun intended, of some of those threats and maybe to cue you off.

You shared with me this report from the American Statistical Association called the Nation's Data at Risk, I guess, published last year or early this year.

this year in which they document that most of the 13 major statistical agencies have lost around 20 to 30 percent of their staff over the last year.

And as you mentioned earlier, the National Center for Education Statistics lost something like 90 percent of its people.