Dear CHANCE Colleagues,

As humans, sometimes we can be disturbingly inhumane. In the news, we see stories of cyberbullying, police killings, racial hatred, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. Bigotry and prejudice are aimed at people of particular religions or country of origin, people of color, and LBGT communities. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 1/3 of all women are affected by sexual violence.

However, the fight for human rights is gaining strength. In 2017, #MeToo was created to help demonstrate the widespread prevalence of sexual assault and harassment of women in the workplace and beyond. The response to the movement has been enormous, and the cause has grown to include men and women of all colors and ages, and to support all people who are marginalized. Research on human rights is also an important part of this progress.

Human rights is the theme of this special issue of CHANCE. Five articles and an editorial discuss various aspects of human rights, their quantification, and the value that good data and sound research can provide. Dr. Robin Mejia and Dr. Megan Price served as special guest editors for this special issue. Dr. Mejia holds a special faculty appointment in the Department of Statistics and manages the Statistics and Human Rights Program at the Center for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where her research focuses on understanding risk factors for human rights violations and estimating the prevalence of conflict events. Dr. Price is the executive director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, where she designs strategies and methods for statistical analysis of human rights data. I thank Dr. Mejia and Dr. Price for helping to organize this important special issue. They discuss the five articles on human rights in their editorial.

In an independent article, Kimmo Vehkalahti, Juuso Koponen, and Hanna Kuusi examine 100-year-old graphical train schedules in Finland, their evolution, and how they reflect the history of Finland, exactly 100 years after the 1918 civil war in Finland and 101 years after its independence from Russia.

In our columns, Mary Gray asks, “Is statistics down for the count?” in the Odds of Justice and discusses the public misunderstanding of probability and issues in survey methodology as they relate to the 2016 election. In The Big Picture, Nicole Lazar discusses the divide-and-combine approach to address issues in Big Data with an interesting example in meta-analysis. Christian Robert then reviews Testing R Code by Richard Colton; Truth or Truthiness: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think like a Data Scientist by CHANCE‘s own Howard Wainer; The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom by Stephen Stigler; Errors, Blunders, and Lies by David Salsburg; and What Makes Variables Random: Probability for the Applied Researcher by Peter Veazie.

Scott Evans

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