This file contains the invitation text from Aaron Ellison and Michael Lavine to contribute an article to Chance. The contribution is due at the end of January 2016.

Dear friends and colleagues,

We (Aaron Ellison and Michael Lavine), are writing to ask whether you’d consider writing for CHANCE magazine.  CHANCE Is a peer-reviewed, non-technical statistics magazine highlighting applications that demonstrate sound statistical practice.  You can learn more about CHANCE at http://chance.amstat.org.

The two of us are soliciting articles for a special issue of CHANCE devoted to statistics in Ecology.  We’re looking for fun articles that use statistics or statistical graphics to say something about interesting ecological questions or issues in a way that can be explained at a low technical level without much mathematics.  Here’s an example of a recent article that was well-“liked”: http://chance.amstat.org/2014/09/streakiness/. Some of the others on CHANCE’s website are open access, and some are not.

We think you might be able to write a good article about one of the topics listed in the attachment. Note that the topics listed were our initial guesses and thoughts, but if you are interested in working with us on a paper for CHANCE, you should feel free to suggest alternative/better topics.

More about articles in CHANCE.

CHANCE Is designed for anyone who has an interest in using data to advance science, education, and society and is meant to entertain as well as inform.  CHANCE articles

 

• Are targeted toward a broad audience
• Display and discuss interesting statistical concepts, ideas, designs, analyses, or presentations
• Have a relaxed expository style (humor is fine when tactful)
• Do not have abstracts
• Do not have acknowledgements
• Have intuitive explanations with limited technical notation and formulas
• Have sidebars for definitions and brief technical explanations
• Do not have citations, but have a “Further Reading” section at the end of the article where ~5 references can be listed (refer to the ASA Magazine Style Guide (PDF) for listing further readings).
• Rarely have footnotes
• Have creative and informative graphics, photographs, and tabular displays
• May link to online videos (please include YouTube or Vimeo links in the word document)
• Are 10–15 double-spaced type-written pages in MS Word
• Figures and tables are numbered, consecutively titled, labeled, and referred to in the article text.
• Requires that every author receive permission from the holder of the rights for all material.

We hope you will consider working with us on this special issue and writing an article for CHANCE.  Please ask if you have questions.  We look forward to your favorable reply.

With best wishes,

Michael Lavine (University of Massachusetts) & Aaron Ellison (Harvard University)