Green Templeton marks World Statistics Day 2020

The third World Statistics Day is celebrated around the globe on 20 October 2020 with the theme ‘Connecting the world with the data we can trust’.

This year the theme has particular resonance, as many of us have realised the importance of authoritative, trustworthy data as we try to manage our lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, and as we appreciate the value of sharing these data in order to learn from other countries.

Green Templeton College has many reasons to note World Statistics Day.

Historically Richard Doll, the founder of Green College, pioneered the collection and analysis of robust, methodical, ideologically-neutral data to draw conclusions about the effect of smoking on health; evidence which has saved the lives of millions of people.

Tim Harford, a neighbour of the college in Jericho, Oxford, has written about Doll’s insight and determination in his recent book, How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers. A quote from the author, of particularly relevance to the current global situation, is: “I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their own preconceptions.”

Good statistics are critical for understanding the world around us.

This important tradition is continued today when Green Templeton can count many diligent and committed health statisticians and epidemiologists among its members, such as Senior Research Fellow Professor Martin Landray, who is co-leading the RECOVERY trial, and Associate Fellow Dr Coral Milburn-Curtis, who co-ordinates the Quant Hub, a research statistics support programme available to all members of the college.

Many college members engage with the media in order to bring sound data to inform policy and the public debate.

The fact that Green Templeton is the home of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is another reason for us to underline the importance of information we can trust. The institute has focussed attention on the issue of “fake news” over recent years. In April, the institute released a factsheet called ‘Types, sources, and claims of COVID-19 misinformation’, which identified some of the main misinformation related to the pandemic at that time.

Elsewhere, Honorary Fellow Professor Denise Lievesley, former Principal of Green Templeton, has presented a fascinating webinar for the institute called ‘Statistics and the battle against misinformation’.

Finally, to mark World Statistics Day, we’d like to share this poem, ‘From the Gospel of Quarantine: Statistics and Silence’, written by Green Templeton casual staff member Linnet Drury. She read the poem on BBC Radio 4’s More or Less in September and was recently named as one of the winners of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2020.

From the Gospel of Quarantine: The Statistics and the Silence by Linnet Drury

The statistics grew exponentially like
everyone’s uncut hair or the hedges
forsaken by the council or like the strangling
queues round shops. The statistics

couldn’t understand why no one else appreciated
their magnitude, why no one was proud of them.
They couldn’t be kept quiet; too young to realise,
too old to be expected to

find out for themselves.

Silence became chewy. Politicians
began to speak about science and scientists
began to speak about people, which confused
the statistics, slowing them down.

But they had already grown too far
to be reclaimed, like how
when I next see you you’ll be a head taller
and I’d have missed it, my cousin

will have learnt to talk without me, my granny
will have shrunk, and the silence
will have begun to take root, having taken our friends
since the first day.

World Statistics Day is organised under the guidance of the United Nations Statistical Commission.