ASA Connect

Dear Colleagues,

The Section on Statistical Consulting webinar series is going well. We just finished the one titled "How to be a Successful Independent Statistical Consultant" and it went very well. It's good to see a lot of people taking advantage of the opportunities to learn.

We have the next webinar for your edification and to enhance your skills. The title of the webinar is "Shiny 101: From Nothing to Deployed" and it will be presented on June 20th at 1 pm Eastern. (Note that the next webinar after this one will be in September.)

Shiny is a popular R package for creating interactive web applications from within R. This webinar will introduce the Shiny package and provide an overview of Shiny's use cases. We'll discuss reactivity, user interfaces, and different options for deploying shiny applications. We'll also build and deploy a simple shiny application from scratch.

The webinar will be presented by Sean Lopp. Sean has a degree in mathematics and statistics and worked as an analyst at the National Renewable Energy Lab before making the switch to customer success at RStudio. Sean has worked on statistical modeling projects ranging from autonomous vehicles to infant sleep dynamics. At RStudio, Sean works with customers to increase the value they receive from Shiny, R Markdown, and the IDE.

To register for the webinar, please visit the ASA's Web Based Lectures page. Note that Section membership gets you a discounted registration.

We also encourage you to share with colleagues who are not ASA members and may be interested in the topic. Webinars like these that various sections put on are just part of the benefit of being an ASA member. Note that the registration fee is for both individuals or for group attendance.

We think that this webinar will be of great benefit to you. Please feel free to contact me or George Luta, George.Luta@georgetown.edu, for any questions or feedback.

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Chuck Kincaid
Section Chair 2017


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Chuck Kincaid
Engagement Director
Experis BI & Analytics Practice Business Analytics
chuck.kincaid@experis.com
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I wondering why I should pay to watch a webinar given about a commercial product, being presented by a sales/marketing professional from the commercial product company.  I think Shiny is pretty cool, but I don't see the reason for the ASA to charge a fee for this.

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Samuel Gardner
Sr Research Scientist
Elanco
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Agree — not only is the fee strange, but webinar would seem to be proving free advertising. I believe advertisers in AMSTAT news pay.

Robert Parker
Consultant

------Original Message------

I wondering why I should pay to watch a webinar given about a commercial product, being presented by a sales/marketing professional from the commercial product company.  I think Shiny is pretty cool, but I don't see the reason for the ASA to charge a fee for this.

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Samuel Gardner
Sr Research Scientist
Elanco
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R is free and Shiny is a free R package installable from CRAN. Base RStudio is also free. Developing shortcourses, workshops, and webinars takes gobs of time, and given the honoraria, those presenters might only clear $10/hour for the first offerings. For the ASA's Consulting Section, any webinar on new statistical tools should be tied to good software, immediately available. In this case, it's all free.

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Ralph O'Brien
Professor of Biostatistics (officially retired; still keenly active)
Case Western Reserve University
http://rfuncs.weebly.com/about-ralph-obrien.html
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Original Message:
Sent: 06-08-2017 09:58
From: Robert Parker
Subject: Webinar: Shiny 101: From Nothing to Deployed

Agree - not only is the fee strange, but webinar would seem to be proving free advertising. I believe advertisers in AMSTAT news pay.

Robert Parker
Consultant

------Original Message------

Agree — not only is the fee strange, but webinar would seem to be proving free advertising. I believe advertisers in AMSTAT news pay.

Robert Parker
Consultant

Def. commercial

adjective

making or intended to make a profit: commercial products.


R, Shiny, and R Studio are all free.  Q.E.D.

It would be harebrained for the ASA to decree that no shortcourse, workshop, or webinar could deal with the wise and productive use of the software tools that all of us depend on. Of course, those tools should be innovative and soundly developed, tested, and documented.

If the software is also free, what's the problem? Let the market decide whether the webinar is desirable. 

Whether a truly commercial product should be so taught is a fair concern that the ASA has long adjudicated on a case by case basis. (This came up at times when I served on the ASA's continuing education committee and on the ASA Board.)

Suppose that Amazing Statistical Tools, Inc (fictitious) produces a terrific webinar that taught the theory behind and use of a new, major statistical software product for a hot new area of statistical science, and their normal fee was $400/login, but they agreed to give it once to ASA members for free. Yet, the ASA's production costs--just to deliver the webinar itself--would be at least $40/login. Wouldn't that be a fine service for the Stat Consulting Section of offer?

If Amazing Statistical Tools gave that particular product away for free, wouldn't that be a no-brainer?

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Ralph O'Brien
Professor of Biostatistics (officially retired; still keenly active)
Case Western Reserve University
http://rfuncs.weebly.com/about-ralph-obrien.html
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Original Message:
Sent: 06-09-2017 08:24
From: Ajit Thakur
Subject: Webinar: Shiny 101: From Nothing to Deployed

I totally agree with Robert Parker word-by-word.  This Webinar is a simple commercial project.  I do not see how young R-programmers in statistics or statisticians could possibly benefit from it.  Irrespective of the fee (reduced or full), in my view, ASA should not sponsor such endeavors.

Ajit K. Thakur, Ph.D.

Retired Statistician

Maybe the ASA can learn a few things from the SCT (Society for Clinical Trials), a much smaller association than the ASA, which offers excellent webinars, many statistical, free for members.

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Jim Julian
McMaster University
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Original Message:
Sent: 06-09-2017 10:52
From: Ralph O'Brien
Subject: Webinar: Shiny 101: From Nothing to Deployed

Def. commercial

adjective

making or intended to make a profit: commercial products.


R, Shiny, and R Studio are all free.  Q.E.D.

It would be harebrained for the ASA to decree that no shortcourse, workshop, or webinar could deal with the wise and productive use of the software tools that all of us depend on. Of course, those tools should be innovative and soundly developed, tested, and documented.

If the software is also free, what's the problem? Let the market decide whether the webinar is desirable. 

Whether a truly commercial product should be so taught is a fair concern that the ASA has long adjudicated on a case by case basis. (This came up at times when I served on the ASA's continuing education committee and on the ASA Board.)

Suppose that Amazing Statistical Tools, Inc (fictitious) produces a terrific webinar that taught the theory behind and use of a new, major statistical software product for a hot new area of statistical science, and their normal fee was $400/login, but they agreed to give it once to ASA members for free. Yet, the ASA's production costs--just to deliver the webinar itself--would be at least $40/login. Wouldn't that be a fine service for the Stat Consulting Section of offer?

If Amazing Statistical Tools gave that particular product away for free, wouldn't that be a no-brainer?

------------------------------
Ralph O'Brien
Professor of Biostatistics (officially retired; still keenly active)
Case Western Reserve University
http://rfuncs.weebly.com/about-ralph-obrien.html
------------------------------


Original Message:
Sent: 06-09-2017 08:24
From: Ajit Thakur
Subject: Webinar: Shiny 101: From Nothing to Deployed

I totally agree with Robert Parker word-by-word.  This Webinar is a simple commercial project.  I do not see how young R-programmers in statistics or statisticians could possibly benefit from it.  Irrespective of the fee (reduced or full), in my view, ASA should not sponsor such endeavors.

Ajit K. Thakur, Ph.D.

Retired Statistician

------Original Message------

Maybe the ASA can learn a few things from the SCT (Society for Clinical Trials), a much smaller association than the ASA, which offers excellent webinars, many statistical, free for members.

------------------------------
Jim Julian
McMaster University
------------------------------

Here's an example of shiny being used as an interface to an R package: seasonal: R interface to X-13ARIMA-SEATS

Seasonal		remove preview
seasonal: R interface to X-13ARIMA-SEATS View this on Seasonal >

The R package is seasonal.

If you're just doing visualizations, Tableau and the like will do.  If you want a web interface to drive R, shiny is the way to go.

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Chuck Coleman
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Original Message:
Sent: 06-12-2017 12:01
From: Enayetur Raheem
Subject: Webinar: Shiny 101: From Nothing to Deployed

My comment is aimed towards young statisticians and fresh graduates and alike.

For young statisticians aspiring to work in industry, I would suggest to learn how to save time in creating visualizations with Power BI or Tableau. I am a veteran R user and I don't use shiny at work. And I don't know how many organizations would use Shiny when the industry is moving towards drag and drop analytics to increase productivity.

This is not to discourage learning Shiny. It may have its uses-which I haven't seen yet.

In the context of the debate of whether this should be free or not, there are alternatives for recent graduates and those with shortage of funds. Udemy is a great source. You can get a course at Udemy for $10 when the offer sale. At the last check I found at least 3 courses on Shiny with over 3 hours of video contents for each. 

If you want to attend a paid webinar, by all means go for it-- it's your choice. Personally, I would never recommend to a fresh graduate who has potentially some time to explore on their own to go for a paid webinar because the ROI will be relatively small.

Webinar will probably add value if you want to get some idea about a topic in a short amount of time AND you have no time to explore on your own. If you are that kind of a student then you probably are already employed.

 

On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 11:25 AM, Jim Julian via American Statistical Association

On May 11, 2017, the ASA presented a webinar, Creating Statistical Graphics for Clinical Trial Outcomes Using SAS, presented by Warren Kuhfeld of SAS Institute and nobody complained, even though SAS is a very expensive commercial product. So why does promotion of a product that you can download and use for free causing such grief?

It's the nature of our work that we are heavily dependent on software companies to provide the tools that we need to do our jobs. And I'm willing to pay good money to learn about these tools. Back when I was a heavy SAS user, I even got my boss to spring for expensive trips to the SAS Users Group meetings (though she balked at the Hawaii meeting one year for reasons I still can't understand).

If we limit webinars only to fuzzy headed academic types like me, we lose a lot. As long as any commercial ties are clearly disclosed, no one is deceived.

So, for the record, and I suspect that I am speaking for many others in ASA, I am grateful to the ASA for setting up these opportunities to meet and learn from software experts at SAS, Revolution Analytics, RStudio, Cytel, Biostat Inc., and other companies as well. I'll complain maybe when ASA offers a webinar from Microsoft about how to do advanced statistical analyses in Microsoft Excel.

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Stephen Simon, blog.pmean.com
Independent Statistical Consultant
P. Mean Consulting
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Original Message:
Sent: 06-08-2017 09:00
From: Samuel Gardner
Subject: Webinar: Shiny 101: From Nothing to Deployed

I wondering why I should pay to watch a webinar given about a commercial product, being presented by a sales/marketing professional from the commercial product company.  I think Shiny is pretty cool, but I don't see the reason for the ASA to charge a fee for this.

------------------------------
Samuel Gardner
Sr Research Scientist
Elanco
------------------------------