In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, master data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Alice Wallbank, a professional support lawyer for the law firm Shoosmiths, whose clients include Mercedes-Benz, Octopus Ventures, and Travelodge. The company also specialises in working for businesses in both the property and banking sector.

The Financial Times has garlanded Shoosmiths as “one of Europe’s most innovative law firms”, and Alice’s pioneering role at the company – focused on privacy, data, and increasingly AI – is symptomatic of a business in the vanguard of a profession catching up with the broadest implications of technology.

At the start of this year, Alice co-hosted an excellent ‘data insights’ conference – naturally hybrid, both in the room and online – which featured a keynote from Austrian activist and lawyer, Max Schrems. Schrems is famous for his successful campaigns against Facebook (and Meta) for their violations of European data privacy laws.

Before joining Shoosmiths, Alice spent six years as the principal legal counsel for the cyber and information security division of the leading technology business, QinetiQ.

Alice is a passionate advocate of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), describing it “as a good thing for data privacy – without a shadow of a doubt”. Although first introduced in 2016 and in place since 2018, it has its origins in a 1995 directive, designed to protect the rights and freedoms of individuals from Big Tech. Alice believes this showed “remarkable foresight”.

One of the very few people in the UK, Europe, and the world to have read all 90,000 words of the EU’s AI Act, artificial intelligence gives Alice that fabled reaction to trench warfare of “a combination of boredom and terror”. There are huge potential upsides – such as radiography diagnostics – and massive downsides from a system that is “at heart a self-limiting black box” dealing in “biases in, biases out”.

And in a Data Malarkey exclusive, Alice is our first guest in more than 40 episodes … to sing. She dons her white stilettos, dances round her handbag, and turns the clock back to 1984 for a tuneful rendition of Rockwell’s dancefloor smash, Somebody’s Watching Me – for Alice, an insightful foreshadowing of data privacy issues 40 years into the future.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Shoosmiths home page – https://www.shoosmiths.com

Alice’s profile on the Shoosmiths’ site – https://www.shoosmiths.com/people/cvdetails/alice-wallbank

Alice’s article on Ashley Madison – https://www.grip.globalrelay.com/could-the-ashley-madison-data-breach-happen-today/

Another blog from Alice, this time on the environmental credentials of GDPR.

The EU AI Act – all 90,000 words of it – here

Rockwell’s Somebody’s Watching Me from 1984 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YvAYIJSSZY

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

Join master data storyteller, Sam Knowles, for an enlightening conversation with Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research. As we navigate 2024 which has been dubbed "the ultimate election year," Sir John shares his insights on polling accuracy, political volatility, and data-driven decision-making in the UK and US elections. We explore the intricacies of his more-accurate-than-most exit polling methodology, the challenges of interpreting voter behaviour, and the future of electoral systems. Plus, Sir John reveals his secrets for communicating complex data effectively.

Key Takeaways:

- Sir John Curtice's approach to accurate exit polling

- Analysis of the 2024 UK General Election results

- Challenges of predicting the outcome of the 2024 US election

- Insights on communicating data clearly and avoiding the Curse of Knowledge

• Thoughts on the future of first-past-the-post and proportional representation in the UK

EXTERNAL LINK:

https://bit.ly/4hij0FG - University of Strathclyde

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, we join master data storyteller Sam Knowles, in conversation with Cristina de Balanzo, PhD, Founder and Board Director at Walnut Unlimited, as she delves into the fusion of neuroscience, behavioural science, and strategic insights to unlock human
behaviour. In this engaging discussion, Cristina shares practical examples of how neuroscience informs communication strategies and marketing, and the role of creativity in human understanding. Learn how insights, human behaviour, and neuroscience come together to shape the future of marketing and communication.

Neuroscience has been a constant drumbeat of Cristina’s career. Before founding Walnut more than a decade ago, she was global head of neuroscience at TNS, following a nine-year stint as a strategic planner with McCann Erickson.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Cristina’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/cristina-de-balanzo-ph-d-1693694/

Cristina on X – https://twitter.com/crisbalanzo

Cristina’s article on WARC – “The science of laughter: Why humour is serious business” – https://bit.ly/3zoTtK9

ResearchGate profile for Cristina – https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cristina-De-Balanzo

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, master data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Mike Ellicock, Founder and Chief Executive of The Plain Numbers Project. Plain Numbers says of its purpose: “We enable clear communication of numbers everywhere so that people can better understand the choices they face in life.” This matters, because about half the adults in the UK have the numeracy skills expected of a primary school child. And one in five suffers from “maths anxiety”.

Plain Numbers works with all sorts of organisations to help them communicate the numbers that matter in ways that are clear, fair, and never misleading. Organisations like banks and building societies, insurers and utility companies, national and local government. Plain Numbers trains, assesses, and accredits individuals, teams, and whole organisations to communicate their data more effectively and transparently.

The company’s approach is both deeply practical – developing the skills that businesses need for clear and simple communication of numbers – and deeply strategic, going and gaining access to the most senior decision-makers (often Government ministers) to effect meaningful, systemic change.

The progress Plain Numbers has made in just a few years has been accelerated by the introduction of the Financial Conduct Authority’s rules and guidance on Consumer Duty which “sets high standards of consumer protection across financial services and requires firms to put their customers' needs first”.

Before founding Plain Numbers, Mike was the Founder and Chief Executive of the charity National Numeracy, which he ran throughout the twenty-teens. Prior to that he ran Numicon, an innovative, multi-sensory approach to teaching maths at primary school level, up to the time when Numicon was acquired by Oxford University Press.

For seven years either side of the millennium, Mike was a Captain in the Parachute Regiment. Outside of the day job, he still takes fitness and the realisation of what’s possible physically to new heights – and always through a data-driven, evidence-based lens.

In 2015, Mike broke the world record for running a marathon wearing a 20lb back-pack, shaving ten minutes off the previous best by clocking a time of just 2h 56m 39s, a record that stands to this day. Next year he’s aiming to row around the British Isles in under 40 days.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Plain Numbers home page – https://plainnumbers.org.uk

The Plain Numbers in Practice report from June 2024 – https://bit.ly/4c2e0Bv

Mike’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-ellicock/

FCA Consumer Duty – https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/consumer-duty

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, master data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Ylann Schemm, Vice President for Corporate Responsibility at the leading academic publisher, Elsevier, home to almost 3,000 academic journals, specialising in scientific, technical, and medical content. Elsevier describes itself as “an information analytics” business – so right up our alley here at Data Malarkey.

In a career with the publisher spanning almost two decades, Ylann has been on a remarkable journey of both personal and corporate development, moving from communications to corporate relations and from there into corporate responsibility. And for more than a decade, she has been a leading figure in the Elsevier Foundation, first as Program Director – running the Foundation’s New Scholars program designed to expand the participation of women in STEM – and since 2017 as its Director.

Under Ylann’s leadership, the Foundation is taking pioneering steps and making a tangible difference. This is manifested most clearly in the organisation’s regular, data-driven reporting into gender and diversity in research. The latest, 2024 report showed that, although as many as 41% of all academic researchers today are women, this is much lower in STEM subjects. At the current rate of change, parity is not expected to be reached until 2052.

Ylann was allowed to lay the – shall we say? – foundations for the Foundation’s work in “a climate of benign neglect” as she found her feet and built networks and partnerships inside and outside of Elsevier. But it was with the 2019 arrival of the company’s first female CEO, Kumsal Bayazit, that Ylann’s work moved front and centre of the publisher’s strategic vision.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Ylann’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ylann-schemm-a5a3632/

Elsevier home page – https://www.elsevier.com/en-gb

The Elsevier Foundation – https://elsevierfoundation.org

2024 Elsevier Foundation gender and diversity in research report – https://www.elsevier.com/en-au/insights/gender-and-diversity-in-research

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

Using data smarter is an attitude of mind. It’s characterised by those who choose to communicate simply, clearly, and effectively, by making sense of the signals and cutting out the noise. Above all, it’s about empathy, humanity, and appreciating the likely data tolerance of your audience.

After our fifth collection of six great guests, it’s a wrap for Season Five of Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data smarter. Your host, master data storyteller Dr Sam Knowles, picks out common themes and chooses his highlights from a lively series of conversations – recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, between February and May 2024.

Thanks as ever to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

In Season Five, our guests included:

Sir David Spiegelhalter, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge.

Olivia Jensen, Deputy Director and Lead Scientist at the Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk based out of the University of Singapore.

Sorin Patilinet, Senior Director for Marketing Effectiveness at Mars (who’s also the Marketing Engineer).

Ian Whittaker, founder of Liberty Sky Advisors, the award-winning city analyst specialising in media and marketing.

John Hibbs, Co-Founder of CoEfficient, a software as a service company that helps organisations grow by measuring performance from the human perspective.

And Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge University, and director of the Autism Research Centre.

Data Malarkey is taking an extended summer vacation and is having all of August off – and then some. We’ll be back with Season Six on 11 September 2024 with another eclectic group of guests from an ever-more diverse set of professions. We’ll be hearing from women and men at the top of their game from the worlds of publishing, consumer goods, political punditry in the wake of the U.K. General Election, journalism, neuroscience, and numeracy. As usual, their common approaches to using data smarter have lessons for us all. And we start with Ylann Schemm who is both the Vice President of Corporate Responsibility for Elsevier, the world’s leading scientific publisher and data analytics company, and Director of the Elsevier Foundation.

To find out how you rank as a data storyteller, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, where he also runs the Autism Research Centre. Simon has been working in the field of autism for approaching 40 years and is one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject.

Since the mid-1980s, the research he’s led and undertaken has led him to advance several different, complementary theories of the condition including: the mind-blindness theory, the prenatal sex steroid theory, and the empathising-systemising theory of autism and typical sex differences.

Some corners of autism research have a somewhat shady and disreputable reputation for their misuse of data; for drawing conclusions about the general population from tiny sample sizes that the data could not warrant. Indeed, it was in the wake of the MMR scandal that the charity Sense About Science was founded in the early 2000s – to encourage researchers to present their findings responsibly and the media to report them responsibly – and Sense About Science’s director, Tracey Brown, was a recent guest on Data Malarkey.

By contrast with the shady stuff, Simon’s research has been a shining light of empiricism and evidence-based, data-driven truth, with sample sizes sometimes in the tens or hundreds of thousands. His 2018, empathising-systemising study famously collected data from 36,000 autistic people and 600,000 non-autistic people.

Described by the medical journal The Lancet as “a man with extraordinary knowledge … his passionate advocacy for a more tolerant, diverse society, where difference is respected and cultivated, reveals a very human side to his science” it is our honour to welcome Simon to Data Malarkey. A very fitting, very high-profile end to Season Five, a season bookended by two great Cambridge minds, as we started with Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter.

To secure Simon as a guest on Data Malarkey, I’m delighted to say I had to drop my son Max’s name. At the time of recording, Max had recently hosted Simon at an excellent event run by the recently-reborn Cambridge Psychology Society, of which Max is now President. At the university, he is studying Psychological & Behavioural Sciences. #proudfather

EXTERNAL LINKS

Profile of Simon on The Lancet – Psychiatry site https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(15)00461-7/fulltext

The Autism Research Centre https://www.autismresearchcentre.com

The extraordinary output of 750+ articles from the Autism Research Centre on PubMed https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=simon+baron-cohen&sort=date

Auticon, the social enterprise on a mission to improve the employment prospects of neurodivergent people, whose board Simon advises https://auticon.com/uk/

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by John Hibbs, the Co-Founder of CoEfficient, a company that helps organisations grow from the human perspective. It does this by gathering genuinely useful feedback from those who work for an organisation and then deploying this intelligence in the most productive way possible, to drive both individual and organisational growth.

Founded on the principle that businesses are simply groups of people, CoEfficient gives hearts and minds that make up a business a voice, ensuring that they feel heard and are valued. This – John believes – is what enables businesses to serve as creators of positive change within society. CoEfficient serves all sorts of different clients right around the world, and today John is based on his native island of Guernsey.

But his journey to becoming a pioneer in using data smarter to help companies grow is neither traditional nor expected. 25 years ago, he was running a personal training business that he was struggling to scale. A chance meeting with a business mentor first opened his eyes to the power of data, measurement, and evaluation. This set him on course to develop both his Monergy Flow model of growth and a thriving, scalable business that few – least of all John himself – would ever have predicted.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Make friends with John on LinkedIn, his preferred social media platform https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-hibbs-coefficient/

There’s more about CoEfficient at https://www.coefficient-solutions.com

John explains his Monergy Flow model – including the hand-drawn, periodic table version – at https://www.maddyness.com/uk/2023/08/09/the-monergy-flow-by-john-hibbs/

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.