Editors’ Letter—Vol. 37, No. 3
Dear CHANCE Colleagues,
Welcome back to CHANCE after a wonderful (and hot!) summer. For many CHANCE readers, it is back to school time, so the September issue includes several articles related to education. Our Taking a Chance in the Classroom column has a submission from Kicab Castaneda-Mendez, with the intriguing title “Puzzling Probabilities of Probability Puzzles.” We will leave it as an exercise for the reader to explore what that is all about. The “Teaching Statistics in the Health Sciences” article is written by Ashley Petersen and describes inclusive teaching practices. The concept of randomness is at the core of statistics and is the subject of the third article with an education focus. It is titled “The Illusion of Randomness: Evaluating Student Sampling Performance.” Wenqi Zeng and co-authors “explore the way statistics students relate the idea of ‘drawing at random’ to visual sampling tasks.” They gathered data from college students, who were asked to click randomly on points in various shapes, some of which included optical illusions. The authors provide R code and other materials, so teachers can run similar experiments in their classrooms.
We are excited to have the Letters to the Editor column in this issue, which is the first one since the April 2022 issue. One goal of the One Thing About… column is to spark discussions so, happily, one letter was in response to the article titled “Strange Expectations: A Dickens of a Problem,” which was published in the last issue of CHANCE (April 2024). Remember, the goal of these letters is “to foster respectful debate and encourage engaging conversations. Through thoughtful discourse, readers can voice their views, share insights, and engage with one another in meaningful dialogue.” Please consider joining the conversation by submitting an article to the One Thing About… column or a Letter to the Editor. The second letter is from Stephen Senn and William Rosenberger and is in response to Stephen Ziliak’s “Letter to a Young Statistician: On ‘Student’ and the Lanarkshire Milk Experiment” (CHANCE, February 2024). Senn and Rosenberger provide further insights into the topic.
There are four fascinating books reviewed in the Book Reviews column, two of which are reviewed by the column editor Christian Robert. Two others are written by guest reviewers Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Gaurav Sood, and Andrew Gelman. We are also excited to have the first Beyond the Box Score sports column of our tenure. Adriana Gonzalez Sanchez and co-authors address whether “icing the kicker work[s] in the NFL.” In football, “icing the kicker” is when a coach calls for a timeout right before a field goal is attempted, where the coach’s aim is to affect the kicker negatively. Be sure to read the column to find the answer!
This CHANCE issue includes three history-related articles. One is in the History Chronicles column, which is a fascinating tribute to Peter Armitage, who died this year at 99. “He was best known for his innovative developments in clinical trial design and analysis, especially the use of sequential analysis and optimal stopping decision criteria.” We also have an article celebrating the life of Ralph D’Agostino, Sr., which includes memories from his colleagues and family. Ralph was a prominent statistician who “made significant contributions to the areas of nonparametrics, design of clinical trials, and research in cardiovascular disease through his involvement as a coprincipal investigator in the Framingham Heart Study.” The third history article is titled “How to Model It: Pólya’s Forgotten Lesson Transcribed for Statistics and Data Science.” It explores how Pólya’s problem-solving principles “could be taught more widely in the classroom and welcome newcomers to our field.”
Finally, there are two interesting articles describing two experiments. The article “Do We Let Businesses Get away with Dodgy Ethics and Loose Morals?” by Moinak Bhaduri uses Markov random fields to examine differences in what matters most to conservative- and liberal-leaning respondents. The author finds that the node that “control the hub of activity” is, “for conservatives, […] whether the business functions in a way that is sustainable for the environment” and is, “for liberals, […] whether the business offers fair wages to workers of all types.” The second article describes a self-experiment, where the author Joseph Lee Rodgers tries to answer the questions “Can old people learn a new language? Can the author of this article, a particular old person, improve his French enough to matter?” We recommend reading the article for inspiration on conducting your own experiments!
Wendy Martinez and Donna LaLonde