Dear CHANCE Colleagues,

We celebrate the coming of spring with a new issue of CHANCE.

The United States has perhaps never been so entrenched in political gridlock. Negotiations over issues such as healthcare and immigration are at a stalemate. Might we look to a statistical concept to play a role in addressing these issues? Could randomness be part of the solution? Leonard Wapner discusses whether flipping a coin can help address the country’s problems in “Fair and Efficient by Chance.”

Graduate admission to STEM-related programs at universities in the United States often involves a quota system to ensure that some applicants from the United States are accepted when competing against a very talented international pool of applicants. Paul Kvan discusses the implications of this in “Demonstrating the Consequences of Quota Sampling in Student Admissions.”

Statisticians understand that point estimates should be accompanied by standard errors or the precision associated with such estimates, but in many cases, tabular summaries are published without this information. Tom Krenzke and JianZhu Li describe an approach of “replicating tables” that allows sampling errors from a table based on the margins of error associated with numbers in the table, to carry into analyses that use this information. An R function and Excel file can be used to implement this approach.

Thank you to Sarjinder Singh for letting us have fun visualizing the connection between a box plot and the human face!

Be sure to reserve Saturday, September 28, 2019, for the next installment of the New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports (NESSIS), one of the preeminent research conferences on statistics in sport. NESSIS is the brainchild of Mark Glickman and yours truly (well—mostly Mark). For more information, visit the NESSIS website.

In our columns, Monika Hu shares a rewarding experience about teaching an upper-level undergraduate statistics course through a shared/hybrid model in “Taking a Chance in the Classroom.” Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel revisits teaching massive open online courses (MOOCs) and what we have learned from them in “Teaching Statistics in the Health Sciences.” Nicole Lazar discusses crowdsourcing in the Big Data era in “The Big Picture.”

Christian Robert reviews The Beauty of Mathematics in Computer Science, IAQ, Let the Evidence Speak, Surprises in Probability—Seventeen Short Stories, and Is that a Big Number? in our book reviews column. Finally, Howard Wainer examines the work of Devah Pager, who died recently at an all-too-young age. Howard discusses her work on the relative effects of race and crime on employment in “Visual Revelations.”

Scott Evans

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