the fun of the fair

Some pictures from the Pier on Tuesday night. The Waltzer really did feel as if it was about to take off as caught on camera!

conference in high gear

Indeed the annual meeting of the RSS is in full swing, and, sadly, I have to leave early tomorrow morning. But today was splendid, everything one hopes for in a meeting.

The highlight of the conference today was the presentation I made at noon. OK, not really, but I did have the opportunity to present a talk titled “Building Trust: Accreditation and the Professionalization of Statistics.” In it, I explored ways we might take advantage of the synergy created by accreditation programs in four statistical societies (the American Statistical Association (ASA), the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC), and the Statistical Society of Australia, Inc. (SSAI)) to further advance the status of statistics as a profession. The RSS and the ASA are finding a number of ways to collaborate, and accreditation is one of them.

The real highlight of the conference today, for me, was the preliminary announcement of the “getstats” program, a 10-year statistical literacy campaign created and led by the RSS. Martin Dougherty, Executive Director of the RSS, presented an overview of the campaign, which will launch officially on October 20 (20.10.2010), which the UN has designated as World Statistics Day. The goal of this campaign is well and succinctly stated: “A society in which our lives and choices are enriched by an understanding of statistics.” It is an ambitious goal, a truth that was brilliantly illustrated by a video Martin put together. The video is a “vox pop,” a series of interviews on the streets of London. People are asked some basic non-technical questions about the relevance and roles of statistics and statisticians. These were people who are clearly literate, but are also clearly not statistically literate. Clearly, there is work to be done.

The plenary sessions were excellent today as well. In the morning, Robert Groves, Director of the US Census Bureau, gave the Campion Lecture. Bob is a superb statistician and an extraordinary leader, and as Census Director he has served his country with distinction. He took on a census that was in the midst of some political turmoil, and quieted things down quickly. Thanks to his work, and that of the vast census team, the US has had a successful decennial census. One of the many things that impress me about Bob is his ability to listen constructively to criticism, even when it isn’t offered constructively.

In a thoughtful and informative talk, Bob reviewed the status of the 2010 census in the US, considered measures of data quality, and provided a look ahead at issues that will need to be addressed.

In the afternoon, Tim Davis, who is both a Chartered Statistician and a Chartered Engineer, discussed the role of statistics and statisticians in engineering. He encouraged early career statisticians to consider going to work in industry, where he said there is great need for their skills. Among many interesting things Tim said, I was particularly interested in his observation that it is the job of the statistical investigator/collaborator to a) encourage creativity (in research and experimentation) and b) ensure convergence (between theory and practice, or theory and data).

Once again, there was an excellent variety of concurrent sessions. I focused on sessions relating to the growth of professionals and the profession, but there was something for virtually everyone. I particularly enjoyed a session on statistical education in the UK, with the clever title “Cornish pasties and learning from teaching statistics.” Unfortunately, convention centre rules made it impossible for us to taste test the pasties.

In the late afternoon, I had the opportunity to get out and stimulate the local economy, and greatly added to the weight of my suitcase going home.

So I will wrap up my blogging from Brighton with three sets of thank yous: (1) to Gerald Goodall and Andy Garrett of the RSS, Judy-Anne Chapman of the SSC, and Nick Fisher of the SSAI for their wisdom and insight, which helped my presentation immensely; (2) to the staff of the RSS for warm hospitality and a superbly executed conference; and (3) to the ASA for making my participation at this conference possible.

Carry on, then!

Statistical Engineering @ Brighton - Slides available

Thanks to those of you that came to my talk - if you would like a copy of the slides, they can be downloaded here.


Thanks


Tim Davis

The Poster Competition

This year I have been allowed to judge a bit of the poster competition. Judging is fun. Specially when you are allowed to do it with a glass of wine in your hand.

I and the proper judges wandered round the posters on Tuesday evening, chatting as we went to the posters’ creators. My colleagues judged no doubt according to quality of statistics, innovative thought, relevance of methodology and analysis and suchlike. I had a much easier brief. It was: Could I understand it?

This year, the poster competition has an additional prize: The Significance prize for the poster which best communicates its message. That’s the bit that I was judging. Judges in past years have complained that some entries contained excellent and advanced statistics that were completely incomprehensible. I was looking for the reverse: I was looking for a poster which might translate into the sort of article that could go into Significance – in other words, a poster that even a non-statistician would find interesting.

Going round, you notice some points straight away. Print size is one. Does it contain acres of small print that you have to read with your nose up against the poster, blocking everyone else’s view for the 20 minutes it takes to slog through it? Or is there nice big print, not too many words, easily readable by the middle-aged like me from a reasonable distance? Layout helps. I was slightly baffled by one otherwise excellent poster, laid out in three columns, til I realised that I was supposed to start reading at the top of the middle column; I’d started, as with a newspaper, on the left.

Say ‘Poster’ to most people and what they think of is pictures not words. A picture is worth a thousand words; and a thousand words is far too many to fit on a poster. But you can fit three or four pictures on, – so, presumably, three or four times the amount of information.

So I was tempted by posters like P31, Andrea Roalfe’s ‘Working as an Applied Statistician in Primary Care and General Practice’; each type of illness she worked on had a picture to illustrate it. Much better than a dry list. Even more than pictures, people like pretty pictures. P9, ‘Supporting statistics in schools,’ scored highly there with its fluffy koala – but came from Australia, where they are entitled to use fluffy koalas as relevant to almost everything. How do you get an attractive picture into, for example, P14, ‘Assessing the Effect of Informative Censoring in Piecewise Parametric Survival Models?’ I don’t know. Probably you cannot. Still, those ones can still be in contention for the proper prize. P6, Tom Gerlach’s ‘Census rehearsal 2009’, with its image of a red-curtained theatre stage, looked marvellous – though it did perhaps lack content. Still, if statistics ever fails him, he should have a great future in design or advertising.

The real key, though, is clarity. Call it the quality of explaining things. Can you understand it at a glance? At first reading? It obviously helps if the message itself is fairly simple. As I have said, I was not looking for cutting-edge statistics. A useful application of standard statistical techniques is just as good for telling the great public why we all need statistics and statisticians.

The winner I chose uses simple statistics and clear graphs and explains its purpose clearly. I could understand what it was saying almost at first glance; three minutes reading it enhanced that understanding. It has a clear conclusion as well, and that conclusion is an important and an interesting and a useful one, and one which should influence real-life decisions and what people actually do. All of which makes it ideal for the basis of an article in Significance magazine – and, I suppose, a near-ideal poster as well. It will be announced at the conference dinner on Thursday. Before then, see if you can guess which one I have chosen.

Julian Champkin,Editor, Significance