{"id":2065,"date":"2012-01-25T18:24:09","date_gmt":"2012-01-25T23:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/?p=2065"},"modified":"2012-01-26T15:16:53","modified_gmt":"2012-01-26T20:16:53","slug":"asas-new-look-its-not-your-fathers-statistical-association","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/asas-new-look-its-not-your-fathers-statistical-association\/","title":{"rendered":"ASA’s New Look : It’s not your father’s statistical association"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/a>\"person<\/a>Photo from Nic Cubrilovic. Creative Commons license. Thanks, dude!<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s been 15-20 years since I was last a member of the American Statistical Association<\/a>. I read an article in their journals occasionally but not much of it is relevant to me. I work with clients who are designing surveys, analyzing messy data and evaluating programs. They do research but it is not in a laboratory or with accommodating undergraduates seeking ten points extra credit. It’s more often with people with substance abuse issues or learning difficulties who are not too excited about research, the researchers or anything related. My clients are not interested in some esoteric statistical technique that three people in the world will ever use or simulations using perfect data that demonstrate method X has a standard error of .337 while method Y has a standard error of .436.<\/p>\n

As for me, I find some of that mildly entertaining, but, in my view, most academic journal articles are written by very intelligent people who are reinforced at every level of their education and career for writing that is deliberately obscure. I remember a professor joking (I hope he was joking!) when a student told him that he had to read his latest article twice before he understood it,<\/p>\n

“Good! That means I can count it twice on my c.v.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All of that being said, one might wonder how I found myself on \u00a0a rainy Monday afternoon driving from Santa Monica to Irvine, on the 405, at rush hour. Generally, this is the sort of thing people don’t undertake voluntarily unless God is appearing at the Irvine amphitheater, or, at the very least, the Grateful Dead.<\/p>\n

Actually, it was neither. It was a meeting of the southern California chapter of the American Statistical Association. Brenda Osuna, the senior statistical consultant at USC, had sent me an email asking if I was going. I wasn’t planning on it, but I took a look at the invitation and saw that the speaker was the new ASA president, Bob Rodriguez, who is also some mucky-muck statistical something at SAS. So, that sounded a little interesting. Then, I saw the topic was on big data and business analytics. That looked a lot more interesting, and not the typical ASA journal thing, so I was intrigued. Intrigued enough to pay $189 to join ASA again and drive down there.<\/p>\n

Was it worth it? Yes. I’d say so. Here is a summary of my tweets during the talk. Yes, this is a lazy way to do a post for the day, but since I took several hours away from business to attend, there is work that needs to be done. Here are my notes, comments from me are in italics.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bob Rodriguez, ASA President speaking at University of California, Irvine on Business analytics and big data: What statisticians need to succeed<\/strong><\/p>\n