Royal Statistical Society

Mags Wiley speaks to Rachel Hogg about the work she does as a statistician at NHS Blood and Transplant, as part of the team looking into the reasons why mortality rates for patients on the lung transplant list are so high and how better patient care can be delivered.

Jen Rogers interviews Amy-Jayne McKnight to discuss the challenges associated with genomic data. We consider how data is captured, processed, and then analysed and AJ outlines the challenges presented by sources of variability.

Brian Tarran, editor of Significance (www.significancemagazine.com), talks to Darren Dahly (University College Cork) and Maarten van Smeden (Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum) about Twitter and the role the social media platform can play in supporting and developing a statistical career – from finding research collaborators to critiquing papers and everything in between.

Brian Tarran, editor of Significance (www.significancemagazine.com), interviews John MacInnes (http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/sociology/macinnes_john), chair of the Royal Statistical Society Professional Affairs Committee and professor of sociology at the University of Edinburgh. They discuss the changing forms that statistics is taking in the era of data abundance and the ethical challenges this gives rise to.

Mags Wiley interviews Guy Miscampbell, technical lead at the Social Metrics Commission, on the innovations and methodology behind the Commission’s new measure of poverty for the UK.

To read more about the Social Metrics Commission’s work go to:

https://socialmetricscommission.org.uk/

https://twitter.com/socmetricscomm

Brian Tarran, editor of Significance (www.significancemagazine.com), interviews James Tucker, head of the Quality Centre and Methodology Advisory Service at the Office for National Statistics, about respondent confidentiality, and data privacy and protection. They discuss new threats to privacy such as linkage attacks, and how the creation and release of synthetic data sets can help protect respondents while still supporting evidence-based decision making.

Mags Wiley interviews Kevin Johanson, from the Expert Group on Sámi Statistics based in Norway, on how the group is working on developing statistics on the Sámi people and how these statistics can lead to better policymaking.

Mags Wiley interviews David Smallbone, from the RSS Business & Industrial Section on what exactly is predictive maintenance and the challenges and opportunities it brings.

To find out more about the RSS Business and Industrial Section go to:

https://www.rss.org.uk/RSS/Get_involved/Sections/Business_and_Industrial_Section.aspx?WebsiteKey=bc86df55-c2ae-4d73-8450-66ecc8988ded&hkey=c49e7196-fb1a-4c1d-8259-7c2f6c51e474

Brian Tarran, editor of Significance (www.significancemagazine.com), interviews Thordis L. Thorarinsdottir (https://www.nr.no/~thordis/), chief research scientist of the Norwegian Computing Center, about predicting future sea level rise, dealing with uncertainty in predictions, and advising policy makers on how to prepare for a changing world. For more on this topic, read: “How to save Bergen from the sea? Decisions under uncertainty”, by Peter Guttorp and Thordis L. Thorarinsdottir (https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2018.01125.x).

How have neighbourhoods changed over the past few decades? Sara McDonnell spoke to Professor Chris Lloyd of Queen’s University Belfast about his research that has brought new perspectives on how local communities in Britain have changed, using data from the last five censuses.

See PopChange population grids for Britain, 1971-2011 at http://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/852498/