Some of My Favorite TAS Papers
by Lynne Stokes, Former Editor, TAS

TAS papers should …

be delightfully interesting

be practically useful

tell a story

be accessible to many "flavors" of statisticians

Some of my favorites

Delightfully interesting (TC)

You can Load a Die, But You Can’t Bias a Coin (Gelman and Nolan, 2002)

"The biased coin is the unicorn of probability theory—everybody has heard of it but it has never been spotted in the flesh."

Favorites (con’t)

Delightfully interesting (TC/G)

Is Human Height Bimodal? (Schilling, Watkins, and Watkins, 2002)

Not according to NHANES data under assumption of normality of heights for males and females

Favorites (con’t)

Practically useful (SC&G)

Let’s Practice What We Preach: Turning Tables into Graphs (Gelman, Pasarica, and Dodhia, 2002)

"We considered the motivation for each of the tables [in a recent JASA issue] and considered how they could be made into graphs, following the principles we have taught in our courses."

Favorites (con’t)

Tell a story (SP)

Reliability of the Uncertified Ballots in the 2000 Presidential Election in Politics (Wolter et. al., 2003)

Seek Whence: Answer Sequences and Their Consequences in Key-Balanced Multiple Choice Tests (Bar-Hillel and Attali, 2002)

Accessibility

Be on a familiar topic

Link your method to a familiar topic

The Mixture Approach for Simulating Bivariate Distributions with Specified Correlations (Michael and Schucany, 2002) (C&SG)

The Calculus of M-Estimation (Stefanski and Boos, 2002) (G)