Dear CHANCE Colleagues,

We are excited to bring you our first issue of CHANCE magazine as the new editors. Admittedly, we are a bit nervous to be following previous CHANCE editor Amanda Peterson-Plunkett. Her term as editor took CHANCE to a new level, and we are grateful for her support and help with the transition. We appreciate the ASA Board for giving us the honor of serving as co-editors. Finally, we are thankful for readers like you who make it all worthwhile. We describe some of our initiatives for CHANCE in this letter, and we urge you to contribute your own ideas and articles. See https://chance.amstat.org/contact for information about submitting articles and other contact information.

CHANCE is meant to be a “magazine designed for anyone who has an interest in using data to advance science, education, and society.” CHANCE is a non-technical magazine highlighting applications that demonstrate sound statistical practice. CHANCE represents a cultural record of an evolving field, intended to entertain as well as inform (https://chance.amstat.org/about).

We also plan to continue several of Amanda’s initiatives, such as partnering with Stats + Stories, a podcast that brings you “the Statistics behind the Stories and the Stories behind the Statistics.”

Your favorite columns will continue giving us the opportunity to showcase interesting discussions about visualization, sports, education, ethics, and law. We also want to introduce new columns. One will focus on aspects of computing of interest to statisticians and data scientists and will emphasize open-source tools, such as R and Python. Another new column we are calling Random Reads and Variable Views will have short descriptions of and links to online and open-access articles, books, videos, and podcasts that would be of interest to our readers. We are still working out the details, but we will be looking to you for content.

The current issue introduces a new initiative: Every year, starting in 2023, the first issue of CHANCE will contain articles from speakers participating in the annual Influencing Discovery Exploration and Action (IDEA) Forum, which will have taken place in the fall of the previous year. The first of these IDEA Forums took place in November 2022. The goal of the forum is to focus on how statisticians can help address global problems by bringing together leaders from academia, government, and industry. Each year, the forum will focus on one problem facing the world. It should be no surprise to readers that the first IDEA Forum addressed how we might contribute to innovative solutions to the problem of climate change. The article “Influencing Discovery Exploration & Action Forum: An Initiative of the American Statistical Association” by ASA 2022 President Kathy Ensor and Donna LaLonde gives an excellent overview of the forum and the related content in this issue, so we will forgo the summary typically done in the Editor’s Letter.

We conclude this letter with another exciting opportunity to share CHANCE content. Our publishers, Taylor & Francis, gave us the opportunity to construct something they call collections. These would be articles on particular topics or themes that would be available online and for a limited time. This will allow us to create additional temporary or virtual “issues” of the magazine. Our goal is to create one or two collections each year.

We really want to hear from you—our readers! Please send your ideas for special issues and collections to us. We welcome submissions from you and your colleagues, so spread the word about CHANCE and submit something today.

Wendy Martinez and Donna LaLonde

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