Last Tuesday I spent the day in the Royal Statistical Society HQ in London with 10 other statisticians training to be statistical ambassadors. For the day we were joined by Scott Keir (from the RSS), Prof David Spiegelhalter (Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, University of Cambridge), Timandra Harkness (journalist and comedian) and by Prof Kevin McConway (Open University) for the morning.
The morning started with the typical ice-breaker activity of finding things in common with one another – there was a definite circus theme to many of my connections; I’m not sure what this says about the group! This was followed by getting down to the serious business of thinking about how to communicate statistical concepts to a wider audience – everything from multiple testing; screening tests to margin of error and p-values. We moved onto composing a short description of ourselves and our work – we could pick the format of a short paragraph, a tweet or twitter biography or ten key words. The shared feedback on this was really useful in thinking about the problem.
Lunch and photographs were next on the main agenda. I still haven’t seen the resulting photographs so I can’t really comment on how these turned out! After lunch, Timandra really kicked off with some of the stranger and funnier challenges such as communicating statistical concepts (or relatively well-known statistical stories) through charades and sound effects. We then progressed to thinking about stage presence and non-verbal means of communication. Our last major activity was to pair up and create a scene from a movie based on a statistical concept. Timandra assigned a variety of genres to use; we were assigned “dystopian science fiction” – which resulted in me ending it with “an Irish mammy guilt stare” [direct quote from another trainee ambassador!] however it was the explanation of multiple testing in the style of a musical that had us all in fits of laughter. Other genres included James Bond, romantic comedy and horror (vampire). The training element of the day ended with a nice example using giant playing cards lead by David.
To be decided 