Hi!  I’m bs king, a person with a background in applied statistics who likes to think about how people feel about numbers and how numbers make people feel. You can contact me here.

Want to know more? Here’s the short(ish) version:

My blogging: This blog is loosely centered around the idea of statistics, education, data usability, media criticism, and cognitive biases and the different ways we can be wrong. It’s generally a place I use to straighten out my own head and experiment with different ways of communicating stats related ideas.

My background: I have one degree in biomedical engineering, one in psych (marriage and family therapy), and one in applied statistics. I like taking the scenic route.

My day job:  I work in a hospital mostly doing lots of projects that require strange mashups of clinical and administrative data with the goal of improving or redesigning various parts of our process. I like knowing what people are doing, what they think they’re doing, and what the numbers say they’re actually doing. I also do some consulting on survey design and data analysis, as it brings me one step closer to my overall goal of turning everyone into a number so they can be parsed more easily.

The illustrations: My logo and the little icons you see are done by my awesome/talented/graphic designer cousin Jamison. See more of his work here. I have a few of my own drawings on here to, but as a general rule if they look good, they’re Jamison’s.

The lore: Interestingly enough, I’m not actually the first person in my family to get obsessed with the idea of bringing statistical methods into places they are needed. My grandfather wrote a stats based newsletter for 12 years back in the 1970s and 80s, trying to convince manufacturing plants that they needed more statistical rigor to control their processes. One of the last conversations we had before he died was him asking me for advice about how to convince his nursing home to adopt better performance metrics. For both of us, stats and improvement is more than a profession, it’s a way of understanding the world. You can see some of his work here.