Professor Kevin McConway and Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter discuss their experiences of communicating statistical research to the media and offer 12 tips for researchers to effectively engage with the media. The coronavirus pandemic has brought an unprecedented demand from the media for statistical commentary. Whereas a trip to a studio for a radio or TV interview was … Continued
Category: statistics
The fragmentation of federal expertise has enabled the politicisation of Covid-19 numbers in the USA
As in any emergency or disaster, institutional agreement over the statistics of the Covid-19 pandemic is incredibly important. During the crisis, President Trump has questioned federally requested research around the spread of the pandemic and the amount of equipment needed to tackle it. Philip Rocco writes on how Trump’s efforts to undermine a common understanding of … Continued
Book Review: News, Numbers and Public Opinion in a Data-Driven World, edited by An Nguyen
In News, Numbers and Public Opinion in a Data-Driven World, An Nguyen brings together contributors to showcase international research on the integration of statistical reasoning in journalistic education, production and consumption. In a data-driven context marked by concerns about fake news, “post-truth” and the spread of disinformation, this is a thoughtful and accessible contribution to understanding the role of numeracy in […]
statcheck – a spellchecker for statistics
A study has revealed a high prevalence of inconsistencies in reported statistical test results. Such inconsistencies make results unreliable, as they become “irreproducible”, and ultimately affect the level of trust in scientific reporting. statcheck is a free, open-source tool that automatically extracts reported statistical results from papers and recalculates p-values. Following an investigation into its accuracy, Michèle B. Nuijten finds […]
More data or better data? Using statistical decision theory to guide data collection
When designing data collection, researchers must take important decisions on how much data to collect and what resources to devote to enhancing the quality of the collected data. But the threshold for choosing better over bigger data may be reached long before the sample numbers in the thousands, write Jeff Dominitz and Charles F. Manski. Big data has become an […]
The Significance of Managing Research Data
Some of the most influential research tools of the last century were created to ensure the quality of beer and extrapolate the results of agriculture experiments conducted in the English countryside. Though ostensibly about the placement of a decimal point, an ongoing debate about the application of these tools also provides a window for understanding… Read more »
Addressing anxiety in the classroom: Innovative techniques to enhance mathematics and statistics education.
Mathematics and statistics anxiety is one of the major challenges involved in communicating complex mathematical concepts to non-specialists. Meena Kotecha reports back from a recent conference where educators and researchers presented on how they have addressed the issue of anxiety in the classroom. Individual learning requirements need to be carefully considered in order to promote a climate that is both […]
The human context of numbers: why live interviews are a particular challenge for statisticians.
The live interview format requires researchers to be concise and succinct when discussing bodies of complex knowledge. But how should researchers respond when asked questions outside their field of expertise? David Spiegelhalter recommends to spend some time prior to the interviews examining the human context of the numbers and be ready to summarise what social scientists have said about how your research relates […]
Big Data: Call for your words and images
Our three-part series on Big Data is an invitation to discussion.
We’re looking for YOUR best stories, essays and images related to Big Data in ecology and environmental science. We’ll highlight excerpts from our favorites here on our blog will be available within the comments of this blog.
We’re aiming to represent a range of ideas as well as cultivate deep discussions around focused subtopics. As long as it relates to Big Data and ecology/environmental science it’s fair game, but we are particularly interested in discussion of the following points:
What’s one of the biggest challenges of ecological Big Data, and how can/should we address it (or what is someone already doing to address it)?…