The CCASA wishes you a fantastic Thanksgiving
with family and friends!

Luncheon Announcement
Noon to 1:30PM
December 2nd, 2008
The East Bank Club
500 N Kingsbury, Chicago 60610

Please join us for our Holiday Luncheon- It's a wonderful way to connect with your statistical colleagues.

Our December speaker is Stephen Stigler , who is on faculty at the University of Chicago. His talk is entitled: The Five Most Consequential Ideas in the History of Statistics

You don't want to miss this! This event will be the highlight of the year!

Abstract:
Five ideas are identified as the most consequential in the history of statistics. All had origins that predate the 20th century; all have enduring contemporary relevance; all are basic yet sufficiently subtle that they can puzzle and perplex some of the best minds even today. And, no, Bayes Theorem is not in the list.

Speaker Biography:
Stephen M. Stigler is Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor and Chairman, Department of Statistics and the College at the University of Chicago. Stephen's research interests include: the investigation of the history of statistical methods; the study of the reception of quantification in the sciences; the investigation of how understanding of regression and aggregation paradoxes have influenced policy debates; the study of how mathematical developments have become confounded with personal disputes in the formation of scientific schools of thought. Stephen has 120+ published articles and two books on the history of Statistics: "The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900" and "Statistics on the Table: The History of Statistical Concepts and Methods." Stephen has been at the University of Chicago since 1979. Stephen was a recipient of the 1998 Quantrell Award, presented annually to University of Chicago faculty members in recognition of excellence in teaching undergraduate students. Stephen Stigler's wit and erudition have earned him frequent speaking invitations.

The January Luncheon, will be held on January 20th, 2009, and the speaker will be Konrad Koerding , Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Dr Koerding will present a talk entitled 'People are very good at statistics-when they do not actually think they are doing statistics.'

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!

Click here to register online

For any questions or concerns, please contact:
Lou Fogg, VP for Luncheons
Phone: 312-942-6239 or E-mail: louis_fogg@rush. edu

Please Spread the Word!

Finding Fame With a Prescient Call for Obama

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
Published: November 9, 2008
New York Times

At 9:46 p.m., blogging on his site FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver called the presidential election for Barack Obama. The television networks followed suit about an hour and 15 minutes later after most polls in Western states closed.

Of course, Mr. Silver had a head start: he had forecast that Senator Obama would beat Senator John McCain back in March.

In an election season of unlikely outcomes, Mr. Silver, 30, is perhaps the most unlikely media star to emerge. A baseball statistician who began analyzing political polls only last year, he introduced his site, FiveThirtyEight.com, in March, where he used his own formula to predict federal and state results and run Election Day possibilities based on a host of factors.

Other sites combine polls, notably RealClearPolitics and Pollster, but FiveThirtyEight, which drew almost five million page views on Election Day, has become one of the breakout online stars of the year. Mr. Silver recognized that people wanted to play politics like they played fantasy baseball, and pick apart poll numbers for themselves instead of waiting for an evening news anchor to interpret polls for them.

FiveThirtyEight is "among the very first things I look at when I get up in the morning," said Allan McCutcheon, who holds the Clifton chair in survey science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "He helped make sense of some of the things that didn't seem sensible."

Mr. Silver has also become an in-demand analyst, appearing on MSNBC, CNN, "The Colbert Report" and Fox News.

"From a marketing standpoint, I'd rather hedge a little bit more," he said, "but we're the ones who are bold enough and are stupid enough to say what the polls translate to."

He spent election night in a small studio inside the Newseum in Washington, as an on-air analyst for "Dan Rather Reports" on HDNet. During the campaign, Mr. Silver had learned a thing or two about television polish: he smoothed his hair, ironed his jacket, applied Visine drops and dabbed on concealer before a "hit," as he had learned to call it.

This was his second television booking of the day, and a producer from "The Tonight Show" had called earlier. A makeup artist brushed on powder and a producer yelled into a cellphone as Mr. Silver sat sideways at his computer, his elbows splaying from his keyboard at angles that would alarm an ergonomist, squinting at Excel spreadsheets.

Mr. Silver has believed in numbers the way authors believe in words, as capable of expression and provocation, since he was young.

He "was a numbers fanatic," said his father, Brian Silver, a political science professor at Michigan State University.

"When we took him to preschool one time, we dropped him off, and he announced, 'Today, I'm a numbers machine,' and started counting," Brian Silver said. "When we picked him up two and a half hours later, he was 'Two thousand one hundred and twenty-two, two thousand one hundred and twenty-three...' "

By kindergarten, he could multiply two-digit numbers in his head. By 11, he was conducting multivariate analysis to figure out if the size of a baseball stadium affects attendance (it doesn't). By age 13, he was using statistics to manage a fantasy baseball team. When his parents refused to buy him computer games, he taught himself the Basic programming language and created his own.

He graduated from the University of Chicago in 2000, and was working for (and bored by) the accounting firm KPMG when he began messing around with baseball statistics. He tried to predict players' performance based on their similarity to players from the past, like Bill James, a pioneer in baseball statistics, had done. But unlike Mr. James, Mr. Silver adjusted for body type, including factors like height and weight, discovering, for example, that taller pitchers age better.

He built a predictive system called Pecota around that, and sold it to Baseball Prospectus, a statistical organization, in 2002, staying on as a writer and consultant for the company. For the 2007 season, he correctly predicted the White Sox would lose 90 games. And for the season that just concluded, he predicted the longtime basement-dwelling Tampa Bay Rays would be a top team.

"I think everybody in our field is pleased and proud to see Mr. Silver's work in political analysis taken seriously, and I'm sure that analysis is shaped to some extent by the ways of thinking that have been developed in our field," said Mr. James in an e-mail message. "It's a vicarious pride, much as one takes in the performance of the old school's football team."

Late last year, Mr. Silver, an Obama supporter, became frustrated with how primary poll results were being reported, and how sloppy polls and rigorous polls were given the same attention.

"What you heard on television was, Hillary was inevitable, she's up 20 points," he said. "She's up 20 points because people had heard of her. They hadn't heard of Obama."

Mr. Silver posted his speculations on the liberal Web site DailyKos.com, and earned attention when he projected Senator Obama would win 833 Super Tuesday delegates, which was within about a dozen of the actual vote estimates.

He began feeding a database with every poll available, from the University of Akron to Zogby International, state demographics and election results from 1952 forward. He weighted all the polls on historical accuracy, and adjusted them for whether they tended to favor Democrats or Republicans and other factors, then built a model that simulated elections.

He began to see patterns, like leads in polls over the summer should be discounted, or a shift in opinion in North Carolina usually moves with one in Virginia.

In March, he introduced FiveThirtyEight.com, and it quickly became a go-to site for readers whose interest in raw numbers had grown after the close (and miscalled) elections in 2000 and 2004. As his reputation grew online - there's a Facebook group called "There's a 97.3 Percent Chance That Nate Silver Is Totally My Boyfriend" - the mainstream media he disparaged for sloppy reporting came calling.

Political predictions are "big this year because of Nate Silver," said Sam Wang, who runs the rival site Princeton Election Consortium. "He loves discussing the details of the data, and his commentary is quite good. He's made this hobby mainstream."

Between his live TV appearances on election night, Mr. Silver updated his model and determined around 8 p.m., after New Hampshire went to Senator Obama, that Senator McCain had no way of winning. By the end of the night, Mr. Silver had predicted the popular vote within one percentage point, predicted 49 of 50 states' results correctly, and predicted all of the resolved Senate races correctly.

The show ended at 1 a.m., and minutes later producers outside Mr. Silver's studio were celebrating and popping Champagne corks. A crew member started to dismantle the desk where Mr. Silver was still examining data.

"You don't have to go home, but we've gotta take your desk away," the crew member said.

"O.K., just let me post this," Mr. Silver said, narrowing his eyes at the screen.

One thing Mr. Silver cannot predict: what happens now. He suspects that Nov. 4 was the height of his popularity, and that producers will not be phoning as frequently any time soon. Publishers have been calling about a book, and he will continue with FiveThirtyEight, using it to predict Congressional votes during the Obama administration - if anyone cares.

"That's the paradox," he said. "You would think that you elect this guy and you want him to effect change, and then he gets elected, and people don't care about bills being passed."

I thought you might be interested in some of Mr Silver's ideas on Proposition 8.
From Nate's website- FiveThirtyEight.Com

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/prop-8-myths.html

Prop 8 Myths


Writes Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee:

Last week, however, 10 percent of voters were African American while 18 percent were Latino, and applying exit poll data to that extra turnout reveals that the pro-Obama surge among those two groups gave Proposition 8 an extra 500,000-plus votes, slightly more than the measure's margin of victory.
To put it another way, had Obama not been so popular and had voter turnout been more traditional - meaning the proportion of white voters had been higher - chances are fairly strong that Proposition 8 would have failed.
Certainly, the No on 8 folks might have done a better job of outreach to California's black and Latino communities. But the notion that Prop 8 passed because of the Obama turnout surge is silly. Exit polls suggest that first-time voters -- the vast majority of whom were driven to turn out by Obama (he won 83 percent [!] of their votes) -- voted against Prop 8 by a 62-38 margin. More experienced voters voted for the measure 56-44, however, providing for its passage.
Now, it's true that if new voters had voted against Prop 8 at the same rates that they voted for Obama, the measure probably would have failed. But that does not mean that the new voters were harmful on balance -- they were helpful on balance. If California's electorate had been the same as it was in 2004, Prop 8 would have passed by a wider margin.

Furthermore, it would be premature to say that new Latino and black voters were responsible for Prop 8's passage. Latinos aged 18-29 (not strictly the same as 'new' voters, but the closest available proxy) voted against Prop 8 by a 59-41 margin. These figures are not available for young black voters, but it would surprise me if their votes weren't fairly close to the 50-50 mark.
At the end of the day, Prop 8's passage was more a generational matter than a racial one. If nobody over the age of 65 had voted, Prop 8 would have failed by a point or two. It appears that the generational splits may be larger within minority communities than among whites, although the data on this is sketchy.
The good news for supporters of marriage equity is that -- and there's no polite way to put this -- the older voters aren't going to be around for all that much longer, and they'll gradually be cycled out and replaced by younger voters who grew up in a more tolerant era. Everyone knew going in that Prop 8 was going to be a photo finish -- California might be just progressive enough and 2008 might be just soon enough for the voters to affirm marriage equity. Or, it might fall just short, which is what happened. But two or four or six or eight years from now, it will get across the finish line.

-- Nate Silver at 2:47 PM

Editor: Linda Burtch (312) 629-2400

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