Significance (magazine)

Last updated
Significance
EditorAnna Britten
Categories Statistics
FrequencyBimonthly
Circulation 28,000
First issueMarch 2004
CompanyOxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Statistical Society and American Statistical Association
CountryUnited Kingdom/United States
LanguageEnglish
Website significancemagazine.com
ISSN 1740-9705

Significance, established in 2004, is a bimonthly print and digital magazine published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Statistical Society of Australia (SSA) and the American Statistical Association (ASA). [1] It publishes articles on topics of statistical interest presented at a level suited for a general audience. Articles are reviewed by an editorial board of statistics experts drawn from the three societies. [2] The founding editor-in-chief was Helen Joyce. [3] The current editor is Anna Britten. Significance replaced the RSS's journal, The Statistician. [4] The magazine also has a website.

In addition to ordinary articles in the magazine, additional "virtual issues" (collections of articles on a particular subject area) are made available online. [5] In November 2010 the magazine launched its website. [6] Having been launched as a quarterly magazine, Significance changed to a bimonthly frequency in 2011. In 2020, the regular column 'Dr Fisher's Casebook' was renamed 'the secret statistician', a review prompted by concern about Fisher's views on eugenics (and supported by the lack of salience of the homage to Dr Finlay's Casebook ). [7]

Members of either the RSS or the ASA receive the magazine as part of their membership. [1] In January 2015, the RSS and ASA decided to make the magazine issues available to the public free of charge a year after their publication. [8]

Related Research Articles

The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second oldest continuously operating professional society in the US. The ASA services statisticians, quantitative scientists, and users of statistics across many academic areas and applications. The association publishes a variety of journals and sponsors several international conferences every year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Royal Statistical Society</span> British learned society

The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) is an established statistical society. It has three main roles: a British learned society for statistics, a professional body for statisticians and a charity which promotes statistics for the public good.

In null-hypothesis significance testing, the p-value is the probability of obtaining test results at least as extreme as the result actually observed, under the assumption that the null hypothesis is correct. A very small p-value means that such an extreme observed outcome would be very unlikely under the null hypothesis. Even though reporting p-values of statistical tests is common practice in academic publications of many quantitative fields, misinterpretation and misuse of p-values is widespread and has been a major topic in mathematics and metascience. In 2016, the American Statistical Association (ASA) made a formal statement that "p-values do not measure the probability that the studied hypothesis is true, or the probability that the data were produced by random chance alone" and that "a p-value, or statistical significance, does not measure the size of an effect or the importance of a result" or "evidence regarding a model or hypothesis." That said, a 2019 task force by ASA has issued a statement on statistical significance and replicability, concluding with: "p-values and significance tests, when properly applied and interpreted, increase the rigor of the conclusions drawn from data."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claus Moser, Baron Moser</span>

Claus Adolf Moser, Baron Moser, was a British statistician who made major contributions in both academia and the Civil Service. He prided himself rather on being a non-mathematical statistician, and said that the thing that frightened him most in his life was when Maurice Kendall asked him to teach a course on analysis of variance at the LSE.

Stephen Elliott Fienberg was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistics, the Machine Learning Department, Heinz College, and Cylab at Carnegie Mellon University. Fienberg was the founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application and of the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality.

Dennis Victor Lindley was an English statistician, decision theorist and leading advocate of Bayesian statistics.

Stella Vivian Cunliffe was a British statistician. She was the first female president of the Royal Statistical Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bradley Efron</span> American statistician

Bradley Efron is an American statistician. Efron has been president of the American Statistical Association (2004) and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1987–1988). He is a past editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and he is the founding editor of the Annals of Applied Statistics. Efron is also the recipient of many awards.

Frank Carter Duckworth MBE is a retired English statistician, and is one of the two statisticians who developed the Duckworth–Lewis method of resetting targets in interrupted one-day cricket matches. He attended King Edward VII School, Lytham, now part of King Edward VII and Queen Mary School, then went on to study physics and earned a PhD (1965) in metallurgy, both at the University of Liverpool. Prior to his retirement, he worked as a mathematical scientist for the English nuclear power industry. He was a consultant statistician to the International Cricket Council, and the editor of the Royal Statistical Society's monthly news magazine, RSS News, until he retired from both these roles in 2014. He also served on the editorial board of Significance before stepping down in 2010. In 2004 he delivered the Royal Statistical Society Schools Lecture, entitled Lies and Statistics.

The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society is a peer-reviewed scientific journal of statistics. It comprises three series and is published by Oxford University Press for the Royal Statistical Society.

David John Finney, was a British statistician and Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of Edinburgh. He was Director of the Agricultural Research Council's Unit of Statistics from 1954 to 1984 and a former President of the Royal Statistical Society and of the Biometric Society. He was a pioneer in the development of systematic monitoring of drugs for detection of adverse reactions. He turned 100 in January 2017 and died on 12 November 2018 at the age of 101 following a short illness.

Harvey Goldstein was a British statistician known for his contributions to multilevel modelling methodology, statistical software, social statistics, and for applying this to educational assessment and league tables.

Stephen T. Ziliak is an American professor of economics whose research and essays span disciplines from statistics and beer brewing to medicine and poetry. He is currently a faculty member of the Angiogenesis Foundation, conjoint professor of business and law at the University of Newcastle in Australia, and professor of economics at Roosevelt University in Chicago, IL. He previously taught for the Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, and Bowling Green State University. Much of his work has focused on welfare and poverty, rhetoric, public policy, and the history and philosophy of science and statistics. Most known for his works in the field of statistical significance, Ziliak gained notoriety from his 1996 article, "The Standard Error of Regressions", from a sequel study in 2004 called "Size Matters", and for his University of Michigan Press best-selling and critically acclaimed book The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (2008) all coauthored with Deirdre McCloskey.

Cuthbert Daniel was an American industrial statistician.

Lee-Ann Collins Hayek is the chief mathematical statistician at the National Museum of Natural History. Her work has included studying the proportions of metals in Renaissance bronze, and the response of Pandas to vaccines. With Martin Buzas, she is the author of Surveying Natural Populations: Quantitative Tools for Assessing Biodiversity.

Amanda L. Golbeck is a statistician, social scientist, and academic leader. She is known for her book, Leadership and Women in Statistics, and her book on Elizabeth L. Scott, Equivalence: Elizabeth L. Scott at Berkeley. She is known for her pioneering definition of health numeracy.

Kevin McConway is emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University, where he spent most of his career. He was the first Vice President of the Royal Statistical Society, from 2012-2016. He was academic adviser to the BBC Radio Four programme More or Less and has written about that experience. He is currently a trustee and advisory board member of the Science Media Centre and has written about experience communicating statistics with the media, and this is developed as general guidance, and to statisticians specifically - "remember to sound human".

R-Ladies is an organization that promotes gender diversity in the community of users of the R statistical programming language. It is made up of local chapters affiliated with the worldwide coordinating organization R-Ladies Global.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sir Ronald Fisher window</span> Stained glass window commemorating Sir Ronald Fisher

A stained glass window commemorating British statistician, geneticist, and eugenicist R. A. Fisher was installed in the dining hall of Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, England in 1989. It depicts a 7x7 Latin square, as featured in Fisher's The Design of Experiments. The idea for the window came from college fellow, A. W. F. Edwards, and the execution was the work of Maria McClafferty.

Regina L. Loewenstein was an American public health statistician who worked as a lecturer in the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

References

  1. 1 2 "Significance Magazine—An ASA and RSS Partnership | Amstat News". American Statistical Association. 2010-05-13. Retrieved 2012-07-13.
  2. "Author guidelines". Significance. doi:10.1111/(ISSN)1740-9713 . Retrieved 2012-07-13.
  3. "Helen Joyce". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 2008-01-10.
  4. "Report of the Council for the session 2002-2003. Council Report". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series D . 52 (4): 603–678. 2003. doi:10.1046/j.0039-0526.2003.02062.x.
  5. "Virtual issues". Significance. doi:10.1111/(ISSN)1740-9713 . Retrieved 2010-07-15.
  6. "Significance Magazine Launches Official Web Site" (PDF). Amstat. November 16, 2010. Retrieved August 19, 2015.
  7. Tarran,B (2020). "New look, new structure, new opportunities". Significance. 17 (4): 15. doi:10.1111/1740-9713.01419. S2CID   225442448.
  8. "Opening the archives: a significant development". www.statslife.org.uk. Retrieved 20 February 2015.