Online Program

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Thursday, February 21
SC1 Management Fundamentals Thu, Feb 21, 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Napoleon A2
Instructor(s): Bill Williams, Organizational Learning Consultant

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This full-day course addresses skill areas critical to effective people management, including material for managers who might describe themselves as introverts, and the following: understanding the role of a “people manager;” forming effective relationships with people reporting directly to you; setting and communicating expectations; providing effective feedback; and, coaching for performance and development.

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SC2 A Corporate Perspective: Financial Savvy for Statisticians Thu, Feb 21, 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Napoleon A1
Instructor(s): Donna M. Faltin, The Faltin Group; Frederick W. Faltin, The Faltin Group

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This course discusses the role of corporate finance, the financial issues that drive decision making and market perceptions, and key topics needed for an understanding of corporate financial management. Along the way, we acquaint attendees with the language of financial management, with the broader aim of helping them to better integrate into the corporate mainstream and to enhance their ability to contribute to, and prosper within, their respective organizations. We’ll conclude with a discussion of “current events”: the Great Recession and the European debt crisis. Attendees will receive course notebooks with presentation contents; no specific software is required, although there will be illustrations using Microsoft Excel.

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SC3 Seven Techniques to Maximize Speech Clarity if English is Your Second Language Thu, Feb 21, 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Napoleon D2
Instructor(s): William A. Vance, Yale University and Executive Voice, LLC
A strong accent influences how colleagues perceive your contributions. If your ideas are delivered with fast speed, poor articulation, or choppy delivery, you may be sabotaging your impact on project teams. And worse, colleagues need to expend extra effort to interpret your message. Yet these barriers to understanding can be removed. In this systematic workshop, you will learn how to increase the clarity of every word and sentence you speak. We will develop seven techniques for reducing your accent, including controlling speech speed, highlighting ideas, making words clear, strengthening vowel and consonant sounds, improving grammatical accuracy, and building fluency. Special attention will be given to the technical vocabulary of statistics. The workshop is fast-paced and interactive, with opportunities for immediate personal application of new skills. We will use specialized tools, such as speech analysis software, to provide a metrics-based gauge of your improvement in the session.

The workshop includes a required pre-evaluation of your oral communication skills, which is completed in advance of the conference. Participants give spoken responses for 30 minutes in an on-line interface, where they perform a series of job-related communications tasks. Their responses will be scientifically analyzed, and each participant receives a 25-page personal analysis report (with metrics on intelligibility). The report will alert the participants to their development needs in accent and communication, and it will give them extensive guidance in how to continue the process of skill-building after the workshop. The workshop content may be adjusted to meet the aggregate group needs that are revealed by the pre-assessment.

The workshop uses a methodology that will benefit professionals of any language background and proficiency level. While some changes to accent and speaking style can be made in one day, participants should expect to devote time to daily exercises in the weeks after the conference, to reinforce the habits of clear speech.

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SC4 Effective Presentations for Statisticians Thu, Feb 21, 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Napoleon D3
Instructor(s): Jeanine Buchanich, University of Pittsburgh; Bob Starbuck, Wyeth (retired)

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This course covers the basics of presentation skills for statisticians. It is under development under ASA President Bob Rodriguez's Career Success Factors Workgroup. Topics include: Slide Preparation, Crafting Your Argument, Proofreading, Timing, Practice, etc. Jeanine is the primary developer and she has given an extended version of this course to statisticians at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health.

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SC5 Tree Modeling Thu, Feb 21, 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Napoleon A3
Instructor(s): Chris Peterson, Capital One

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The explosion of data availability coupled with continual increases in computational power make this an exciting time to be an analyst! Decision Tree based methodologies have proven their value in wading through large quantities of data to generate meaningful insight across many industries and should be in every analyst's toolkit. This course will provide an introduction to several data mining/machine learning algorithms based on Decision Trees with an emphasis on application, interpretation, and common pitfalls. Specifically, the course will introduce the student to the CART, Stochastic Gradient Boosting and Random Forest algorithms by providing a description of the analytic approach, an overview of potential applications, and a survey of software implementation.

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SC6 Survey Sampling: Design, Weighting, and Analysis Thu, Feb 21, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Napoleon D3
Instructor(s): David Morganstein, Westat

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The course will review and compare tools used by the sample designer to produce an efficient and cost effective design: stratification, clustering and weighting. Three approaches, design based, model based and model assisted will be compared. Attendees will learn about steps in the survey weighting process: base weight, adjustments for ineligibility, adjustments for non-response and benchmarking to externally obtained control totals. The purpose and impact of each of these steps will be discussed. Estimates of population characteristics are generally accompanied by estimates of their sampling error and the course will describe the most common approaches for creating sampling error estimates: exact methods, linearization and replication. Of great importance, survey estimates, including models and model parameters, require specialized formulas and software for descriptive and analytic results. The course will discuss the impact of the sample design and weight adjustment process on the survey estimates and model parameters. The course will be of interest to anyone using survey data, whether they have a role in planning the design, analyzing the data or both.

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SC7 A Crash R Course on Statistical Graphics Thu, Feb 21, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Napoleon A3
Instructor(s): Isabella Rodica Ghement, Ghement Statistical Consulting Company Ltd.

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This half-day course is a must for anyone who wishes to learn how to use the powerful open source statistical software package R to produce publication-quality graphics. After providing the participants with an overview of R and its data import capabilities, the course will introduce the participants to two of the graphical systems available in R: the base graphics and the lattice graphics. The base graphics is suitable for producing standard statistical plots such as bar plots, histograms, boxplots, scatterplots and time series plots. The lattice graphics is an extension of the base graphics, which relies on canned formulas to produce multi-panel and 3-D displays of data. Participants will learn through a variety of demos and exercises how to use each of these two R graphical systems to create and customize publication-quality graphics, ranging from simple univariate graphics to complex hypervariate graphics. Participants will also learn how to use scripts to store R commands for data visualization and how to save R graphical output for further reporting. To get the most out of this course, participants will need to bring their laptops to the course, preinstalled with R. No previous knowledge of R is required.

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