Beginning March 15, the online materials that support the Chance Project will move to new web site. Laurie Snell has overseen development of these materials at Dartmouth College for nearly two decades, but hopes to ‘really’ retire after celebrating his 85th birthday this year. Jeanne Albert and Bill Peterson of Middlebury College will assume the editorial duties.

JSM Program Committee members hold back two invited session slots for late-breaking talks. ASA members are encouraged to submit a proposal for one of these sessions by April 17.

Here M. G. E. Peterson, and Steve Pierson, ASA Director of Science Policy reply to Professor Devore’s letter about data sharing that appeared in the January 2010 issue of Amstat News.

David J. Finney asks about the article in the January Amstat News that states that Karl Pearson used Weldon’s data when developing the chi-square statistic.

Two recent conferences celebrated the 90th birthday of C. R. Rao, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. The International Conference on Frontiers of Interface Between Statistics and Sciences in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India, and The Advances in Statistical Science conference, which took place in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.

J. L. Narayana made a passionate plea for appropriate critical thinking and statistical training for the next decade, during the International Indian Statistical Association (IISA) conference that took place January 4–8 at Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India.

More than 300 people attended the 10th Islamic Countries Conference on Statistical Sciences (ICCS-X), held at the American University in Cairo (AUC) in New Cairo, Egypt. The conference was dedicated to the late Mir Maswood Ali, a statistician from Bangladesh and founder of the department of statistical and actuarial sciences at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

The Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics (ISAE) was established in July of 1969 with initial support from the United Nations Development Programme to meet the need for high-level training of professional statisticians in eastern and southern Africa. Here is a showcase of the programs the ISAE has used to train more than 3,000 professional statisticians, quantitative economists, actuarial scientists, and population scientists.

A letter to the editor from Jay Devore, a professor in the department of statistics at Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo

As President Barack Obama finishes his first year in office, the state of the economy, climate change, health care reform, and the continuing war in Afghanistan all vie for center stage in U.S. politics, and statistics has something to contribute to each of those issues. However, there is an issue that is not as prominent, but just as important, that deserves the attention of the statistical community: the need for reformation of U.S. policy and protocol concerning foreign assistance.