Statistics Breakfast with Mark Hansen (Thursdays in February and March 2021)

Some of the biggest stories of 2020 were statistical. We tracked exponential curves as COVID-19 spread across the country. On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we reassessed the pace of climate change. And after the 2020 Election, the country debated whether any of the then-President’s claims about voter fraud could be true, attempting to estimate the true number of missing or incorrectly counted ballots. In each story, an increase in observation and measurement, in data, helped us understand little more about our current situation and predict where things might go. Statistics, the science of data and inferences we make from data, was and is at the center of these stories. The Brown Institute will be hosting a series of “Statistics Breakfasts” to introduce CJS students and alumni to provide a basic grounding in statistics reasoning. We assume no background whatsoever — this material is not difficult, but is extremely important for journalists to understand. Interested? Please contact Mark Hansen, markh@columbia.edu. Also, if there are topics you’d like to see covered please drop me an email — if there is enough interest, we can run the breakfasts for longer than 4 weeks. Perhaps you can be a presenter as well, bringing your questions that the group can help to reason through.