(Article courtesy of the Chicago Chapter of the American Statistical Association newsletter)

The ASA analyzed data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and found that Statistics is the fastest-growing undergrad STEM degree, even ahead of Computer Science. Overall, the number of statistics bachelor’s degrees has grown from 526 in 2003 to 1,678 in 2013.

(Articles courtesy of the CCASA newsletter)

Those of you that watched the Super Bowl this year may have heard of the “scandal” that erupted in the weeks before it involving the New England Patriots and deflated footballs, which the media promptly christened “DeflateGate”, and then proceeded to report it to death.

Opinions on the media cycle aside, one of the unfortunate circumstances to rise out of the scandal were some truly tortured and wildly inaccurate uses of statistics, including, as this article from the Harvard Business Review astutely points out, some causal leaps inferred from correlations in the data. The article drives home an important lesson that our media seems to frequently ignore: correlation does not equal causation.

We mourn the tragic loss of Vicente Mundo who was a junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working towards a degree in Statistics. Our hearts go out to his family and to all of his friends. We hope in this time of sorrow that joyful memories of his life will bring some comfort.

https://www.facebook.com/missingvicentemundo

Faculty and Staff
Department of Statistics
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Chances are, at some point in your life you’ve been trapped in an unwanted conversation with someone, and had to figure out how to escape as gracefully as possible. If you’ve ever wondered what’s the most efficient way to exit a conversation without offending the other party, then you’re in luck.

In 1989 a graduate student at San Jose University conducted a study comparing 350 different “conversational retreat tactics” and compared them based on how effective/non-effective they are, as well as how socially acceptable/unacceptable they are.

Click here to read the Washington Post article about the study, or to enlarge the graph above. To read the student’s 100+ page Master’s Theses on the subject click here

With all the attention number crunchers are getting lately, this Washington Post article delves into the diversity statistics of a few STEM fields, and found that, surprisingly, Statistics stands above the pack: women earn 40% of statistics degrees, and represent 40% of statistics faculty poised for tenured positions. Women receive only 18% of earned computer science degrees, and represent only 11% of math faculty.

The Big Data fields could certainly benefit from a stronger female presence, and it is widely quoted that women represent 25% of STEM fields as a whole. For example, the Burtch Works Study (Sept. 2014) shows that only 26% of the overall analytics workforce is female, and our data science study (April 2014) found that only 12% of data scientists are women.

Hopefully things will continue to improve with Statistics leading by example!