It is indeed an honor and privilege to chair the Chicago Chapter for the 2008-2009 year. Over the years I have served the Chapter in many capacities--as president, secretary, VP for workshops, luncheons, and conferences, and as webmaster. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the dedicated volunteers who are working to bring Chicago area statisticians a wide-ranging program of career enhancing activities.

This past year we successfully converted to an electronic version of the Parameter, our Chapter newsletter. The Parameter is published from September to June and lists positions wanted (free to Chapter members) , as well as job listings and is an excellent way to find out about Chapter events. Linda Burtch has done a superb job editing the Parameter, and will continue to be the editor of the Parameter. You should contact Linda to place a listing or submit an article about your experiences as a Chicago area statistician in the Parameter.

Many of the Parameter articles also appear on the Chapter's website, http://www.ChicagoASA.org. Our website also contains information on joining the Chapter, membership dues, Chapter officers, how to post announcements, information about the Harry V Roberts Statistical Advocate Award, an archive of past events, and more. Kathy Morrissy will continue to be our Chapter webmaster. If you have suggestions on how we can make this site better serve your needs, contact or if you want to receive notices of Chapter events via email, let me know.

In March 2007, the Chicago Chapter and Northeast Illinois Chapter co-hosted a very successful Chicago Career Forum. We are planning to do another this year. Let me know if you would like to help prepare for the next career forum.

In 2001, the Chapter inaugurated the 2001 Harry V. Roberts Statistical Advocate Award. The purpose of this award is to identify those individuals whose contribution to statistics lies in advocating the use of statistical methodology. The chapter decided to name the award after Harry Roberts, a long time member of the Chapter, because he best personifies the qualities that this award represents. Most recently, the award went to Steven Levitt. Is there someone in your company that you would like to nominate for this award? Let me know!

This year's monthly luncheon series will be organized by Borko Jovanovic. These luncheons provide an excellent opportunity to meet colleagues from the Chicago area and to learn from and be entertained by a truly diverse group of speakers. Last year's series organized by Lou Fogg. Thank you Lou. The 2008-2009 luncheons will usually be held in the East Bank Club the second Tuesday of the month from approximately noon to 1:30 pm (September through April). The East Bank Club, which is located near the Merchandise Mart at 500 N. Kingsbury, provides a central location that is accessible both by car or CTA. Would you like to make a luncheon presentation? Let Borko know!

The next Statistician of the Year award dinner is planned for Spring, 2009. This year the Statistician of the Year award went to David Wallace. The ASA Chicago Chapter Statistician of the Year program is an annual recognition of a professional statistician and his or her work. A nominating committee sends forth several names, and past recipients of the award elect the recipient. Send names you would like the nominating committee to consider to Richard Smiley. Another important activity of the Chapter is the Annual Spring Conference. This conference usually occurs on a Friday early in May and they have recently been held at the Loyola campus near the Water Tower. Organized around a timely statistical theme, the conference brings together experts from all over the country to make presentations and interact with conference participants in insightful panel discussions and question and answer sessions. Planning for the next Spring Conference in 2009 is about to begin. John VanderPloeg is this year's Conference VP. So to express your ideas and to volunteer your help in organizing this year's conference contact John.

Another way that the Chapter aims at providing continuing education to its members is through the statistical workshops. In recent years these workshops have been organized by Tony Babinec. Thank you Tony!. They are more in-depth than our luncheons, and more hands-on than our conference. These workshops provide members with a practical way of learning about and using new statistical techniques. Last March, the Chapter sponsored a successful workshop on survival analysis by Suzanne May. Let Tony know of your ideas for the next workshop.

Finally I would like to thank Lou Fogg for his work in coordinating Chapter efforts to encourage the establishment of STATCOM student organizations at universities in the Chicago area. STATCOM is a volunteer community outreach organization which provides professional statistical consulting services to governmental and nonprofit groups free of charge. Let me know if you would like to help with STATCOM. I am looking forward to a great year.

Thank you,
Gerald M. Funk
president@chicagoasa.org

Sept. 3rd 2008

Luncheon Announcement

Noon to 1:30 PM

TUESDAY September 23rd, 2008

The East Bank Club 500 N Kingsbury, Chicago 60610

Please join us for this first exciting event in the CCASA's 2008-2009 Luncheon program.

Our September speaker is Jacques Kibambe Ngoie, who is on faculty at the University of Pretoria and is on staff at the African Institute of Econometric Modeling. His talk is co-authored with Arnold Zellner and entitled: THE EFFECTS OF FREEDOM REFORMS ON THE GROWTH RATE OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN ECONOMY.

Abstract:
In this paper, an evaluation of the effects of several policy reforms on the South African economy's growth rate are evaluated using an estimated disaggregated Marshallian Macroeconometric Model (MMM-DA). The results indicate that institution of these policy reforms would result in a real GDP growth rate of 8.5% with a standard error of 1.3 percentage points. The "freedom reforms" considered include (1) freeing up barriers to firms' and workers' abilities to start up new firms and to obtain new employment and (2) health and educational programs that free individuals from poor health and ignorance, thereby enhancing their productivity. The usefulness of our MMM-DA model are discussed and several suggestions for improving it are considered.

The October luncheon will be held on October 21, and the speaker will be Byron Bell, from Harold Washington College. Dr Bell will discuss his work on new developments in modeling autocorrelation.

Plans for our future luncheons will be included in our upcoming announcements and in the Parameter. Lunch is $30 for CCASA members, $35 for nonmembers. Nonmembers, join the chapter for a year for only $15 and get the discount plus all the other benefits of membership! Please register for the luncheon by Friday September 19, 2008.

Contact Lou Fogg, VP for Luncheons Phone: 312-942-6239 or E-mail:louis_fogg@rush.edu

Save the Date: 2008-2009 Luncheons All luncheons are being held at the East Bank Club.

• September 23, 2008-Jaques Kibambe, University of Pretoria, 'The Effects of Freedom Reforms on the Growth Rate of the South African Economy.'
• October 21, 2008-Byron Bell, Harold Washington College, 'Data analysis of multi-wavelength magnitudes the SDSS-DR3 using a modified Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (ARCH) process.'
• November 5, 2008(WED)-Borko Jovanovich, Northwestern University-'Phase 1 Cancer Trials: Why Are They Not Trivial?'
• December 2, 2008-Steven Stigler, University of Chicago
• January 20, 2009-Konrad Koerding, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, 'People are very good at statistics-when they do not think they are actually doing statistics.'
• February 17, 2009-TBA
• March 17, 2009-TBA
• April 21, 2009-TBA

President Gerald Funk, Loyola University Chicago
President-Elect Lou Fogg, Rush University
Past-President Richard Smiley, NCSBN
VP Communications Linda Burtch, Smith Hanley Associates
VP Conferences John VanderPloeg, ARC Worldwide, an affiliate of Leo Burnett
VP Luncheons Borko Jovanovic, Northwestern University
VP Publicity John Graham, John A. Graham Consulting
VP Membership Suzanne Niemi, Walgreens
VP Secretary Dan Hayes
VP Treasurer Jerry Enenstein, JEResearch
VP Workshops Tony Babinec, AB Analytics
ASA Council of Chapters Rep. Tony Babinec, AB Analytics
Historian Steve Maguire
Directors at Large
George Bateman, University of Chicago
Linda Clark, LMC Consulting
Edward Hirschland, The Landhart Corporation
Mary Kwasny, Rush University
Peter Manikowski, Zelcom Group (Assistant Treasurer)
Arnold Zellner, University of Chicago
Ex-Officio Director: Council of Chapters Governing Board, Vice-Chair, Region 2, District 4 (effective Jan. 2007) Kathy Morrissey, Strategy 2 Market Inc.

Nate Silver was our featured speaker at a luncheon earlier this year. Here's an article that was published in Newsweek magazine this summer showcasing some of his work. Be sure to attend our upcoming luncheons, as you never know who you're going to meet! We've reprinted the article below in it's entirety.

Making His Pitches Nate Silver, an all-star in the world of baseball stats, may be the political arena's next big draw

http://www.newsweek.com/id/140469/output/print
By Andrew Romano, Published: Jun 7, 2008 Newsweek

On May 6, expectations were high for Hillary Clinton. After all, the latest polls suggested the former First Lady had built up a 5-point cushion in Indiana and slashed Barack Obama's 20-point lead in North Carolina to 8. But over at FiveThirty Eight.com, an anonymous blogger (nom d'écran: "Poblano") wasn't convinced. Relying on demographic data from previous primaries and ignoring the usual mishmash of polls, the mysterious upstart projected that Clinton would win Indiana by 2 percent and lose North Carolina by 17-a far-less favorable outcome. When the results finally rolled in-1 in Indiana, 15 in North Carolina-Poblano had outperformed every established pollster. Clinton never recovered, but with the National Journal, the Guardian and the New York Post suddenly dissecting or demanding the secrets of his success, Poblano became an Internet sensation. "It was kind of amazing," he says.

It only gets better. For the man behind the blog, outpredicting the experts wasn't anything new-even if outpredicting political experts was. On May 30, Poblano finally revealed his offline name: Nate Silver. Doesn't ring a bell? Chances are you're not a baseball geek. Silver, 30, is already celebrated among ball fans for inventing something called PECOTA. Developed while the University of Chicago econ alum slogged through a post-collegiate consulting gig-"I'm used to not sleeping," he tells NEWSWEEK-PECOTA is now recognized as the most accurate system for forecasting how athletes and teams will perform in the future (down to the number of singles). In 2007, Silver's algorithm enraged at least half of Chicago when it said the White Sox-2005 champs-would post a 72-90 record. Turned out PECOTA was exactly right. For laypeople, the leap from the national pastime to national politics might seem like a stretch. But not for Silver (who posted his first political item on Daily Kos in October). "Baseball and politics are data-driven," he's written. "But a lot of the time, that data might be used badly. In baseball, that may mean looking at a statistic like batting average when things like on-base percentage and slugging percentage are far more correlated with winning ballgames. In politics, that might mean cherry-picking a certain polling result." In other words, different sport-same skill set.

From the start, Silver took pride in myth-busting the MSM, which has tended to reduce 2008's complex calculus-delegate distribution, demographic coalitions-into not-quite-true narratives. Obama has a problem with working-class whites? Actu-ally, he has a problem with Appalachian working-class whites-and not their cousins in Oregon and Wisconsin. And so on. The response was ecstatic, and FiveThirtyEight's daily traffic increased 5,000 percent between March and June. But the main attraction was always Silver's primary predictions. Taking a page from PECOTA-a comprehensive historical database, it projects future performance by matching current players to comparable predecessors-Poblano predicted the results in, say, Pittsburgh by measuring how Clinton and Obama did in demographically similar congressional districts earlier on (once set, their coalitions were remarkably stable). Silver's score wasn't perfect-he underestimated Clinton in Kentucky and South Dakota. But ultimately, he came within 20 delegates of the final split on Super Tuesday (out of nearly 1,700) and 2.5 percent, on average, in the other six post-March primaries. "Nate's work is innovative," says Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com.

So who will win in November? Silver says Obama (full disclosure: he's a supporter). Predicting the Election Day outcome is not like predicting a primary; with no previous head-to-head results to mine, Silver is relying on Census data to balance out the polls. So far, Silver's system shows Obama and McCain splitting the popular vote 50.0 percent to 50.0 percent, with Obama winning the Electoral College 274.4 to 263.6. Today, McCain runs about 10 points better than Bush in parts of the Northeast-his strongest region, comparatively-but it's not enough to swing any states. The Arizonan's best chance for a flip? Michigan. Obama, on the other hand, currently swipes Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa from the GOP, and is within striking distance in Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia and even Alaska. And thanks to Nebraska, where electors are awarded by congressional district, Silver even suspects that McCain and Obama could, um, tie. "Right now, Obama's losing the state by 10 points, but that's 10 points better than Dems usually do," he says. "If Obama wins Colorado, Iowa and the city of Omaha, where he's popular, it would end up 269-269 and go to the House of Representatives. Crazier things could happen." They could. And Silver will probably be the first to know.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/140469/output/print

Part Time Faculty
Robert Morris College
Chicago, Waukegan, Bensenville, Schaumburg, Aurora, Orland Park, Peoria, Springfield Campuses

Within Robert Morris College, the Graduate School of Management and the Division of Science and Humanities, seeks part-time faculty to teach Statistics classes to graduate and undergraduate students at the Chicago, Waukegan, Bensenville, Schaumburg, Aurora, Orland Park, Peoria, and Springfield campuses.

UNDERGRADUATE REQUIREMENTS:

• Masters Degree in Statistics or related degree with 18 credit hours of graduate level statistics classes
• Previous teaching experience is a plus
• Prior research experience

GRADUATE REQUIREMENTS:

• Masters Degree in Statistics or related degree with 18 credit hours of graduate level statistics classes
• 5 years of senior level experience
• Ph.D. in statistics or related area preferred
• Previous teaching experience required

HOW TO APPLY:

Submit a resume and cover letter to:
The Office of Human Resources
Robert Morris College,
401 S. State Street,
Chicago, IL, 60605
or Fax resume and cover letter to 312-935-6711
or Apply via email at hr@robertmorris.edu

Editor: Linda Burtch (312) 629-2400

PARAMETER, newsletter of the Chicago Chapter of the American Statistical Association, is published 10 times a year as a service to its members. To submit material for publication, contact the Editor, Linda Burtch, email: lburtch@smithhanley.com

PARAMETER provides a job listing service by publishing Positions Available and Positions Wanted, the latter being free to Chapter members. Companies may list positions for $75. Contact the Editor for more information.

For additional information about Chicago Chapter ASA, please visit us on the web at: www.ChicagoASA.org Also, visit the National ASA web site www.amstat.org.

Email change of address to: suzanne.niemi@walgreens.com

email: newsletter@chicagoasa.org

web: http://www.chicagoasa.org