For HuffPost UK
Underrepresentation of Black and Asian individuals in teaching, especially at senior levels, is depriving pupils of multi-ethnic role models and risks sending message that “Black people are not capable of being teachers”.
US Election 2020
The return of 2016’s third-party voters to the Democratic Party in Wisconsin, robust support in west Pennsylvania, demographic change and record turnout in Arizona and a blue shift in the Atlanta suburbs made the difference in 2020.
Prediction-oriented visualisation
Education
How did the algorithm work and why did the exam regulator end up designing a system for awarding grades that favoured private school students and was biased against top students at the poorest performing schools?
The cancellation of A Level exams has created stress and anxiety for resitting and home-schooled students, with many fearing they will be unable to receive a fair grade without paying inflated fees.
Birmingham News
Birmingham’s infant mortality rate is the highest in England and almost double the national average with factors including high poverty, low identification of growth-restricted babies during pregnancy, and genetic anomalies linked to consanguineous marriage in the Pakistani community.
Analysis of the Labour Force Survey suggests the West Midlands’ foreign-born population fell 27% in just twelve months – the biggest fall of any region in the UK. Is the data accurate, and what could explain such a dramatic exodus?
Polarisation in America
President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to heal the wounds of division in America, but with a majority of Republican supporters viewing him as an illegitimate president, his ability to unify is limited. Instead, unity will depend on the future electoral strategy of the Republican party.
Statistics and Basketball
For decades cognitive psychologists used the ‘hot hand fallacy’ as a perfect example of how human intuition can lead people to false beliefs. Meanwhile, the basketball community stubbornly clung onto the idea of streaky shooting. Then two economists discovered a pair of small but crucial errors in the original study that flipped the debate on its head.
Inequality
The statistics we use to measure global inequality often sound alarming, but do we understand what they actually mean? Are they the best ways of measuring and thinking about global inequality? Or are there better methods out there that deserve more of our attention?
In the Bay Area over the past 70 years, political and racial divisions have evolved into economic inequalities. Now local policymakers are struggling to agree a solution that can unite neighbouring communities and prevent low-income families from leaving California.
Viewers of BBC's Question Time were shocked when an audience member earning over £80,000 a year claimed to be in the bottom 50% of income earners. But the tendency for the higher paid to underestimate the incomes of others is more common than you might expect.