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Newsletter of the Chicago Chapter of the American Statistical Association |  |
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 The CCASA wishes you a joyful holiday season!
Noon to 1:30PM TUESDAY, December 8, 2009 The East Bank Club, 500 N. Kingsbury, Chicago 60610
Please join us for another exciting talk in the CCASA's
2009-2010 Luncheon program!
Our December speaker is Albert
Madansky.
Plans for our future luncheons will be
included in our
upcoming announcements and in the Parameter.
Lunch is $30 for CCASA members, $35 for
non-members. Non-members, join the chapter for a
year for only $15 and get the discount plus
all of the other
benefits of membership! As usual, the Lucile
Derrick
Fund will purchase a limited number of
tickets for
students who wish to attend. If you are a
student and
would like to take advantage of this offer,
please
register online below, and contact Gerald Funk,
expressing your interest. Please register for
the
luncheon by Friday, December 4th,
2009. Register online at https://www.123 signup.com/servlet/SignUpMember? PG=1531573182300&P=153157300. Mark Your Calendars! The January luncheon will be held on January 26th, and the speaker will be Lisa Amoroso. Lisa will present a talk on Ethics in an Infoglut World. Plan to join your CCASA friends in January! Questions: Contact Borko Jovanovic, CCASA VP Luncheons, Phone: 312-503-2008 or E-mail: borko@northwestern.edu
VP Conferences, Byron Bell
At the recent Chicago ASA Board
meeting, the topic of
chess came up. Our ever-entertaining leader, Lou
Fogg, informed us that at one point, briefly, he had a
rating of over 2200 and so was a chess master. As
for me, I have been a victim of scholar's mate by a six
year old more than once. This topic morphed into an
interesting discussion about Arpad Elo the creator of
the Elo rating system. This is the system that the
World Chess Federation adopted in 1970 to rate
chess players based on statistical estimation. For
those interested, Wikipedia has an
interesting summary of the theory and mathematical
details.
Thanks, Lou, for your interesting
content contribution
to this month's Parameter. Anyone think that a CCASA
chess tournament would be an interesting event? Let
us know! -Linda
Statman is coming to town and attending next week's CCASA luncheon, featuring speaker Dr. Al Madansky. Be sure to not to miss it!
Kicking SAS?
Not if James
Goodnight, statistician and CEO of the SAS Institute,
has any say in the matter. Recently the New
York Times reported that the venerable software
giant that created the statistical tool of choice for
countless business statisticians for over three
decades is under siege. New competition is
threatening SAS's longstanding, comfortable position
as the undisputed leader in business intelligence
software.
This summer, IBM took a serious step
into the business intelligence realm with their
purchase of SPSS and Cognos. In a direct threat to
the SAS reign, it has been widely reported that IBM
intends to build a 4,000-person-strong business
analytics and optimization group to provide global
business support.
As the industry leader, SAS has not, up
to this point, had to be concerned. In fact, SAS
resisted integrating with the open programming
environments and information transparency that has
now turned their legacy world upside down. Free,
open source coding, such as R, has been quickly
adopted by academic institutions and labs, and SAS
was slow to recognize the importance of this shift.
Within a few short years, many graduating
statisticians will be using R in the workplace,
potentially usurping SAS's domination.
But SAS founder Goodnight is on the
move. According to senior VP and chief technology
officer Keith Collins, SAS has seen the error of it's
closed-minded ways and is committed to engaging
with the open source community. SAS has other
strong assets that could help it maintain its dominant
position in the market, including a loyal workforce with
a turnover rate of just four percent. The company has
worked hard to earn its reputation as a low-stress,
family friendly workplace. Even despite recently
reducing software development time from 24 to 36
months to 12 to 18 months, you would still be hard
pressed to find an employee who has worked a 60-
hour week more than two weeks in a row. It will be interesting to see how the new
strategies at SAS and the aggressive actions of its
competitors will affect the rapidly expanding world of
business analytics. Like Thanksgiving feasts on
tables across the country last week, data and
information have become the bounty of the business
world. Businesses need flexible, agile tools to help
them digest it all in ways that will keep them healthy
and growing. To complicate matters further, static
information of old - such sales and operations data -
needs to be combined with new, dynamic sources of
information, such as social networking buzz, Web
behavior and now easily accessible public records.
Nervous yet, Mr. Goodnight?
**PLEASE NOTE EDITOR'S NEW CONTACT INFORMATION**
Editor: Linda Burtch (847) 328-6902
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@burtchworks.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.
Email change of address to:
smileyr@georgetown.edu
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email:
newsletter@chicagoasa.org
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