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Joint ASA/ISI/RSS committee for the Year 2013
Committee on Probability and Statistics in the Physical Sciences, C(PS)2
Web-based mentoring for students in statistics at Universities in developing countries
David's Musings: What should our college students know (aside from what we teach them)?
The International Statistical Institute (ISI), the American Statistical Society (ASA) and the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) have considered the possibility of declaring year 2013 “The International Year of Statistics (IYStat)”. In spring 2011, an ad hoc committee was formed, consisting of Ada van Krimpen (ISI), Denise Lievesley (ISI, RSS) and Ronald Wasserstein (ASA) (chair). Bernoulli Society's representative was Adam Jakubowski. A proposal prepared by this group is as follows.
An International Year of Statistics (IYStat) - A partnership among societies and organizations to declare and celebrate an International Year of Statistics (IYStat – “Eye-Stat”).
Purpose: To promote the importance of statistics through the combined energies of societies and organizations worldwide.
Goals include:
• increasing public awareness of the power and impact of statistics on all
aspects of society;
• nurturing statistics as a profession, especially among young people; and
• promoting creativity and development in the science of probability and
statistics
Intended audiences: the broader scientific community, the media, and the general public
Participants: All interested societies and organizations.
When: 2013
The year 2013 will be the 300th anniversary of the publication of the Ars
Conjectandi, written by Jakob Bernoulli (and published after his death), which
is considered a foundational piece of work in probability. The Bernoulli Society
has already planned a rich variety of activities in 2013 to celebrate this
anniversary. 2013 is also the 250th anniversary of the public presentation of
Thomas Bayes’s famous work.
Anticipated activities: There are a wide variety of ways to recognize an international year. There are dozens of statistical societies and organizations worldwide, plus many societies with particular interest in statistics, and we will encourage all of them to develop activities among their constituents. Conferences, workshops, symposia, career fairs, outreach fairs, public service announcements, videos, op ed pieces in local and national media, blogs, weekly “featured statisticians,” and special editions of magazines or journals are just some of the possibilities. Special emphasis should be made on activities to engage students and potential students of statistics, helping them to become more aware of statistics as a key scientific discipline. Other foci might include broad statistical literacy outreach (such as the “Getstats” campaign by the RSS) or promoting the ways in which statistics advances science and improves the human condition.
Structure: All societies and organizations with interest in statistics are invited to celebrate and encourage others to celebrate the International Year of Statistics in ways that are suitable to their circumstances. A steering committee with representatives from the International Statistical Institute, the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association will facilitate communication about the International Year, including the essential task of development and maintenance of a website, and will reach out to as many societies and organizations as can be identified to seek their participation. They will work with appropriate representatives at the United Nations to garner support for the concept and/or for specific activities. As societies and organizations join the effort, we will ask them to appoint a liaison with the steering committee to facilitate communication and feedback among the participating groups.
Activities already prepared
The first discussion on the year 2013 took place in Singapore, during the annual meeting of the Bernoulli Society Council. Since then, several activities have been planned, mainly thanks to the personal involvement of its President, Victor Perez-Abreu. It is worth to give here the list of initiatives that the Bernoulli Society is organizing, sponsoring and promoting for the year 2013.
1) A Special Issue of the Bernoulli Journal (BJ) in 2013. Thomas Mikosch and Richard Davis were appointed as guest editors of this special issue. The issue will consist of a series of invited papers to provide a glimpse of future directions in probability and statistics from new application areas and the development of new models, to the emerging interfaces between statistics and probability with other sciences, as well as of essays on the future of probability and mathematical statistics. This issue will be published in addition to the four numbers of the annual volume and will have universal electronic open access.
2) Open Public Lectures as part of the program of the Bernoulli Society Meetings during 2013, namely the 59th ISI World Statistics Congress in Hong Kong; the 36th Conference on Stochastic Processes and their Applications in Boulder, Colorado, USA, and the 29th European Meeting of Statisticians (EMS) in Budapest, Hungary. The EMS will also hold a Special Session to celebrate the 300 years of the St. Petersburg Paradox.
3) The Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) has kindly agreed to hold a Special Session for Ars Conjectandi in its 2013 Annual Meeting in Montréal, Canada.
4) The Swiss Statistical Society is planning an International Conference in Basel, focusing on the history of Ars Conjectandi, the impact on science and the development to date, of the most important result in this book entitled “the Law of Large Numbers”. The Bernoulli Society is one of the sponsors of this conference.
5) The Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society is planning a Special Issue to be published in July 2013, on the impact of the mathematical and physics contributions of members of the “Bernoulli Family”. The issue will have the same focus as the "Euler issue" of the Bulletin Vol. 44 no. 4 in 2007 (it is free at http://www.ams.org/news/ams-euler).
6) The American Mathematical Society in collaboration with several Mathematical Societies from North, South and Central America will hold its First Mathematical Congress of the Americas (MCA), in Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2013. The organizers have kindly agreed to promote in the program committee of this congress an Ars Conjectandi or Bernoulli Lecture, sponsored by the Bernoulli Society.
Adam Jakubowski
C(PS)2 has been recently re-assembled for the two-year term 2011-2013, under the auspices of The Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability, with a mission to foster communication of recent statistical or probabilistic methods and applications in the realm of Physical Sciences at large (e.g., Geophysics, Biophysics, Astrophysics, etc.). The main venue for accomplishment of its mission is by involvement/participation in the organization of international conferences or special sessions within announced conferences of mathematical/statistical/physical interest.
The appointed membership of the re-assembled C(PS)2 consists of
Harry Pavlopoulos (Chairman, Athens, Greece,
hgp@aueb.gr )
Carlo DeMichele (Milano, Italy,
cdemiche@polimi.it )
Jorge Mario Ramirez Osorio (Medellin, Colombia,
jmramirezo@unal.edu.co
)
Jan Picek (Liberec, Czech Republic,
jan.picek@tul.cz )
Enrique Thomann (Corvallis, Oregon, USA,
thomann@math.orst.edu )
Ilia Zaliapin (Reno, Nevada, USA, zal@unr.edu
)
First order of business for the newly appointed members of C(PS)2 is the launch of a new website, where its membership and mission will be communicated with active links to recent and forthcoming activities, partnerships and collaboration with other international organizations serving the community of statistical, mathematical, physical sciences. That website is currently under construction, to be launched shortly, hosted in the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB, Athens, Greece).
As a matter of top priority, C(PS)2 has already declared its interest and intent to serve the partnership of the Bernoulli Society in the Mathematics for Planet Earth, 2013 initiative (MPE2013, http://www.mpe2013.org/propositions.php).
The MPE2013 initiative provides a most attractive framework for activities fitting the scope and mission of C(PS)2, combined with a parallel initiative of Bernoulli Society to recognize 2013 as an International Year of Statistics, which also will be celebrated as the 300th anniversary since the publication of Ars Conjectandi by Jacob Bernoulli.
In this multifaceted prospect, C(PS)2 aspires to play an active role at the
interface of Bernoulli Society participation in the MPE2013 initiative.
To that end, we have proposed the organization of joint BS-C(PS)2-MPE2013
special sessions in two major conferences scheduled for 2013. Namely, in the 36th
Conference on Stochastic Processes and their Applications (SPA-2013,
http://euclid.colorado.edu/~hilljb/spa2013/local-organizing-committee/),
to be held in Boulder, Colorado, July 29 - August 2, 2013, and in the 59th
World Statistics Congress of the International Statistical Institute
(ISIWC-2013, http://www.isi2013.hk/)
to be held in Hong Kong, China, August 25-30, 2013.
Both of these forthcoming events represent institutions with a long history, importance, prestige and visibility within the statistical and the broader scientific community internationally, ensuring a high impact and visibility of the MPE2013 initiative as well.
Harry Pavlopoulos
C(PS)2 Chairman
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The International Statistical Institute and the Bernoulli Society have started a new international web-based tutoring programme for PhD students in statistics at universities in developing countries.
Statistical communities, academic and governmental, are growing in many developing countries, and statistician play key roles in production, decision and government, from health to agriculture, from business to energy, from transport to education. But resources and infrastructure are still incomplete. This mentoring programme is based on volunteering senior statisticians, from all over the world, who act as mentors over the internet for PhD and master students in the developing countries, in particular in Africa and Asia. We shall use the internet to create a network of support and mentoring, at individual level.
Mentoring works like this. PhD students and master students from developing countries enroll in the programme by filling out a form available on the web-site http://statmentoring.nr.no. Volunteer mentors also join the programme by registering on the same web-site.
The tutor will typically be a professor or senior professional statistician (or probabilist) at a university in Europe, America or Australia. In Norway, we match each student with a mentor taking into account language, area of research, gender and more. Student and mentor will have contact by email. This programme is not able to provide funding for travel and, therefore, mentoring is at distance. Mentoring means:
Providing access to scientific material (papers, chapters of books,
preprints, etc.)
• Helping with access to scientific software.
• Suggesting appropriate reading.
• Suggesting journals to which the student could submit her/his papers
• Suggesting to attend conferences, summer schools, workshops, and funding
possibilities.
• Help in preparing presentations.
Discussing jobs and career opportunities after the PhD, help in writing the CV
• Occasionally, help solving problems related to the thesis. Important: the
mentor has no responsibilities with respect to the progression of the studies of
the student. Mentoring does not mean supervision.
We are looking for new mentors. In particular, we need many mentors in applied statistics. Join the programme from our web page http://statmentoring.nr.no Email your colleagues about statmentoring.nr.no!
You can also help the programme by emailing information on statmentoring.nr.no to your contacts in Africa and Asia. If you cc us, also, then this will help to create a contact network in these countries.
This mentoring programme is run by members of the ISI and BS based in Oslo, Norway, including Magne Aldrin and Arnoldo Frigessi. You can email them at statmentoring@nr.no.
Arnoldo Frigessi
In the context of college level statistics and probability and their mathematical background, readers will be familiar with what their students actually do know, and readers no doubt have their own opinions on what the students should be taught about these technical subjects. But in a wider context, what do and what should students know? These musings were prompted by an opinion piece in the August 24, 2011, New York Times by Sol Garfunkel and David Mumford, addressing the question of what mathematics a typical high school graduate should know.
... how often do most adults encounter a situation in which they need to solve a quadratic equation? .... most citizens would be better served by studying how mortgages are priced, how computers are programmed and how the statistical results of a medical trial are to be understood.
Imagine replacing the sequence of algebra, geometry and calculus with a sequence of finance, data and basic engineering. In the finance course, students would learn the exponential function, use formulas in spreadsheets and study the budgets of people, companies and governments. In the data course, students would gather their own data sets and learn how, in fields as diverse as sports and medicine, larger samples give better estimates of averages. In the basic engineering course, students would learn the workings of engines, sound waves, TV signals and computers. Science and math were originally discovered together, and they are best learned together now.
In math, what we need is "quantitative literacy," the ability to make quantitative connections whenever life requires (as when we are confronted with conflicting medical test results but need to decide whether to undergo a further procedure) and "mathematical modeling," the ability to move practically between everyday problems and mathematical formulations (as when we decide whether it is better to buy or lease a new car).
Proposals to reform mathematics education are as perennial as the grass, but emphasizing the particular combination "finance, data and basic engineering" seems unusually radical (here finance means "understanding credit card interest rates" not "Black-Scholes"). Statisticians will surely be pleased by the focus on data. Summarizing the intellectual contribution of our discipline by the phrase "larger samples give better estimates of averages" may strike you as somewhat condescending, but can you do better in seven words? Anyway, though I see very little likelihood this proposal would be implemented in the near future, it seems to me self-evident that this is the right direction for reform.
Coincidently, I am currently teaching my "probability in the real world" course for junior-senior level Statistics majors, and this course touches upon many topics which I don't assume students have seen explicitly in other courses. Out of pure curiosity, I gave an anonymous quiz to determine what percentage of the class knew, very roughly, the meaning of various phrases, and here are some results.
Credit default swap: 23% Moore's law: 20% the OECD: 11% Stuxnet: 6% Alfred Russel Wallace: 0%
My choice of phrases had no particular rationale, except for requiring there be a Wikipedia entry explaining the meaning clearly. I'm not sure what to make of the results, though it was a little surprising, being close to Silicon Valley, that so few students in a quantitative discipline recognized Moore's law.
So let me pose the questions: what do, and what should, college graduates in a quantitative discipline know about topics outside the technical scope of their discipline? The should part will always be a matter for debate. But, at the somewhat superficial level of my quiz, one could try to measure what students do know, in a less haphazard way, by choosing 1,000 Wikipedia entries as representative of the universe of ideas we would like graduates to know, and then repeating such a quiz on randomly sampled entries. If any reader is inspired to attempt such a project their own statistics/mathematics students, please let me know the results!
David Aldous
Berkeley
Editor's note: This is the fourth installment of a regular opinion column.