SSA February 2020 eNews

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

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?

WA Branch November 2019 Meeting
Talk by Frank Hansford-Miller Fellow Professor Cathryn Lewis
On the 12^th 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.

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

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.  

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!

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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. 

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

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.

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

Statistical Society of Australia |  PO Box 213 Belconnen ACT 2616 Australia 

02 6251 3647 | www.statsoc.org.au