Article from NY Times

Why Do Americans Stink at Math?

By ELIZABETH GREEN; JULY 23, 2014

When Akihiko Takahashi was a junior in college in 1978, he was like most of the other students at his university in suburban Tokyo. He had a vague sense of wanting to accomplish something but no clue what that something should be. But that spring he met a man who would become his mentor, and this relationship set the course of his entire career.

Takeshi Matsuyama was an elementary-school teacher, but like a small number of instructors in Japan, he taught not just young children but also college students who wanted to become teachers. At the university-affiliated elementary school where Matsuyama taught, he turned his classroom into a kind of laboratory, concocting and trying out new teaching ideas. When Takahashi met him, Matsuyama was in the middle of his boldest experiment yet — revolutionizing the way students learned math by radically changing the way teachers taught it.

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[Full article]

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I am pleased to announce that the Department of Statistics is now an affiliate of the Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) program.
http://cse.illinois.edu/directory/affiliated-departments

We offer CSE certificates in Statistics for both undergraduates and PhD students. Please see the relevant links from our degree programs page:
http://www.stat.illinois.edu/students/index.shtml

Both the undergraduate and graduate certification programs offer scholarship/fellowship opportunities on a competitive basis for enrolled students. Please see the relevant deadlines for applications.

Best wishes,
Doug Simpson

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Douglas G. Simpson
Professor and Chair
Department of Statistics
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Has it been a while since you’ve thought about what a p-value says, and what it doesn’t say?

An article in this month’s issue of Nature features Stephen Ziliak, Economist at Roosevelt University in Chicago. The article discusses the ways that p-values are commonly misused. Ziliak is quoted as saying “P values are not doing their job, because they can’t.”

http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-errors-1.14700

If you find this article intriguing, I recommend Ziliak’s book, “The Cult of Statistical Significance“. It’s available on Amazon and through the university library system.

-DU

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Data Boom: The field of statistics is soaring—according to latest stats.

When Douglas Simpson arrived on the University of Illinois campus in 1985 to take his first professorship straight out of grad school, the time-traveling movie Back to the Future ruled the theaters and the U of I Department of Statistics had just been founded. Today, the field of statistics is booming, and that’s something no one but a time traveler, back from the future, might have predicted in 1985, when the U of I department had only a handful of students.

Fittingly, statistics back up the stunning rise in statistics.

Even as recently as 10 to 15 years ago, the Department of Statistics had only about 30 undergrads, five to 10 master’s students, and maybe 17 to 20 PhD students, Simpson says. Since then, the number of undergrads has skyrocketed to about 200, the number of master’s students has gone up eight times to over 80, and the numbr of PhD students has nearly doubled to 35.

…Read the rest of the article at http://www.las.illinois.edu/news/2013/statisticsdept/.

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The University of Illinois Statistics Department is among the Top Five in the U.S. Conferring Bachelor’s Degrees in Statistics in 2012. Statistics degrees have increased greatly in recent years, with growth driven by demand for analytical skills in the workplace, according to the American Statistical Association.

The number of students earning bachelor’s degrees in statistical science has more than doubled in the last five years, topping 1,000 for the first time in 2012, says American Statistical Association (ASA) President Marie Davidian. “Availability of jobs, the diversity of jobs, starting salaries, a low unemployment rate and similar facts help influence a student’s college major decision,” says Davidian. “Combined, these factors are helping to make statistics a more attractive career choice to today’s high-school and college students.”

Full article at https://www.amstat.org/newsroom/pressreleases/Number-of-Statistics-Majors-Continues-Climbing.pdf

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