NY Times: "For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics"

Here is an article from the NY Times that outlines the up-and-coming status of statisticians in today's world. Enjoy!

A make-over for your correlation matrix

This morning I received a pleasant surprise in my inbox. Taiyun Wei , a student from Hunan, China emailed me about his/her R package, corrplot. This package can produce a number of pretty "stylish" visualization of your correlation matrices. Next time I need to present such a matrix of mine, I may give it a make-over from the "wardrobe" of Taiyun's functions. More of Taiyun's art-like statistical graphs can be found here.

Election-fraud detection

WSJ.com published an article on "Rise and Flaw of Internet's Election-Fraud Hunters: Benford's Law, Which Tests Numbers for Authenticity, Might Detect Vote-Rigging but Can't Prove It" that describes how one can use the limited information in the election count data to possbly detect fraud. Because of the limited nature of the data, some "model" has to be assumed, which can be wrong in the first place.

Accepting rejections by Xiao-Li Meng

"Xiao-Li Meng took a humorous approach to the sore subject of handling rejections whenhe was part of a panel, “Reflections on Rejections,” sponsored by Harvard’s Bureau ofStudy Counsel (BSC). We publish his article here to amuse and comfort the many IMSmembers who have to deal with rejections of their research papers. ..."

For full article, see page 16 of IMS Bulletin Vol 38 Issue 5.

A couple of good examples of observational studies for Intro Stats

Recently I noticed a couple of good examples of observational studies that can be used in my future Intro Stats teaching.

1) In the Parents magazine, it reported that a study found a positive association between the frequency and severity of heartburn during pregnancy of the mom and how much hair the newborn baby has. According to the study, about two thirds of women who reported to have modest to severe heartburn during pregnancy gave birth to babies with full head of hair, while most of women who didn't have heartburn during pregnancy have babies with little hair.

2) I read on Columbia's website about a study that found positive association between the appointment of top female executives and performance of a company.