The Joint Statistical Meetings in the Post

From an article in The Washington Post style section,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/04/AR2009080403117.html):

In D.C., Statisticians Flex Their Strength in Numbers
By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Real superheroes, most people know, skip the capes and tights. Too bulky, too flashy, spandex doesn't breathe well, etc.

Which is why they can be easy to miss when they're in town, even when there are 6,000 of them, super-number crunchers, data heroes, with powers of finding meaning in digits far beyond those of mortal men and women.

The 6,000 is just rough data, not accounting for last-minute arrivals. Their median annual income is $65,720. Their employment is expected to grow 9 percent by 2016.

That's not even getting into their standard deviations.

Ladies and gentlemen: statisticians. At the Washington Convention Center this week for the Joint Statistical Meetings, the largest international gathering of data junkies on the continent.

Later, the author discusses the importance of statistical literacy:

. . . The general population does not get it. Worse, they don't even get what they don't get. They use "random" when they mean "uniform." They confuse "cause" with "correlation." They do not question study designs, like the recent survey claiming Republicans were happier with their sex lives than Democrats, but failing to take into account that more Republicans are men, who always think they're studs. They can't tell the difference between relative and absolute risk. They can't tell the difference between the mean and the median. "That eats at me constantly," says Jim Cochran, a statistics professor from Louisiana.

Go ahead. Laugh. Roll your eyes at the number crunchers, and the way they flock excitedly to sessions with names such as "Alternatives to Proportional Hazards Survival Methods." But this stuff matters. Statistics on the recession -- you think those create themselves? What about tracking the spread of infectious diseases? Don't even get statisticians started on the 2010 Census, which for the first time will include an option for same-sex marriages. Which would be fine, except that some gay couples have actually self-identified as married on the Census for decades, which means that some valiant guy on a computer needs to figure out how to interpret the numbers.

Why do they do it?

"I think it must have been something that happened to us in childhood," Larry Featherston says. He's a member of the Committee on Statistics and Disability, which aims to improve disability research.

"We might like to hang around with numbers," says David Keer. "But the real question is, what can we use them for? In this country, if you're not counted you don't count."

It's so true, even while sounding so . . . boring. Who wants to save the world using the Bayesian method?

The statisticians get that, and they're working on their image.