The Society provided no evidence of a "stupendous" achievement relating to the year 2018.

..........................

"Studying one indicator at a time in development research is likely to be misleading since poverty is multidimensional."

Denise Lievesley, President of the Royal Statistical Society. Presidential Address, 2001.https://www.rss.org.uk/Images/PDF/events/rss-presidents-address-lievesley.pdf

...............

"Back to ways of measuring poverty, which can also be complex. Income alone is not sufficient –though the commonly used “dollar a day” is a sometimes useful rule of thumb.

Trying to quantify world poverty is obviously riddled with complications. A problem with a lot of these global figures is that the empirical basis for them can be quite weak. The World Bank figure relies on a lot of household surveys. A lot of those surveys in many countries are missing; a lot are quite old now; a lot are unreliable. Another issue is the purchasing power parity, which is not always credible, especially in China. ...the World Bank figure is a commendable effort with a lot of clear weaknesses.

“The other difficulty with that figure is that it is a very binary threshold. It sets a dollar a day as the poverty line. If you look at people who have come out of the slightly higher poverty line of $2.50 a day there has been a lot less progress. There is still a lot of transient poverty, of people moving just above and below that line. And that is always going to be a problem with those very binary ways of measuring progress."

Article on Richard King of Oxfam. Royal Statistical Society Publications. 19 February 2014https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2014.00724.x

..............

UN calls in data experts to measure post-2015 development goalsWritten by Web News Editor on 14 October 2014. Posted in News

United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon (pictured) has named an Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development to help shape a future development agenda beyond its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Eight MDGs were adopted by the UN in 2000...

https://www.statslife.org.uk/news/1846-un-calls-in-data-experts-to-measure-post-2015-development-goals

...............

"a recent World Bank study showed that nearly half of low-and middle-income countries had insufficient data to monitor poverty rates (2002-2011)"

StatsLife. Royal Statistical Society. 5 October 2015https://www.statslife.org.uk/news/2495-global-partnership-for-sustainable-development-data-launches-at-un-summit

......................

"a report by a High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons...recognised that for too long

development efforts have been hampered by a lack of the most basic data about the social and economic circumstances in which people live."

World Statistics Day statement. Royal Statistical Society and other organisations. 20 October 2015.

..............

"...global development must no longer be hampered by a lack of the most basic data about the social and economic circumstances in which people live. ...almost 50 organisations worldwide have signed up to the statement..."

Royal Statistical Society press release for World Statistics Day. 20 October 2015

..............

"Reporting margins of error is essential for readers to critically assess the reliability of a source. ...it is always important for readers to have all the facts. The margin of error should therefore always be made clear so the public can have confidence in the statistical information being presented to them and be able to assess it for themselves. ...

Upholding timely and accurate statistical reporting should be a key principle for the BBC in its role as a public service, and in its dialogue with the public and with regards to online content, we ideally would like corrections to be dealt with on the day they are received."

Royal Statistical Society response to BBC Trust Impartiality Review on BBC’s reporting of statistics. 2015

..........

 

Wednesday 22 June 2016, 06:00pm - 08:00pm

Speaker: Professor Andrew Tatem (University of Southampton)

Title: Mapping progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals

The UN sustainable development goals, an intergovernmental set of 17 aspirational goals and 169 targets to be achieved by 2030, were launched last year. These include ending poverty and malnutrition, improving health and education, and building resilience to natural disasters and climate change. A particular focus across the goals and targets is achievement 'everywhere', ensuring that no one gets left behind and that progress is monitored at subnational levels to avoid national-level statistics masking local heterogeneities. How will this subnational monitoring of progress towards meeting the goals be undertaken when many countries will undertake just a single census in the 2015-2030 monitoring period?

This or similar text at:

https://www.statslife.org.uk/events/eventdetail/607/-/2016-beveridge-lecture-mapping-progress-towards-the-sustainable-development-goals

................................

"it’s only by public scrutiny and exposure that anything will ever change. ...In my angrier moments I feel that number abuse should be made a criminal offence."

David Spiegelhalter, President-elect of the Royal Statistical Society2016https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/17/politicians-dodgy-statistics-tricks-guide

...........................

Excellence in Journalism Awards 2017: criteria 

All categories will be judged against the following criteria:

1. Raised awareness and understanding of what statistics are, what they can be used for, and what statistical methods can achieve

2. Displayed integrity in the explanation and use of statistics, avoiding distortion and highlighting the extent of uncertainties.

 

.........................

"Matthew talked about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), officially known as 'Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development'. Before discussing the SDGs in more detail, Matthew alluded to their concept and origin: in 2015, the 194 countries of the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Following the adoption, UN agencies decided to support a campaign that introduced 17 aspirational 'Global goals', stretching from 'No poverty' and 'Climate action' to 'Peace justice' and 'Strong institutions'.

Matthew explained that the aforementioned goals are accompanied by 169 targets and 230 global indicators. Whereas targets are unambiguously defined (eg 'to reduce child mortality by a third in the next 15 years'), the indicators are split into three different categories (tiers) depending on the methodology and availability of data. The global indicators were developed following a series of Inter-Agency and Expert Group (IEAG) meetings that took place between 2015 and 2017. Interestingly, the IAEG meetings resulted in a call for a 'data revolution' in order to devise and improve instruments to tackle the indicators system.

In his talk, Matthew related the SDGs to another set of UN goals, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set in 2000. Some MDG achievements are impressive: for example, during 2000–2015, the amount of people living in extreme poverty decreased by nearly a half."

https://www.statslife.org.uk/members-area/sections-and-local-group-meeting-reports/3223-west-midlands-local-group-and-international-development-section-joint-meeting-measuring-sustainable-development

..........................

"Researchers and evaluators working in development are highly dependent on household surveys. However many of the most excluded populations are either outside households – such as street children, or sparsely distributed – such as the disabled. The need for better methods to measure such groups is only becoming more accute...."

October 2017statslife.org.uk/events/eventdetail/1020/-/where-there-is-no-frame-applying-methods-from-ecological-statistics-in-international-development

.....................

"All categories will be judged against the following criteria: ...

2. Displayed integrity in the explanation and use of statistics, avoiding distortion and highlighting the extent of uncertainties.

Royal Statistical SocietyExcellence in Journalism Awards 2018

....

"Max Roser from Oxford points out that newspapers could have legitimately run the headline 'Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 137,000  since yesterday' every single day for the past 25 years" ..."Careless statistical reporting could cost lives."

David Spiegelhalter, President of the Royal Statistical SocietyRisk, statistics and the media.Independent Press Standards Organisation lecture, 24 April 2018https://www.statslife.org.uk/features/3790-risk-statistics-and-the-media

..........

Hetan Shah   @HetanShah  17 Sep 2018

'One can almost never describe everything that is important about a complex issue whether poverty, inflation, inequality, crime or pretty much anything else in a single number.' Excellent blog from fellow @SocMetricsComm Commissioner Robert Joyce @TheIFS

"Decline of Global Extreme Poverty Continues but Has Slowed: World Bank

...Fewer people are living in extreme poverty around the world, but the decline in poverty rates has slowed, raising concerns about achieving the goal of ending poverty by 2030 and pointing to the need for increased pro-poor investments, the World Bank finds.

The percentage of people living in extreme poverty globally fell to a new low of 10 percent in 2015 — the latest number available — down from 11 percent in 2013, reflecting steady but slowing progress, World Bank data show. The number of people living on less than $1.90 a day fell during this period by 68 million to 736 million."

World Bank press release 19 September 2018

........................

"Despite decline  in extreme poverty, broader measures show billions still struggle to meet basic needs

...Economic advances around the world mean that while fewer people live in extreme poverty, almost half the world’s population — 3.4 billion people — still struggles  to meet basic needs, the World Bank said. 

Living on less than $3.20 per day reflects poverty  lines  in lower-middle-income countries, while $5.50 a day reflects standards  in upper-middle-income countries, the World Bank said in its biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report, “Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle.”

The World Bank remains committed to achieving the goal of ending extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.90 a day, by 2030. The share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty fell to 10 percent in 2015, but the pace of extreme poverty reduction has slowed,  the Bank warned on Sept. 19." 

World Bank press release 17 October 2018

.................................

"the RSS is  looking for the numbers that tell the story of 2018 for our annual ‘Statistic of the Year’."

https://www.statslife.org.uk/news/3969-one-month-to-go-until-nominations-close-for-statoftheyear

.............................

On 18 December 2018 the Royal Statistical Society announced its "Statistics of the Year" - not the "RSS statistics of the year", but the "Statistics of the Year" - and made numerous factual claims. The press release read,

"Hetan Shah, RSS Executive Director: "...The statistics on this list capture some of the zeitgeist of 2018. Hearteningly, the world is getting better when it comes to poverty..."

and in relation to all ten awards,

"these numbers tell us how the world continued to change in 2018." "

...............

"all the statistics that...appear in our statistics of the year, they've all been really thoroughly fact-checked"

Vice-president of the Royal Statistical Society, Today programme, BBC Radio 4. 18 December 2018

"All the stats that we've produced today are fully fact-checked and fully trustworthy"

Vice-President of the Royal Statistical Society, Newshour, BBC World Service.18 December 2018

.......................

"The origins of the society in 1834 were for the public good. As president, I want to focus on what that means in the 21st century. ...the RSS needs to engage in debates about ...the issue of trustworthiness in data systems around us"

Deborah Ashby, President-elect of the Royal Statistical Society. 19 December 2018https://wwwf.imperial.ac.uk/blog/imperial-medicine/2018/12/19/noel-hypothesis-my-life-as-a-medical-statistician/

On 19 December I attempted to communicate with Professor Shah and the Society. I wrote,

"Is the Royal Statistical Society claim on global poverty adequate?"

and cited his own recent statements -

"traditional poverty measures focus on income but not assets...

Our other big concern...traditional poverty measures are not sensitive enough to people’s different needs."

I asked,

"If the chief executive officer of the Royal Statistical Society has "big concerns" about traditional poverty measures in the UK, why is the Society presenting a categorical claim about poor countries, which have far fewer resources for statistics?"

"Criteria

Entries will be expected to show integrity in their presentation, explanation and use of statistics – avoiding distortion and highlighting the extent of uncertainties."

https://www.rss.org.uk/RSS/About/Recognising_Statistical_Excellence/Journalism_awards/RSS/About_the_RSS/Recognising_statistical_excellence_sub/Statistical_Excellence_in_Journalism_Awards.aspx

Excellence in Journalism Awards 2019: criteria

...

All categories will be judged against the following criteria: ...

2. Displayed integrity in the explanation and use of statistics, avoiding distortion and highlighting the extent of uncertainties.

https://www.rss.org.uk/Images/PDF/about/2019/Journalism%20Awards%202019%20criteria.docx

.....................

"it is essential to make sure that the evidence available is used to interrogate the fundamental question for anybody keen to contribute to improving public policy: ‘what is prosperity and how do we know when we have it?’"

Diane Coyle, 2018https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/Bennett_Insitute_Launch_Report.pdf

......................

Dr Jen Rogers, RSS vice-president, said: 'In an era of fake news, I don’t think that there’s ever been a better time to commend those journalists who are championing statistics and promoting the importance of evidence based news.

.......................

"Cambridge Professor David Spiegelhalter joins the How To: Academy to teach us how to distinguish reliable statistics from suspect fake news. As President of the Royal Statistical Society, he is a world-renowned authority on data science; but as a BBC broadcaster and author, he has perfected the art of helping the rest of us make sense of the conceptual issues at the heart of this challenging discipline."

How to Make Sense of Statistics | how to: Academy. Material for 2019 talk.http://www.howtoacademy.com/courses/make-sense-statistics-david-john-spiegelhalter

....................................

"The least reliable science can get the most coverage...

Out of many possible grumbles, four stand out for me:

There is not enough acknowledgment of the stage of the scientific process: there is a huge distinction between early animal work, and the results of large clinical trials or a combined analysis of all the major studies

Too much notice is taken of single studies, or the change from a previous period of a single statistic such as unemployment or crime. These isolated results are rarely ‘significant’, in any sense, and context and longer-terms trends are needed for reliable conclusions

Real life is complex. Medical treatments have harms and benefits – two people faced with exactly the same evidence could come up with entirely different choices as to what is best for them. But treatments tend to be declared as either a breakthrough or a scandal

Uncertainty is ignored. The substantial margins of error on unemployment and migration statistics can mean that many column-inches are spent trying to interpret changes that may be illusory."

...

"The recent House of Lords report on polling recommended that the RSS work with IPSO and others to provide training for journalists to ask the right questions when judging the quality of data."

"It requires considerable skill to report data-based claims in a way that is engaging and yet true to the evidence."

https://www.statslife.org.uk/features/3790-risk-statistics-and-the-media

Significance   @ signmagazine  Dec 4

The @ SocMetricsComm  wants all parties to agree on its approach to measuring poverty. @ SocialStatsMan , @ eagarratt  and @ GrahamWhitham  assess its chances of success https:// rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j. 1740- 9713.2018.01204.x   … pic.twitter.com/3OIrGVkMTi

Significance (@signmagazine) | Twitter https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:83XsH7QYdwkJ:https://twitter.com/signmagazine%3Flang%3Den+&cd=15&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=opera

..............

"Cambridge Professor David Spiegelhalter joins the How To: Academy to teach us how to distinguish reliable statistics from suspect fake news. As President of the Royal Statistical Society, he is a world-renowned authority on data science; but as a BBC broadcaster and author, he has perfected the art of helping the rest of us make sense of the conceptual issues at the heart of this challenging discipline."

How to Make Sense of Statistics | how to: Academy http://www.howtoacademy.com/courses/make-sense-statistics-david-john-spiegelhalter

..............

"We will look at how decisions made in the presentation of the press release influences the reception of a story and guide the discussion of it into directions possibly not intended by the scientists involved."

Hauke Riesch    &David J. Spiegelhalter

Pages 47-64 | Received 16 Jan 2009, Accepted 30 Jul 2009, Published online: 16 Feb 2011

Health, Risk & Society: Vol 13, No 1 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698575.2010.540645?journalCode=chrs20

...............

"I genuinely believe that statistics is an honourable and immensely worthwhile profession, full of decent people who have a proper respect for the truth."

David Spiegelhalterhttps://www.rss.org.uk/RSS/Join_the_RSS/Meet_our_members/Member_Profiles/RSS/Join_the_RSS/Member_profiles.aspx?hkey=05f4f294-1a8b-4429-8dbb-124654aceca0

.............................

David Spiegelhalter:

"Out of many possible grumbles, four stand out for me:

There is not enough acknowledgment of the stage of the scientific process: there is a huge distinction between early animal work, and the results of large clinical trials or a combined analysis of all the major studies

Too much notice is taken of single studies....

Uncertainty is ignored. The substantial margins of error on unemployment and migration statistics can mean that many column-inches are spent trying to interpret changes that may be illusory."

https://www.statslife.org.uk/features/3790-risk-statistics-and-the-media

..................

"official statistics that meet the test of practical utility are to be compiled and made available on an impartial basis by official statistical agencies to honor citizens’ entitlement to public information."

Principle 1, United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics https://unstats.un.org/unsd/dnss/gp/fp-english.pdf

....................

"Studying one indicator at a time in development research is likely to be misleading since poverty is multidimensional. Multiple deprivation (such as the strong correlation between a lack of education and a lack of many of the other basic conditions for an adequate life) is of vital interest in targeting disadvantage."

Denise Lievesley, President of the Royal Statistical SocietyPresidential Address2001https://www.rss.org.uk/Images/PDF/events/rss-presidents-address-lievesley.pdf

.....................................

"For the BBC, the overarching theme that emerged was that questioning, challenge and explaining a lack of certainty was essential, as was ensuring that the BBC continues to reflect the span of opinion."

Diane Coyle, BBC Vice Chair 6 November 2012Comment on the BBC Trust seminar on impartiality and economic reportinghttp://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/news/comment/economics_seminar.html

......................

"The new SDGs cover climate change as well as poverty and inequality and, as Hetan Shah explained, throw up all kinds of questions relating to statistics, including ‘how do we know we are achieving these goals?’ and ‘can we trust the numbers that we have?’"

Event report – Measuring international development at the Hay Festival | StatsLife https://www.statslife.org.uk/features/2286-measuring-international-development-rss-hay-festival-event-report

...................

"you are right to be concerned with how we can improve the quality of public debate using statistics. Three things would help. To ensure transparency, government should publish the evidence base for any new policy."

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/01/celebrate-statistics-vital-part-democracy

.............

"a recent World Bank study showed that nearly half of low-and middle-income countries had insufficient data to monitor poverty rates (2002-2011)"

New partnership for development data launches at UN summitStatsLife Royal Statistical Society 5 October 2015https://www.statslife.org.uk/news/2495-global-partnership-for-sustainable-development-data-launches-at-un-summit

.................................

"Reporting margins of error is essential for readers to critically assess the reliability of a source. We understand that statistics based stories need to be presented in a way that is newsworthy but it is always important for readers to have all the facts. The margin of error should therefore always be made clear so the public can have confidence in the statistical information being presented to them and be able to assess it for themselves."

"The BBC’s correction process is a related area which we believed could be improved. We are aware of other outlets that have a policy of publishing corrections on online articles, and we believe this to be good practice. For BBC stories, corrections are made with no mention that the article has been amended, making such corrections very difficult to identify. ...

Quick response rates are an especially important principle with regards to statistical corrections, as this leads to more timely reporting of the correct information. In the age of 24/7 journalism, two weeks seems like an unduly long response time.

Upholding timely and accurate statistical reporting should be a key principle for the BBC in its role as a public service, and in its dialogue with the public and with regards to online content, we ideally would like corrections to be dealt with on the day they are received."

Response from the Royal Statistical Society toBBC Trust Impartiality Review: BBC’s reporting of statistics2015

.........................

Filling global population data gaps: an interview with Andy TatemWritten by Web News Editor on 07 June 2016. Posted in Features

The Sustainable Development Goals is an ambitious set of targets agreed by members of the United Nations to eradicate poverty around the globe, but how do we know whether we are achieving them? How do we define the goalposts in order to check that we are moving in the right direction?

In order to measure the progress being made, the UN has its own expert group within its statistics division http://unstats.un.org/sdgs/ devoted to creating a framework of indicators and statistical data to monitor progress and inform policy regarding the SDGs. Key challenges include a lack of data – in some countries it has been decades since the last census, so even basic data - knowing how many people there are in each part of a country - is out of date or simply inaccurate. ...

There is also strong evidence that geographical variations in rates of poverty are linked to factors such as remoteness, urbanicity, mobility, social network characteristics and consumption - all of which can be mapped using satellite and mobile phone data. This enables further insights into a given population. 'By leveraging and integrating these multiple data sources,' he says, 'we can map key population characteristics that form the SDGs accurately.’

7 June 2016https://www.statslife.org.uk/features/2904-filling-global-population-data-gaps-an-interview-with-andy-tatem

........................

 

RSS events

Wednesday 22 June 2016, 06:00pm - 08:00pm  

Location Royal Statistical Society, 12 Errol Street, London, EC1Y 8LX

Speaker: Professor Andrew Tatem (University of Southampton)

Title: Mapping progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals

The UN sustainable development goals, an intergovernmental set of 17 aspirational goals and 169 targets to be achieved by 2030, were launched last year. These include ending poverty and malnutrition, improving health and education, and building resilience to natural disasters and climate change. A particular focus across the goals and targets is achievement 'everywhere', ensuring that no one gets left behind and that progress is monitored at subnational levels to avoid national-level statistics masking local heterogeneities. How will this subnational monitoring of progress towards meeting the goals be undertaken when many countries will undertake just a single census in the 2015-2030 monitoring period?

................................

David Spiegelhalter, President-elect of the Royal Statistical Society, 2016:

"In my angrier moments I feel that number abuse should be made a criminal offence."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/17/politicians-dodgy-statistics-tricks-guide

..............

"Next time you hear a politician boasting that unemployment has dropped by 30,000 over the previous quarter, just remember that this is an estimate based on a survey. And that estimate has a margin of error of +/- 80,000, meaning that unemployment may well have gone down, but it may have gone up – the best we can say is that it hasn’t changed very much, but that hardly makes a speech. And to be fair, the politician probably has no idea that this is an estimate and not a head count."

"We deserve to have statistical evidence presented in a fair and balanced way, and it’s only by public scrutiny and exposure that anything will ever change. There are noble efforts to dam the flood of naughty numbers. The BBC’s More or Less team take apart dodgy data, organisations such as Full Fact and Channel 4’s FactCheck expose flagrant abuses, the UK Statistics Authority write admonishing letters. The Royal Statistical Society offers statistical training for MPs, and the House of Commons library publishes a Statistical Literacy Guide: how to spot spin and inappropriate use of statistics .

They are all doing great work, but the shabby statistics keep on coming. Maybe these nine points can provide a checklist, or even the basis for a competition – how many points can your favourite minister score? In my angrier moments I feel that number abuse should be made a criminal offence. But that’s a law unlikely to be passed by politicians.

David Spiegelhalter is the Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge and president elect of the Royal Statistical Society"

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/17/politicians-dodgy-statistics-tricks-guide

.............

"With statistics, once somebody puts a number in front of you, you can pick holes in it and really analyse whether it stands up or falls apart.

To celebrate the power of numbers to shine a light on fake news and bogus claims, the Royal Statistical Society runs a competition for the best statistic of the year.

They want people to send in the stat that captures the zeitgeist of 2018, or in some way reveals something surprising or powerful - a hitherto unseen truth."

Lies, damned lies and favourite stats - BBC News Date claimed by BBC (which has a habit of giving the wrong date when stories are altered)24 August 2018https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45285615

.....................

"Researchers and evaluators working in development are highly dependent on household surveys. However many of the most excluded populations are either outside households – such as street children, or sparsely distributed – such as the disabled. The need for better methods to measure such groups is only becoming more accute as the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) challenge to 'leave no one behind', is being translated into programmes on the ground. At the same time semi formal service providers, especially private schools, are becoming ever more important.

...

Problems of unregistered and mobile populations in development  Dr Cora Mezger, head of official statistics portfolio, Oxford Policy

Management: Unregistered and mobile populations and the SDGs

Where there is no frame: applying methods from ecological statistics in international developmentOctober 2017https://www.statslife.org.uk/events/eventdetail/1020/-/where-there-is-no-frame-applying-methods-from-ecological-statistics-in-international-development

.....................

Science and Technology Committee Press Release: Evidence hearing  

  

Science And Technology Committee<scitechcom@parliament.uk>

17 November 2017 at 08:51

House of Commons

Science and Technology Committee

EVIDENCE HEARING: Research integrity

Tuesday 21 November 2017 at 10.50 am, Committee Room 5, Palace of Westminster

Science and Technology Committee holds its second evidence session on Research integrity. Watch it online at Parliament TV.

Witnesses:

At 10.50 am

Professor David Hand, Royal Statistical Society

.......................

"the RSS is looking for the numbers that tell the story of 2018 for our annual ‘Statistic of the Year’. ...

"The judging panel is chaired by RSS’s President, Sir David Spiegelhalter, while the other panel members are:

Mark Easton – BBC News Dr Liberty Vittert – University of Glasgow Mona Chalabi – Guardian US Dame Jil Matheson – Former National Statistician Professor Diane Coyle – University of Cambridge Ben Page – Ipsos MORI Dr Jennifer Rogers – University of Oxford / RSS Vice-President Dr Gemma Tetlow – Institute for Government ...

'We had a very eclectic and enlightening list of winning and "highly commended" statistics last year, when we first launched this initiative,' says David Spiegelhalter. 'For Statistic of the Year 2018, I hope we’ll be able to announce an even more insightful set of statistics which will encapsulate some of the big issues of the year – showing how powerful and important statistics can be.' "

Less than a month to nominate your #StatoftheYear!https://www.statslife.org.uk/news/3969-one-month-to-go-until-nominations-close-for-statoftheyear

..............................

On 18 December 2018 the Royal Statistical Society announced its "Statistics of the Year" - not the "RSS statistics of the year", but the "Statistics of the Year" - and made numerous factual claims. The press release read,

"Hetan Shah, RSS Executive Director: "...The statistics on this list capture some of the zeitgeist of 2018. Hearteningly, the world is getting better when it comes to poverty..."

and in relation to all ten awards,

"these numbers tell us how the world continued to change in 2018." "

"Hetan Shah, RSS Executive Director: “We were delighted with the quality and quantity of this year’s nominations - with well over 200 received. The statistics on this list capture some

of the zeitgeist of 2018. Hearteningly, the world is getting better when it comes to poverty, even though it’s often hard to notice. And renewable energy in the UK is really taking off. But there are plenty of issues left to tackle including plastic waste, women on boards, and even how many Jaffa cakes come in a special Christmas box - highlighting the phenomenon of ‘shrinkflation’. Statistics help us make sense of the world around us, and these numbers tell us how the world continued to change in 2018.”

..................

On 19 December this was published:

"The origins of the society in 1834 were for the public good. As president, I want to focus on what that means in the 21st century. ...

...the RSS needs to engage in debates about ...the issue of trustworthiness in data systems around us"

Deborah Ashby President-elect of the Royal Statistical Society19 December 2018https://wwwf.imperial.ac.uk/blog/imperial-medicine/2018/12/19/noel-hypothesis-my-life-as-a-medical-statistician/

..................

[Professor Shah lists himself as CEO]

......................

Liberty Vittert

Visiting Assistant Professor in Statistics, Washington University in St Louis

In reply to Patrick de Freitas

Patrick, I agree. I’m not sure how this would be a “leftie” or “rightie” article. The amount of plastic incinerated is made very clear inside the article text (12%) which still leaves 79% in

landfills and oceans. Incinerated certainly doesn’t mean recycled so that statistic of 90.5% is completely accurate.

If you recycled all the plastic garbage in the world, you could buy the NFL, Apple and Microsoft https://theconversation.com/if-you-recycled-all-the-plastic-garbage-in-the-world-you-could-buy-the-nfl-apple-and-microsoft-108324#comment_1805342

John Bailer

John Bailer is one of the founding panelists on Stats+Stories.   He is also university distinguished professor and chair in the Department of Statistics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

He is currently President-elect of the International Statistical Institute and previously served on the previously on the ASA Board of Directors.  

............................

Stats and StoriesProduced by the University of Miami and the American Statistical AssociationDated 27 December:

Spiegelhalter: That was a deliberate choice and we’ve also chosen one negative and one positive there. The U.K. one is a positive environmental one, that on the 30th of June the 28.7 percent is the figure and that's the peak percentage of all electricity produced in the U.K. is solar power, on the 30th of June. So that means that amazingly for this certain country, solar power was the biggest producer of electricity. Briefly, extremely briefly and that number is exact. That is a true statistic. But of course it was only brief, but it's a staggering change from you know, when it was so low, nobody thought about it 10 years ago in this country.

Bailer: So could you give us the list of kind of the highly commended statistics international?

Spiegelhalter: Yes. We've got some very positive and negative ones. The positive one is that in spite of all the stories you know that we hear about the decline of living standards in the West, worldwide the percentage of the population that it considers living in absolute poverty, has more than halved since 2008, that’s in the last 10 years. It has gone down from 18 percent to essentially 9 percent and it is a quite extraordinary benefit that this happened to people. And this isn't a story that makes the international news, that far fewer people are living in absolute poverty than 10 years ago.

Bailer: And then, just as a…well before we go to the other ones, I had a question for you in terms of reporting this. When I saw it, I was wondering if 50 percent reduction in absolute poverty would be a more impressive statistic to me than 9.5 percent...

Pennington: Yeah, maybe.

Spiegelhalter: No exactly. We chose deliberately to use the percentage point reduction. Then we can say it’s halved, essentially, but in this case we would have a bigger emotional hit to say poverty has halved in the last ten years. But we want to do this statistic, which is the percentage point reduction. We could frame this and give it a stronger emotional hit, but we chose not to.

Bailer: You are a risk difference guy, than a risk ratio guy here.

Spiegelhalter: Yeah exactly I believe in absolute risks, absolute proportions. We know that relative risk, relative changes can be highly manipulative. The way in which to communicate changes over time.

Campbell: Is part of the statistics of the year to how much behind the final decisions is what's going to attract a news story? We need to get people interested in and learning about statistics. What's going to get the New York Times to cover this, what's going to get the British press to cover this?

Bailer: Yes. There is a trade-off there. We can't just have a whole lot of negative stories and they can’t be too dull. We want them interesting, but at the same time they can’t all be about celebrities or whatever. Last year's was quite a nice mix. We couldn't find quite like that this time. We want good news stories but we also want ones that are just important and frankly ones that have a story that’s not generally being told, rather than just the celebrity stories. The stories about poverty being halved in the last 10 years, nobody's written a story about that this year. That’s not in our news.

Bailer: So you had 3 more that were in your highly commended group. So you want to just run through them real quickly and then we can…

https://statsandstories.net/entertainment1/stats-of-the-year

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"If you recycled all the plastic garbage in the world, you could buy the NFL, Apple and MicrosoftLiberty Vittert, Washington University in St Louis

Published 4:02 am PST, Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Liberty Vittert, Washington University in St Louis

(THE CONVERSATION) This year, I served on the judging panel for The Royal Statistical Society’s International Statistic of the Year.

On Dec. 18, we announced the winner: 90.5 percent, the amount of plastic that has never been recycled. Okay – but why is that such a big deal?

Much like Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” competition, the international statistic is meant to capture the zeitgeist of this year."

if you could monetize all of the plastic trash clogging up our environment – including the 12 percent that is incinerated– you could buy some of the world’s biggest businesses.

Assuming it costs 3.25 cents to produce a plastic bottle, we can estimate that a grocery bag contains about US$1 of plastic material production. (I took a grocery bag and filled it with 31 bottles.) So 7.2 trillion grocery bags is the equivalent of a cool $7.2 trillion.

What can you buy with that? Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Walmart, Exxon, GM, AT&T, Facebook, Bank of America, Visa, Intel, Home Depot, HSBC, Boeing, Citigroup, Anheuser-Busch, all the NFL teams, all the MLB teams and all the Premier League Football teams.

In other words, if someone could collect and recycle all the unrecycled plastic on earth, this person would be richer than any individual on the planet.

One of the most difficult aspects of statistics is putting the numbers into a context that we can wrap our heads around, into a format that means something to us. Whatever it is that speaks to you, all I can say is that this speaks to me. It’s clearly time to clean up our act.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/If-you-recycled-all-the-plastic-garbage-in-the-13474181.php

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"The UK winner of statistic of the year pertained to the amount of energy created by solar energy - which peaked at 28.7 per cent on June 30."  

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6507657/Scary-stat-90-5-percent-plastic-not-recycled.html

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"This issue of Significance is devoted to global poverty and ways of understanding and alleviating it."

Royal Statistical Society Publications https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2014.00729.x

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"The statistics on this list capture some of the zeitgeist of 2018. Hearteningly, the world is getting better when it comes to poverty, even though it’s often hard to notice... these numbers tell us how the world continued to change in 2018."

"The judges found these figures to be striking, worrying and timely as 2018 has seen unprecedented concern about the amount of plastic in rivers and oceans"

"WINNER - UK STATISTIC OF THE YEAR 2018

27.8%: the peak percentage of all electricity produced in the UK due to solar power on 30th June.

The judges considered several statistics which related to the UK’s unusually hot summer. In their view, the most insightful and surprising figure was 27.8% - the peak percentage of the UK’s electricity supply which came from solar power during 30th June, making it, albeit briefly, the country’s number one electricity source (ahead of gas). The statistic demonstrates the fast-growing importance of solar within the UK’s electricity-generating mix; its contribution was negligible only a decade ago. This step-change in solar generation has also contributed to renewable energy accounting for a record proportion of UK electricity supplies (30.5%) over the past year. Dame Jil Matheson commented: “2018 was a landmark year for solar-generated electricity in the UK - as well as for renewable energy more generally. In the current climate, in particular, we should commend this highly successful example of public policy-making. Since the Climate Change Act was passed ten years ago, some really impressive progress has been made. This very welcome figure is deservedly the RSS’s ‘UK Statistic of the Year’ for 2018."

"A member of the judging panel, Ben Page, Chief Executive of Ipsos MORI, said: “The rise in fake-news..."

"Professor Diane Coyle, an eminent economist and member of the judging panel, said:..."

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"Back to ways of measuring poverty, which can also be complex. Income alone is not sufficient –though the commonly used “dollar a day” is a sometimes useful rule of thumb. Things called multidimensional poverty indices have been developed..."

"The World Bank claims that poverty in the world halved between 1990 and 2010. If that is true, it is a major achievement. The pessimist or cynic in me finds it hard to believe, so I sought Richard King's expert opinion.

“I think that the number deserves credit to some extent. Trying to quantify world poverty is obviously riddled with complications. A problem with a lot of these global figures is that the empirical basis for them can be quite weak. The World Bank figure relies on a lot of household surveys. A lot of those surveys in many countries are missing; a lot are quite old now; a lot are unreliable. Another issue is the purchasing power parity, which is not always credible, especially in China.” If you are working out how many people survive on a dollar a day, the currency exchange rate obviously matters, but so does what a dollar or its equivalent will actually buy in the country in question. “There is a lot of evidence that purchasing power parity isn't particularly credible for China at the moment, and obviously China weighs very heavily in the calculation, because of its very rapid progress and its huge population. So the World Bank figure is a commendable effort with a lot of clear weaknesses.

“The other difficulty with that figure is that it is a very binary threshold. It sets a dollar a day as the poverty line. If you look at people who have come out of the slightly higher poverty line of $2.50 a day there has been a lot less progress. There is still a lot of transient poverty, of people moving just above and below that line. And that is always going to be a problem with those very binary ways of measuring progress.

“That is the reason why Nancy Birdsall at the Centre for Global Development has come up with a proposition for using a country's median wealth as a better indicator of its population's poverty or wealth.”

What, then, of the future? Is poverty, however you care to define it – perhaps as the ability to lead a decent life – increasing or decreasing in the world?

“It is difficult to say. We are all reliant on these global numbers which, as we have seen, have their inherent problems. Undoubtedly there has been a lot of progress in many areas since the 1990s. Until recently we have been on the right track. We might have been moving more slowly than is ideal, but progress has generally been in the right direction.

“But one of the increasing concerns now is not so much absolute income poverty as the level of inequality; and we are entering an era where we are banging up against some quite serious resource constraints in terms of food, climate, water and land. We are yet really to

see the implications that that is going to have. The future is going to be more precarious, and more volatile.

“Population pressures are pushing on those resources, but more important than the level of population is the level of consumption, which is clearly the bigger issue.”

Should we all, then, reduce our standard of living?

“We should make our lives less full of material possessions. It might mean working out what well‐being really is. I wouldn't necessarily see that as reducing our standard of living; more as redefining what it means to live well.”

Royal Statistical Society Publications https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2014.00724.x

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"As a charity, we advocate the key role of statistics and data in society, and we work to ensure that policy formulation and decision making are informed by evidence for the public good. 

Everything we do is guided by our Strategic Plan 2018-22, which has six goals at its heart:

Statistics and the public interest. For statistics to be used effectively in the public interest, so that policy formulation and decision-making are informed by evidence of the good of society."

https://www.rss.org.uk/RSS/About/RSS/About_the_RSS/About_top.aspx?hkey=e8216e58-513f-4d7c-be9d-f989d9eed036

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"Max Roser from Oxford points out that newspapers could have legitimately run the headline 'Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 137,000  since yesterday' every single day for the past 25 years"...

The recent House of Lords report on polling recommended that the RSS work with IPSO and others to provide training for journalists to ask the right questions when judging the quality of data.....

The media could follow the BBC in increasing support for data-driven journalism, defer to their specialist reporters, and keep sub-editors on more of a leash. And press regulators can come down hard on practice that breaks their code, such as including false and misleading ‘quotes’ in headlines. IPSO has started producing resources and guidance for journalists and editors, and it would be timely for them to produce guidance on statistics: the RSS fed into the development of the BBC’s editorial guidance on statistics and would be pleased to help others such as IPSO in a similar endeavour. Guidance for science reporting drawn up by the Science Media Centre for the Leveson Inquiry already exists.

It requires considerable skill to report data-based claims in a way that is engaging and yet true to the evidence. I have reasonable confidence in the journalists: it remains for the rest of the pipeline to rise to the challenge. 

Careless statistical reporting could cost lives.

Risk, statistics and the media: David Spiegelhalter's IPSO lecture | StatsLife https://www.statslife.org.uk/features/3790-risk-statistics-and-the-media

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"Dr Jen Rogers, RSS vice-president, said: 'In an era of fake news, I don’t think that there’s ever been a better time to commend those journalists who are championing statistics and promoting the importance of evidence based news" ...

Entries will be expected to show integrity in their presentation, explanation and use of statistics – avoiding distortion and highlighting the extent of uncertainties."

https://www.statslife.org.uk/news/4036-statistical-excellence-awards-2019-nominations-open