The Faculty voted to approve a Major in Statistics. See the report and the editorial in the Williams Record. Description of the Major in Statistics: The major in Statistics is designed to meet three goals: to introduce some of the central ideas of information and data science,… Continue reading »
Professor Richard De Veaux was interviewed on the public radio WAMC Speakers Corner by Alan Chartock. What Chartock called the data mining crisis De Veaux called the long-term data mining evolution. Can one use the vast amount of available data to figure out whatever you… Continue reading »
2013 is the International Year of Statistics! What, you didn’t know??? It’s actually pretty cool: there are nearly 2000 organizations – universities, government agencies, schools, societies and research institutions – from over 120 countries participating in the activities. Here’s a map (from Smith College students Sarah Alper and Brittany… Continue reading »
In statistics, we draw conclusions from data. But to get data, we need to be able to measure the variable(s) that we are interested in. Measuring can be very crude (say, a trait is absent or present) or rather sophisticated (the expression levels of large numbers of genes). In the… Continue reading »
The hot hand is a term used in basketball to describe a player making a series of successful throws at the basket, i.e., getting “hot”. But it seems that we, as humans, are too fast at jumping at the conclusion that someone is “hot” just because we saw… Continue reading »
Do you like risk? Or, more precisely, do you like to assess and quantify risk and put a price on it (the premium that insurance collects)? If yes, consider becoming an actuary. This profession almost always makes the top 10 in the various best jobs lists (like this… Continue reading »
One of the many things I love about mathematics is that results initially discovered in one realm pop up in surprising places. A terrific example is Benford’s law of digit bias (those taking Math 341 in the fall will get to learn a lot more about this!). Benford’s… Continue reading »
Recent concerns of serious side effects in drugs (culminating in the withdrawals of blockbuster drugs such as Merck’s Vioxx) have lead to an increased public interest in the safety and toxicity of pharmaceutical products. Drug safety data are commonly included in drug labels or the fine print on… Continue reading »
Almost 30 years ago, something happened that made introductory statistics harder to teach. Students didn’t suddenly become less teachable, nor did professors forget their craft. It was that we began to switch from teaching statistics as a mathematics course to teaching the art and craft of statistics as its… Continue reading »