WYSO is partnering with Stats and Stories, a podcast produced at Miami University.

We swim in a virtual stew of data. From voting data, to health data, to crime data, there’s likely a number somewhere that, with a little crunching, can get you a better understanding of your community. The task of crunching those numbers and making them intelligible for a broad audience is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories. Rosemary Pennington is joined in the studio are regular panelists John Bailer, Chair of Miami Statistics Department, and Richard Campbell, former Chair of Media, Journalism and Film. Their guest today is Simon Rogers, a data journalist who authored the book Facts Are Sacred, which quote, “reveals how data has changed our world and what it tells us”. He’s currently a data editor at Google, and before joining that new media giant, Rogers served as a data editor at Twitter, and worked at The Guardian where he created the newspaper’s data blog. 

Oakwood city officials are promising to review police policies and continue a program in anti-bias training for officers.

At an Oakwood City Council meeting Monday night, officials addressed a report released this fall by the nonprofit Legal Aid firm Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, or ABLE, which found one-third of all Oakwood traffic tickets written in 2016 went to black drivers in a city with a black population of less than 1 percent.

Oakwood officials dispute the report’s methodology and say its data isn’t comprehensive or conclusive.

I wander into the fields and woods this soft and cloudy morning.

Clover is keeping the paths green, along with some dandelions, some plantain. Wind rustles the dry grass and the brittle leaves. I can hear distant crows but no other birds for the first miles. Then the whinny of a robin as though it were frightened or had been attacked.

Craneflies follow me up into High Prairie. Moss is still bright beside me, becomes the dominant green in the woods. A few red raspberry branches and a bank of honeysuckles keep their leaves.