George Box 1919 - 2013

"All models are wrong but some are useful." - G. E. P. Box

 
Statistics lost a giant on 28th March, 2013, when George E.P. Box, 93, passed away. Read more at:

http://blogs.sas.com/content/jmp/2013/03/29/george-box-a-remembrance/
http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2013/03/28/george-box/
http://www.isi-web.org/images/membership/George%20Box-In%20Memoriam.pdf

Paul Erdős

"This week we celebrate the life of the most published mathematician in history, Paul Erdos (AIR-dosh) who was born 100 years ago on March 26," wrote Gary Antonick for The New York Times. "Dr. Erdos, who has been called the world’s greatest problem poser and solver, collaborated with over 500 mathematicians before his death in 1996." Read more at http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/erdos/

Here are some more articles:

The Magician of Budapest by Peter Schumer (winner of the 1999 Trevor Evans Award)  http://bit.ly/YREDNm

Reminiscences of Paul Erdös (1913-1996) by the late Melvin Henriksen http://bit.ly/15Q22CT

Paul Erdos among the Dancing Saints by Gerald L. Alexanderson http://bit.ly/15Q2jWD

Erdös Number 1 . . . for Mountain Climbing by Alfinio Flores http://bit.ly/sLjrKX

Paul Erdos: An Infinity of Problems by Ivars Peterson http://bit.ly/10MeBzN

Correlation

In 1954 Tukey asked, “Does anyone know when the correlation coefficient is useful, as opposed to when it is used? What substitutes are better for which purposes?”

Here is Terry Speed's  musings about the same:
http://bulletin.imstat.org/2012/02/terences-stuff-correlation/

Times per second benchmark

In GNU R the simplest way to measure execution time of a piece code is to use system.time. However, sometimes one wants to find out how many times some function can be executed in one second. This is especially useful when we want to compare functions that have significantly different execution speed.
Check out this post:

http://www.r-bloggers.com/times-per-second-benchmark/

The Statistician’s New Face

If today’s statistician is going to have a new face, what was the face of yesterday’s statistician? How often do we ‘see’ the modeler or the number cruncher doing his business? How often do we see the statistician come ‘onstage’ to explain his analysis?

Here is an article by Srinivas Bhogle pondering over these:
http://bademian.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/the-new-face/

Can you name a female statistician?

Statistics are everywhere. And perhaps even more so this year, as 2013 has been hailed as the International Year of Statistics. Despite all this attention for numbers, we generally don't know a lot about the people hiding behind their computers churning them out. Some non-statisticians are now able to name at least one statistician, but, stepping it up a level, can you name a female statistician?

http://www.significancemagazine.org/details/webexclusive/4440361/Can-you-name-a-female-statistician.html

STEM Profession that Women Dominate

Do you know which major STEM field boasts as many women in the profession as men? Where almost half the college degrees - even at the PhD level - are granted to women? Where women have a significant presence in the most influential circles of the profession? We are proud that, it is Analytics. The number of women among mathematicians and statisticians equals the number of men.

http://smartdatacollective.com/metabrown/49293/stem-profession-women-dominate

Ballad for Statistics

To celebrate International Year of Statistics Prof. A. P. Gore (Former Head, Department of Statistics, University of Pune) has composed a Ballad for Statistics in English, as well as in Marathi.

Here are the lyrics for the same:

English - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37320965/Statistics_Ballad_APG.pdf

Marathi - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37320965/Sankhya_Geet_APG.pdf

To make it more appealing to the common public, an audio with a catchy tune has also been created. Enjoy the songs:

English - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37320965/Statistics_Ballad_APG.mp3

Marathi - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37320965/Sankhya_Geet_APG.mp3

To download, right click and select save link as.


Details of the Audio:
Music Composer - Ashish Kulkarni.
Singers (English) - Parashar Joshi, Pooja Tatvavadi & Megha Palkar
Singers (Marathi) - Kalyani Dasakkar, Ishwari Dasakkar & Ashwini Bhargave

Do multiple choice tests really work?

Have you ever thought.. How many gatecrashers can enter a merit list through a multiple choice tests? How much would you gain or loose by random guessing? How tests with multiple correct choices reduces the scourge due to random guessing?

Have a look at an interesting conversation between Srinivas Bhogle and Rajeeva Karandikar about validity of Multiple Choice Tests:

http://bademian.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/do-multiple-choice-tests-really-work-2/

Understanding Citation Indices

Some love them, some hate them, but citation indices are heartily gobbled up by administrators in tenure and promotion decisions.  Here is Anirban DasGupta explaining the Citation Indices:

http://bulletin.imstat.org/2013/02/anirban%E2%80%99s-angle-understanding-citation-indices/

A World Without Referees

Every researcher has many stories about having papers rejected because of unfair referee reports. This happens because the refereeing process is very noisy, time consuming and arbitrary. Here is Larry Wasserman, sharing his views about the same:

www.stat.cmu.edu/~larry/Peer-Review.pdf

IMS Bulletin Editor, Dimitris Politis writes about the psychoanalytic angle of the same:

http://bulletin.imstat.org/2013/02/refereeing-and-psychoanalysis/

Overlapping Histogram in R

Just like plot and line can be used to create overlapping plots, here is a link explaining a trick to do similar overlapping for histograms:

http://www.r-bloggers.com/overlapping-histogram-in-r/

ASA Statistical Significance Series

The American Statistical Association’s (ASA) “Statistical Significance” series highlights the important contributions that statisticians make to society - from health care and the economy to national security and the environment:

http://www.statistics2013.org/asa-statistical-significance/

Royal Statistical Society’s 2013 honours announced

The RSS has announced its honours (which includes Guy medals) for 2013, having been decided by Council in January. The awards will be presented to the recipients at a ceremony held during the Society’s annual conference in Newcastle on 3 September 2013:

http://www.rssenews.org.uk/2013/02/royal-statistical-societys-2013-honours-announced/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=royal-statistical-societys-2013-honours-announced

Essay Competition for Young Statisticians

In honor of the 150th anniversary of Politecnico di Milano a competition leading to a BarCamp has been organised for young (< 33 years) statisticians to envision statistical models and methods that will have an impact on the development of technology in the next 25 years. For more details have a look at:

http://mox.polimi.it/barcamp_sco2013/