San Antonio ASA
Chapter Newsletter
February 2008
Volume 21, No. 3
American Statistical Association
www.amstat.org/chapters/sanantonio/
Volunteers Needed to Judge two Upcoming Science Fairs
The category is "The Best Use of Statistics in a Science Project", senior high division, which is
awarded by the San Antonio Chapter of the American Statistical Association. Being a member of
the Association is not a requirement to judge in this category. The only requirement is a desire to
help our budding young scientists hone their academic and research skills. No experience as a
judge is necessary.
Please consider volunteering to be a special award judge at
1) The 2007 Alamo Regional Science and Engineering Fair.
Judging is scheduled for Saturday, March 8, 2008 from 8:30 am to 11 am. The location
is St. Mary’s University, Bill Greehey Arena, in San Antonio.
2) The Exxon-Mobile Texas Science and Engineering Fair 2008
Judging is scheduled for Friday, April 11, 2008 from 8:30 am to 11 am. The location is
the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center in downtown San Antonio.
Parking is free at both fairs. Breakfast and lunch are provided free of charge at both fairs. The
more judges we get the more relaxed the judging process goes, and the sooner we get done.
Please volunteer!
To volunteer send an email to judging coordinator Howard Monroe at hmonroe2@satx.rr.com or
call Howard at 210-421-7547.
2008 COTS in San Antonio
The 2008 Conference of Texas Statisticians will be held here in San Antonio Friday, March 28
and Saturday, March 29th. The conference will be hosted by our San Antonio Chapter of the
American Statistical Association. Conference coordinator is Dr. Nandini Kannan,
nandini.kannan@utsa.edu. The location will be University of Texas at San Antonio, Downtown
Campus.
Conference Registration Fees: $40; $20 for students
Banquet: $20; $10 for students
Preliminary Conference Schedule:
Friday Events:
Pre-Conference Short Course, 8am to 12 noon
Conference Registration, 12 noon
Conference Sessions, 1:00 pm to 4:30 pm
COTS Business Meeting, 5:00 pm
Student Poster Session, 6:00 pm
Banquet, 7:00 pm, Radisson Hotel
Saturday Events:
New Texas Faculty Session, 9:00 am to 11:30 am
Attached to this newsletter is the COTS 2008 Program. Conference and Short Course
registration is available at the COTS 2008 website
http://business.utsa.edu/departments/mss/conf/
Pre-COTS Short Course
The San Antonio Chapter is pleased to announce a Pre-COTS Short Course taught by Professor
Tim Hesterberg. The course is titled “Bootstrap Methods and Permutation Tests for Doing and
Teaching Statistics” and will be a half-day short course scheduled for Friday morning, March
28th.
Short Course Registration Fee: $50; $25 for students (includes lunch and materials)
The registration form can be found at the COTS 2008 website
http://business.utsa.edu/departments/mss/conf/
Note: We must have all short course participants pre-registered to ensure that we have
enough food and handouts for everyone.
Pre-COTS Short Course Description:
Early in Stat 101 we teach that robustness is important. Yet later in the course, and too often
in statistical practice, we ignore those lessons, and use simple means and least-squares
regression together with Normal-based inferences, even though the corresponding
assumptions are violated.
Bootstrapping and permutation tests (BPT) let us check the accuracy of common procedures,
and the results are surprising. We'll see how inaccurate Normal-based methods are in the
presence of even moderate skewness. The old rule of trusting the CLT if n>30 is just old.
BPT let us more easily do inferences for a wider variety of statistics (e.g. trimmed means,
robust regression) for data collected in a variety of ways (e.g. stratification).
BPT provide output we may graph in familiar ways (like histograms) to help students and
clients understand sampling variability, standard errors, p-values, and the Central Limit
Theorem (CLT)-not just in the abstract, but for the data set and statistic at hand.
We'll look at applications from a variety of fields, including telecommunications, finance, and
biopharm.
About the Instructor:
Tim Hesterberg is the lead author of “Bootstrap Methods and Permutation Tests” (2003), is
primary author of the “S+Resample” package for bootstrapping, permutation tests, jackknife,
and other resampling procedures, and has written numerous technical articles. He is a
Research Scientist at Insightful Corp., previously taught at Franklin & Marshall and St. Olaf
Colleges, and was an Operations Research Analyst at pacific Gas & Electric Co. He is pastchair of the Statistical Computing Section of the ASA, Secretary of the Interface Foundation,
and is an associate editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics.
Upcoming Conferences in the Area
SAS Global Forum (formerly SUGI), San Antonio, Texas, March 16-19, 2008
Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center
http://support.sas.com/events/sasglobalforum/2008/index.html
(COTS) Conference of Texas Statisticians, San Antonio, Texas, March 28-29, 2008
University of Texas at San Antonio, Downtown Campus
http://business.utsa.edu/departments/mss/conf/
_________________________________________________
San Antonio ASA Chapter Officers 2007-2008
President:
David W. Smith, University of Texas School of Public Health
San Antonio Branch Campus
(210) 562-5512
smithd2@uthscsa.edu
Vice-President: Jerry Keating, University of Texas at San Antonio
(210) 458-5370
jerome.keating@utsa.edu
Secretary:
Norma Ketchum, Brooks City-Base
(210) 536-1962
norma.ketchum@brooks.af.mil
Treasurer:
Carolyn Oakley, Federal Government (Retired)
(210) 481-3473
cjo@texas.net
COC Rep
(2008-2010):
COTS Rep
(2006-2008):
TBA
Nandini Kannan, University of Texas at San Antonio
(210) 458-5691
nandini.kannan@utsa.edu
Visit the San Antonio ASA website at http://www.amstat.org/chapters/sanantonio/
Webmaster:
Ginny deWolf, dewolf@ktc.