Stats + Stories

The Billboard Hot 100 has been ranking the week's most popular music since 1958. The first song to top the chart was Ricky Nelson's Poor Little Fool. The most recent song to do so is Taylor Swift's The Fate of Ophelia. A lot has changed in the music industry between those two songs, not only in the types of songs that top the charts, but also in how they're promoted and how they're determined. A new book explores the statistics behind the Hot 100, and it's the focus of this episode of Stats + Stories with guest Chris Dalla Riva.

Long after Harry Nilsson said, “one is the loneliest number,” and after Bob Seger sang about feeling like a number, music streaming services are using data to help of discover new music that connects to our frequent plays and preferences. Dr. Kobi Abayomi helps break that all down in this episode of Stats+Stories.   

Good data visualization can catapult a news story or research article from ho hum to extraordinary. A new book series is exploring the careers of information graphic visionaries. And that's the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest RJ Andrews.

Romantic comedies are rife with plucky heroines. Small bookstore owners are being pushed out by big corporations, runaway brides, and Perpetual bridesmaids. But where are the scientists, microbiologists and engineers, and statisticians? One researcher went looking for them, which is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Veronica Carlan. 

In this special episode of Stats+Stories we announce our new guest host Dr. Regina Nuzzo, a professor at Gallaudet University and freelance science writer, who will be joining us for the next couple of months. We will also be looking back at some of our favorite interviews from the past 12 months from the likes of...

Our lives are increasingly shaped by statistics and data. However, they remain concepts that can be difficult for broad audiences to understand. A number of outlets, including this one, have sprung up to help make them more accessible. Today another one, the “Not So Standard Deviations” podcast is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guests Hilary Parker and Roger D. Peng.

At Stats+Stories we're lucky to have listeners who put up with John's bad jokes and our general shenanigans. In fact, you've listened to 199 discussions of the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. To mark our 100th episode we asked you to submit statistical headlines and a haiku won. For 200 we took to Twitter using the #MemeMedianMode hashtag and this time those that rose to the top actually memes. Today we're talking to the creators of our top two.

Nynke Krol (@krol_nynke) is a statistician at statistics Netherlands who also submitted a stance mean that caused both, John and Rosemary, to actually laughed out loud when they saw her take on data normality.

Eric Daza (@ericjdaza) is a data scientist statistician who focuses on digital health, he submitted several means to our mean, median, mode contest, including one that made me flashback to my first graduate class in research methods, on causation/correlation.

Rick Ludwin was hired by NBC Entertainment in 1979 and made director of variety shows there in 1980. He then became vice president for specials and variety programs in 1983; senior VP for specials, variety programs and late-night in 1989; and executive VP for NBC’s late-night and prime time series in 2005. In its 57 years, The Tonight Show has had five permanent hosts, and Rick has been the boss of three of them. His late-night division at NBC developed the hit comedy Seinfeld. Rick, a 1970 Miami University grad, joined the Stats+Stories regulars to discuss the use and impact of ratings on television programming

Brian McDonald is currently the Director of Sports Analytics in the Stats & Information Group at ESPN. He was previously the Director of Hockey Analytics with the Florida Panthers Hockey Club, an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at West Point, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Management Science at the University of Miami, and an Adjunct Professor in Sports Analytics in the College of Business at Florida Atlantic University. He received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College, Easton, PA, and a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.

Michael Schuckers is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Statistics at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. An applied statistician he has received funding from the US National Science Foundation, the US Department of Defense and the US Department of Homeland Security. He is the author of over three dozen publications including Computational Methods for Biometric Authentication (Springer, 2010). Additionally, Schuckers has done work in sports analytics particularly ice hockey including consulting with a MLB team and an NHL team. For his work in this area, he was named a American Statistical Association's Section on Statistics in Sports "Significant Contributor".

We have reached episode 100 of Stats + Stories and therefore we felt like it would be a good time to have John Bailer, Richard Campbell and Rosemary Pennington sit around and talk about what all has brought us here and what more to expect in the future.

Stephen T. Ziliak is Professor of Economics at Roosevelt University and Conjoint Professor of Business and Law at the University of Newcastle-Australia.  A major contributor to the American Statistical Association “Statement on Statistical Significance and P-values” (2016) he is probably best known for his book (with Deirdre N. McCloskey) on The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (2008), showing the damage done by a culture of mindless significance testing, the history of wrong turns, and the benefits which could be enjoyed by returning to Bayesian and Guinnessometric roots.

Mark Glickman, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, is Senior Lecturer on Statistics at Harvard University, and Senior Statistician at the Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research, a VA Center of Innovation.  He is well-known for his work in games and sports, having created the Glicko and Glicko-2 rating systems that are widely used in online gaming.  Mark co-organizes the biannual New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports, has been Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, and has been the chair of the US Chess Ratings Committee since 1992.  More recently, Mark has embarked on projects in music analytics.  His work on authorship attribution of Lennon-McCartney songs has received widespread media coverage.

Tripp Eldridge is a host and member of the Cincinnati Public Radio station WVXU which producers his weekly show Start Hear where he plays the role of "Podcast Jockey" to introduce his audience to new national and local podcasts.

Nick Thieme (@FurrierTranform) is a research fellow at University of California Hastings Institute for Innovation Law and freelance writer for a variety of outlets. Currently, his work focuses on AI regulation, cybersecurity, and pharmaceutical patent trolling. His writing has appeared in Slate Magazine, BuzzFeed News, and Significance Magazine. He was the 2017 AAAS Mass Media Fellow at Slate Magazine, writing about technology, science, and statistics.

Dr. Rose Marie Ward is a professor in Miami University's Department of Kinesiology & Health. She studies college student health, with a focus on both addictive/harmful behaviors (alcohol use, disordered eating, unsafe and unwanted sexual behavior) and prosocial activities (women’s leadership, life satisfaction, scholastic achievement, exercise, and athleticism).

Rick Ludwin was hired by NBC Entertainment in 1979 and made director of variety shows there in 1980. He then became vice president for specials and variety programs in 1983; senior VP for specials, variety programs and late-night in 1989; and executive VP for NBC’s late-night and prime time series in 2005. In its 57 years, The Tonight Show has had five permanent hosts, and Rick has been the boss of three of them. His late-night division at NBC developed the hit comedy Seinfeld. Rick, a 1970 Miami University grad, joined the Stats+Stories regulars to discuss the use and impact of ratings on television programming