Raising public awareness of statistics through increased exposure in the mass media: an illustration with the case of sports statistics

Although mathematics and statistics are playing an increasingly important role in many areas of study, there has been a steady decline in enrolments in mathematics based courses in both secondary and tertiary education. In Australia during the nineties there has been a decline from about 50000 to 30000 in the number of year 12 secondary students studying advanced mathematics subjects. At my university Swinburne, our statistics major has been discontinued due to failure to attract sufficient high quality students, in favour of the currently more glamorous areas such as business studies, information technology, psychology and multi-media studies. With this declining interest from students, it is important that researchers and teachers take every opportunity to promote the applications of statistics to the wider community. For some reason I have been very successful in achieving publicity for the results of my research. A rough count reveals I have been involved in about eight television appearances, over 30 radio interviews and countless articles in the print media. I believe such publicity is good for the university, the subject and the profession, and is possible in many other application areas. This paper explores some of the ways in which I have brought the results of statistical modelling to the attention of the general public. [Introduction]