SSA February 2020 eNews
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Welcome to 2020, although given the way the year has
started, perhaps we all want to fast-forward to 2021, or at least
to winter. The unprecedented bushfires have been truly awful. I
know the fires were almost everywhere across the country, but I
want to give my particular thoughts to our members in the southern
states. I hope you and your family all stayed safe. I know that
some of you had your work badly disrupted. Here in Brisbane I had
itchy eyes and a sore throat for days because of the bushfire smoke,
but our sub-tropical climate came to the rescue and the rain
cleared the air.
Personally I also found the political debate about
the fires disheartening, especially around the role of climate
change. Some of my statistical analyses have been misused by climate
deniers, and there is a hard-core group of deniers in Australia who
are often in the media but have no scientific qualifications. I am
glad that the Statistical Society made a statement on climate
change last year that strongly supports the science, which you can
read here.
It does feel like Australia has been changed by this
disastrous summer. I hope the remainder of the year is a good one
for you personally and the country.
Adrian Barnett
President, SSA
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WA Branch June 2019 Meeting
Adriano
Polpo, Associate Professor at UWA, spoke in the June meeting
about Optimal Sample-Size-Dependent Significance Levels. The talk
was based on the work (DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2018.1518268)
published on the The American Statistician special issue about
“Statistical Inference in the 21st Century: A World Beyond p <
0.05”. It can be seen that this is a hot topic given the number of
publications in this issue is over 40. But Adriano and his
coauthors address or revisit the nuances of hypothesis testing in
the classical approaches in order to prepare the way for their
approach to what has recently been a vexed question involving
whether or not or how to use p-values?
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WA Branch November 2019 Meeting
Talk by Frank Hansford-Miller Fellow Professor Cathryn Lewis
On the 12th November 2019 Cathryn Lewis who is
Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and Statistics at Kings College
London, University of London received her Frank Hansford-Miller
Fellowship medal, and led the audience in a tour through some of
her research in a talk titled “Polygenic risk scores to predict
risk of disease, hype, hope and statistical reality”. Cathryn has
been working at her present position for 20 years and describes
herself as someone who works on applied statistics. This is
very fitting as Frank was very enthusiastic for applied statistics
and the benefit that it could bring to the whole of society.
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Not
a long time ago, in a Captial not so far far away...The Tales of an
Applied Statistician
The next SSA Canberra meeting will
take place on Tuesday 25th February, where Dr Marijke Welvaert from
the ANU Statistical Consulting Unit will walk us through her
journey and experiences as an applied statistician, and how
statisticians have and can help overcome the bridges between
statistics and their applications. Dr Marijke Welvaert joined the
ANU Statistical Consulting Unit in 2019, having obtained her PhD in
2013 from Ghent University, Belgium and has subsequently held
postdoctoral positions at CSIRO and the University of
Canberra.
As always,
details will be available in due course on the Canberra
branch meeting website.
Francis Hui, Warren Muller, Phil Tennant
On behalf of SSA Canberra
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The
early bird gets the worm!
Registration is open to all persons
interested in the Australian Statistical Society and New Zealand
Statistical Association Conference 2020 (ANZSC 2020) and the
Australian Conference on Teaching Statistics (OZCOTS). Register
today here.
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Register to see keynote speakers including Ian
Anderson, Robert Gould and Renate Meyer and many more. Visit the
joint ANZSC and OZCOTS website to see our full
list of National and International Speakers set to take the stage
at this year Conference on the Sunny Gold Coast. Stay tuned for our
full program to be announced soon!
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Announcement
and call for submissions
Special issue
of Teaching Statistics
“Teaching Data
Science and Statistics: senior school or introductory tertiary”
Editors: Helen
MacGillivray, Robert Gould, Jim Ridgway
The special
issue of Teaching Statistics will be published in 2020 as an
e-book, titled Teaching Data Science and Statistics: senior school
or introductory tertiary.
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Update
from the Bayes Section
There will be a pre-conference workshop at ANZSC in
July on logistic
regression in Autostat. We have a trip report from the
BayesComp workshop in January, which was attended by members of the
Bayes SSA section. The ISBA Program Council have extended the early
registration and poster submission deadlines for the ISBA
World Meeting and BAYSM (June/July, 2020). A reminder about ABC
in Grenoble (March, 2020) and announcement of an SMC
workshop in Madrid (May, 2020).
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The
8th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF)
will take place in Heidelberg, Germany during
September 20–25, 2020. At HLF all winners of the Fields Medal,
the Abel Prize, the ACM A.M. Turing Award, the Nevanlinna
Prize, and the ACM Prize in Computing are invited to attend.
In addition, young and talented computer scientists and
mathematicians are invited to apply for
participation. The previous HLFs have been an exceptional
success. The HLF serves as a great
platform for interaction between the masters in the
fields of mathematics and computer science and young talents.
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Calling
all writers!
Significance
and the Royal Statistical Society Young Statisticians Section have
just launched their 2020 writing competition for early-career
statisticians and data scientists.
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International
Statistical Ecology Conference (ISEC2020)
June
22-26, 2020, Sydney Australia.
ISEC2020 is nearly upon us! This is the
leading meeting internationally at the interface between statistics
and ecology, and the first time ISEC will be held in the southern
hemisphere!
Registration is open with early
bird deadline coming up April 1!
To find out more info on registration, plenary
speakers, showcase skills workshop, etc. please go to the conference website.
See you in Sydney,
The ISEC2020 Local Organizing Committee
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SSA Career Centre
Have you been to the SSA Career Centre lately?
Since its implementation in 2014 it has grown steadily, year
by year. The Career Centre currently features 168 registered
employers and 423 registered job seekers. 106 resumes have been
uploaded and can be viewed by potential employers. There are
currently 1009 live job ads (figures from 1 February 2020).
Our Career Centre has many helpful features, such
as tips on how to prepare a resume, what NOT to include in your
resume, how to ace your interview, how to advance your career and
how to manage in a digital world . Job Seekers can create job
alerts so that they get notified when a new ad is listed.
Employers can view the uploaded anonymous resumes
for free. If they see one that they find interesting, they can
contact the Career Centre managers to let them know that they would
like to contact the person who posted the resume. The managers will
then get in touch with that person and if he or she would like to
follow it up, they will connect employer and potential employee for
a fee of $35.00, payable by the potential employer.
From the (passive) job seekers’ view they have
nothing to lose. Their resume just sits there waiting for the right
employer to see it.
We are lucky to have this great tool on our website,
providing an extra service for our members and I hope that one day
it will develop into the hub for all things to do with the
statistical job market.
Marie-Louise Rankin
Executive Officer, SSA
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Don't forget: SSA Members get 30%
discount on Oxford University Press statistics titles!
With origins dating back to 1478, Oxford University
Press is the world's largest university press with the widest
global presence. Click here to see all your membership perks and how
to access them.
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Did
you see our webinars?
Did
you miss our webinars with Agus Salim or Sir David
Spiegelhalter? You can catch them here. You will need to log in before you
can view the page.
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Need
to catch up on missed Branch Meetings?
Check out our
ever growing video library and catch up on branch talks you may
have missed. New videos are added each month and here are the
latest ones:
Presenting
Uncertainty and Risk – John
Henstridge
Statistics
is the Crown Jewel of Data Science – Antoni
Ugoni
Detecting
botnet activity using machine learning – Jill
Slay
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SSA events you
can look forward to:
ANZSC2020
6-10 July 2020, Gold Coast
JSSM2022
27 June - 1 July 2022, Darwin
See more events listed here.
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ATSIMA 2020
Conference
Monday 27 to
Wednesday 29 July 2020
‘Nhe
waŋana’ ‘Nhe djämamirriyaŋana’ ’Speak it' “You create it'
Transforming
mathematics education for Indigenous learners
NOW OPEN -
Registration and submissions to present
See conference
website for details www.atsima.com
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