Hello everyone! Our next and last meeting of the semester will be April 25th. Make sure to come because we will be having a pot luck at the time!

Announcements: 

• Mary Meyer came by to tell us about the First Annual CNS Probability Casino, expected to be held at Laurel Village in Mid-February next year. If you are interested in joining, undergraduates on the Organizational Committee will need to register for a one-credit independent study class for the Fall semester. At the very least, undergraduates will need to have taken Stat 315, and preferably at least Stat 420. The class will be Stat 495 Section 2, and you would be required to speak to Kristen to get an override. For more information, email Mary Meyer, or either of the graduate advisors or officers, and we will get you more information. 
• CO/WY chapter meeting is next week at NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research), and you can get an approved absence for it. Speak to Josh, Miranda, or Jackson and they will help get you the information you need for that. We will be carpooling there and back, and it is a whole day event. 
• Our Bee project with the ecology department is going along buzzingly. We will have another session meeting at the Wild Boar on Friday from 4pm to 6pm. 

Josh gave us a super cool presentation on a quick intro to Bayesian Statistics by example! If you are interested in learning more about Bayesian, register for Stat 440.

Hello everyone! We are beginning to start on projects just in time to wrap up the semester. Jack and Josh brought in some of the information from a meeting about Pollination data. We are also beginning to plan for an end of the year pot luck on April 25th​, which is our last meeting of the year. 

Our next meeting will be April 11th

Announcements:

• CO/WY is coming up, RSVP with Miranda (see below)
• Our potluck will be April 25th, our last meeting. 
• Next meeting, April 11th, Josh will be presenting on Bayesian Statistics. 

Projects

• DataDriven currently has a dataset for water pumps in Africa called "Pump It Up: Data Mining the Water Table". We will look at that. Jack showed some of the work he has done on it so far. For example, comparing types of pumps (ie, rope, gravity pump), types of water. Things to consider are location type for types of water, if they had permits or not. 
• Ecology Bee Pollination Project: This is a messy Citizen Science data set that we are looking into starting with the Ecology department. We would have to clean data, and help come up with guidelines for other projects going forward. One convenience sample data set to use for guideline/example is iNaturalist.org (its data is downloadable). Because it is a citizen scientist project, the issue with the data is figuring out if the data represents a large insect population being reported, or just a lot of participation. Another issue is the accuracy of the data, because not all of it can be confirmed, but some users have higher level reporting skills linked to their accounts. While this is potentially a very big and intimidating project, we have many professors and grad students willing to help us work through it. Josh, Kyra, and Jack all met with the people in the Ecology department to get specifics. One of the things would be to help figure out where are observations are more likely to occur and how to set a protocol for research going forward with this kind of data. 
  • Possible solutions to look into: blocking, Presence/Absence models, controlling for areas/types of people

Upcoming Events: 

• CO/WY Chapter of the American Statistical Association Regional Meeting on Friday April 21, 2017. You can get an excused absence for this and we will provide Transportation. RSVP with Miranda.Fix@colostate.edu

Hello everyone! We are almost done become a Registered Student Organization, and we are officially registered through ASA, so we will have some tumblers coming soon. Here are the meeting notes from tonight's meeting. 

Our next meeting will be March 28th, which is the week after the week we get back. It will once again be at 5pm in Engineering E206.
​

• Announcements
  • Upcoming events
  • Possible projects: data, events, registration
• Presentation by Ahmed on ggplot2

Upcoming Events: 
Source Talk by Dr. Brooke Anderson tomorrow (3/8) in Weber 237 at 4pm. 

Current program/project plans:
Statistics potluck
Kaggle project
Datadriven.org
Rocky Mountain National Park data set
Local restaurant business data set

Here are the meeting notes from a while ago, and were able to elect positions for the 2017-2018 academic year. Here are some of the highlights: 
​
Elections

• President: Jack Hill
• Vice President: Justin Cowden
• Financial Officer: Alexis Suhr
• Secretary: Kyra Ferguson
• Social Media Officer: Madison Pottruff

Presentation by Ahmed on ggPlot2

We had a nice club meeting yesterday, at which we discussed upcoming things of interest.  Here are some of the highlights.  Check out the Opportunities tab for information about other things that are going on.

We're planning on electing Stat Alliance officers at our next meeting on Thursday, 2/23 at 4p.  Here are the positions we want to fill:

• President
  • Lead meetings
  • Represent club
  • Act as liaison to faculty, university, and outside speakers
• Vice president
  • Send announcements to mailing list (weekly digest?)
  • Plane events
  • Coordinate outreach with President (e.g., major fairs)
• Secretary
  • Take notes during meetings, etc.
  • Keep organized list of opportunities; be able to provide President & VP with information and ideas
  • Update calendar
• Financial officer
  • In charge of fundraising efforts & volunteer opportunities
  • Keep track of club funds to be used for field trips, speakers, etc.
• Social media officer
  • Manage website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts.

At our next meeting, we're planning to look at Kaggle's Data Science Bowl 2017.  We plan on making this an ongoing project for the semester.  It's a project using real medical imaging data to try to use statistics and machine learning to identify cancerous lesions in human lungs.  Various cash prizes are available for the top submissions.

The CO-WY ASA chapter is meeting at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO on 4/21.  Statisticians will present work they are doing in the CO-WY area and there will be time to meet people, learn about statistics jobs, and network.  We plan on attending.

Before the chapter meeting, we also hope to meet with two NCAR statisticians: Doug Nychka and Dorit Hammerling.  They develop models and statistics to understand patterns in (climate-related) spatial datasets as well as how to use super computers to implement these methods on big spatial datasets.

NCAR also has a historic Cray 1 supercomputer on display, which is really neat to visit!