2013 promises to be a great year for all statistics aficionado as today is the first day of the International Year of Statistics. More than 1400 organizations from 108 countries — professional statistical societies, colleges and universities, primary and secondary schools, businesses, government entities, and research institutes — are participating in this worldwide event. Statistics have powerful and far-reaching effects on everyone, yet most people are unaware of their connection and how statistics improve their lives, whether it is the availability and quality of foods they eat to the benefits and risks of the medicines they take, statistics is all around. Sports would be a lot less interesting without statistics.

The founding organizations of the International Year of Statistics are the American Statistical Association, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, International Biometric Society, International Statistical Institute, and Royal Statistical Society. According to these organizations, the primary objectives of this event are to:

• Increase public awareness of the power and impact of statistics on all aspects of society
• Nurture statistics as a profession, especially among young people
• Promote creativity and development in the sciences of probability and statistics

The official website of the event, www.statistics2013.org, was launched today and is filled with information to educate the public about how statistics improves their lives, the work of statisticians as well as careers in statistical science. MPK Analytics is proudly  participating and supporting this event and is looking forward to a statistically  stimulating year and an increased appreciation among the public for the myriad ways statistics improves the quality of your life and greatly advances our global society.

2013 promises to also be a great year for R aficionados as today marks the first official announcement from the R Development Core Team of the upcoming release of R version 3.0.0 around April 1 this year. This milestone release will mark a new level of maturity of the R code base which now includes full 64 bit support on all major platforms,  support for parallel processing, the Matrix package, and much more.

Happy International Year of Statistics and the year of R

This is from the blog of MPK Analytics (www.mpkanalytics.com). In the business of helping clients transforming data into insight through the power of R.