Mike Larsen, CHANCE Editor

Volume 22, No. 3 of CHANCE includes articles on a diverse set of topics. It also is worth noting that authors in this issue reside in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Italy. CHANCE welcomes contributions and readers from around the world.

Authors Shahedul Ahsan Khan, Grace Chiu, and Joel Dubin discuss statistical issues with modeling the concentration of chlorofluorocarbons, a primary greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere based on worldwide observations. Autar Kaw and Ali Yalcin present a new measure to quantify upsets, or unexpected game outcomes, in college football. Once you study their statistic, you can watch for signs of continued topsy-turvy behavior in the 2009–2010 season. Tristan Barnett analyzes expected returns and the chances of extreme outcomes in online gambling games. How risk-adverse are you? The calculations in this article could be useful illustrations for teaching expectation, variance, and other distributional summaries.

Alberto Baccini, Lucio Barabesi, and Marzia Marcheselli apply network analysis to editorship networks of statistical journals. In doing so, the authors give insight into network analysis and help readers understand the field of probability of statistics. Chris Bilder imagines the potential application of group-testing methods in a popular science-fiction television series. Could “Battlestar Galactica” have benefited from having a statistician/biostatistician on board?

In his Visual Revelations column, Howard Wainer and coauthor Peter Baldwin discuss a case in which a teacher was accused of helping students cheat on a test. A careful statistical analysis was critical in reaching a justifiable outcome. In Mark Glickman’s Here’s to Your Health column, Scott Evans defines and illustrates what are referred to as noninferiority clinical trials. The purpose of such trials is to study whether a new version of a drug is not inferior to the currently accepted treatment. Read the article to learn why noninferiority trials are common and how they compare to other clinical trials. In his Goodness of Wit Test column, Jonathan Berkowitz offers a standard bar-type cryptic puzzle with one constraint. The theme of the puzzle is statistical inference. Finally, Daniel Westreich provides a little comic relief in “A Statistical Investigation of Urban Skylines in Illinois.”

In other news, the CHANCE web site was reorganized and improved recently. Material is easier to locate and PDFs of more past issues are available. Also, additional information about the editors and a list of all past articles were posted.