Talk to the Newsroom: Interview with Steve Duennes of the NY Times

The graphics director of New York Times, Steve Duenes, was recently featured in the Talk to the Newsroom column of the paper - and you can read the interview online at nytimes.com to learn more about the process that the NY Times uses to produce their excellent graphics.

(Thanks to Deb Vance for the pointer. If you've seen something that would be interesting to the wider statistical graphics and computing community, please let us know!)

Chambers award winner announced

We are pleased to announce that the judges of the Chambers Award have selected the winner of the 2008 competition: Alejandro Jara Vallejos, from the Catholic University of Leuven. Alejandro received this year's award for his submission "DPpackage," an R package for Bayesian semiparametric and nonparametric models.

In addition to the US$1000 prize, the winner will have his JSM registration paid by the Computing Section and be reimbursed up to US$1000 for travel and housing at the meeting. As usual, the award will be presented at the Section's business meeting/mixer on Monday evening.

The judges for this year's competition were Simon Urbanek and David James, with support from Jan De Leeuw. There were thirteen submissions in total, which the judges said were of particulary high quality. Thanks to the judges for their hard work, dedication, and timeliness in making this year's competition a success.

J.R. Lockwood
The RAND Corporation
Awards Chair, ASA Statistical Computing and Graphics Sections