Synthesis and quality

By combining a keen interest in agriculture and natural science with his ability as a mathematician, John Nelder has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as an agricultural statistician. In conversation with Helen Joyce, he offers a personal view of the world of statistics and his own contributions to it.     

A response to M. Stone: 'How not to measure the efficiency of public services (and how one might)'

Summary.  This is a response to Stone's criticisms of the Spottiswoode report to the UK Treasury which was responding to the Treasury's request for improved methods to evaluate the efficiency and productivity of the 43 police districts in England and Wales. The Spottiswoode report recommended uses of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), which Stone critiqued en route to proposing an alternative approach. Here we note some of the most serious errors in his criticism and inaccurate portrayals of DEA and SFA. Most of our attention is devoted to DEA, and to Stone's recommended alternative approach without much attention to SFA, partly because of his abbreviated discussion of the latter. In our response we attempt to be constructive as well as critical by showing how Stone's proposed approach can be joined to DEA to expand his proposal beyond limitations in his formulations.     

Sir Godfrey Thomson: a statistical pioneer

Summary.  Godfrey Thomson (1881–1955) was a leading figure in intelligence testing who made his name in that field first at Armstrong College, Newcastle, and then at the University of Edinburgh. In the course of his practical work he identified many theoretical problems which were essentially statistical in character. In particular, he used maximum likelihood estimation as early as 1919 and his statistical work largely set the course of modern factor analysis and related techniques. His statistical abilities were recognized, at different stages of his career, by both Karl Pearson and Sir Ronald Fisher. His key insight was to recognize the importance of Fisherian inference for the future of that subject.     

Looking at Journals from Both Sides

The author, a professor in the field of communication, describes his contrasting experiences with publishing an open access society journal and advising a regional association in regards to turning over publication of its journal to a major commercial publishing firm. Using his experience of producing an open access journal as a foundation, he argues for the intrinsic importance of establishing credibility and exercising personal care in the production and maintenance of a journal. The author argues that current efforts by some societies to increase access to their journals through outsourcing to commercial publishers may be counterproductive to the fundamental goal of disseminating knowledge.     

In Memoriam: Emeritus Professor Henry Oliver Lancaster, AO FAA 1 February 1913 – 2 December 2001

The death, in Sydney, of Oliver Lancaster marks the end of an era in the histories of the Statistical Society of Australia, which (in its previous existence as the Statistical Society of New South Wales) he helped found in 1947, and of the Australian Journal of Statistics of which he was founding editor (1959–1971). Oliver Lancaster was Foundation Professor of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Sydney (1959–1978), where he spent his life as student and academic. During his academic career, he achieved scholarly distinction in at least four fields: mathematical statistics, medical and public health statistics, the history of medicine and of statistics, and statistical bibliography. With E.J.G. Pitman (1897–1993), M.H. Belz (1897–1975), E.A. Cornish (1909–1973) and P.A.P. Moran (1917–1988) he was part of a cohort of renowned Australian mathematical statisticians who laid the foundation of the glory days of Australian mathematical statistics. This obituary and tribute focuses on some of these aspects, within a broader historical picture.     

Sexes and statistics

Arthur Geissler's data for the distribution of the sexes in families with eight children, published in 1889, became famous through its use by R. A. Fisher in Statistical Methods for Research Workers in 1925 as an example of the binomial distribution. Geissler compiled data from Saxony for the period 1876-1885 for all family sizes. How did Fisher obtain the figures for his example? And why did he change the sixth significant figure of his value for the variance in his fourth edition of 1932?     

Purposes, methods, philosophies

Peter Armitage has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in biostatistics, and has also given considerable thought to the way in which statistics is taught to non-mathematicians, perhaps because, he says jokingly, he always found maths a bit difficult himself. Now in retirement, he is still communicating statistical ideas in his rôle as Editor of the Encyclopedia of Biostatistics .     

Looking at Journals from Both Sides

Abstract

The author, a professor in the field of communication, describes his contrasting experiences with publishing an open access society journal and advising a regional association in regards to turning over publication of its journal to a major commercial publishing firm. Using his experience of producing an open access journal as a foundation, he argues for the intrinsic importance of establishing credibility and exercising personal care in the production and maintenance of a journal. The author argues that current efforts by some societies to increase access to their journals through outsourcing to commercial publishers may be counterproductive to the fundamental goal of disseminating knowledge.     

Questions and Answers

In addition to his contributions to biostatistics and clinical trials, Paul Meier had a long-term interest in the legal applications of statistics. As part of this, he had extensive experience as a statistical consultant. Legal consulting can be a minefield, but as a result of his background, Paul had excellent advice to give to those starting out on how to function successfully in this environment.     

The Accidental Statistician

During his long and distinguished career, Sir David Cox has played a substantial part in the development and growth of the discipline of statistics, but, as he tells Helen Joyce, he very nearly specialised in mathematical physics or analysis instead.     

Defying symmetry

John Venn, Cambridge don, is best known for the "Venn diagram", which he introduced in the course of his lectures on logic and published in 1880. But he had other strings to his bow. He wrote The Logic of Chance, which greatly influenced the development of the frequentist viewpoint and included the first drawing of a random walk in the plane (accompanied by the realization that in the limit the figure was fractal, as we should now say). He gave the first British lecture course on Theory of Statistics, in the Moral Science Tripos in 1890, and among historians he is famous for that branch of local history which concentrates on colleges, universities and their members.     

Consistent testing for non‐correlation of two cointegrated ARMA time series

A consistent approach to the problem of testing non‐correlation between two univariate infinite‐order autoregressive models was proposed by Hong (1996). His test is based on a weighted sum of squares of residual cross‐correlations, with weights depending on a kernel function. In this paper, the author follows Hong's approach to test non‐correlation of two cointegrated (or partially non‐stationary) ARMA time series. The test of Pham, Roy & Cédras (2003) may be seen as a special case of his approach, as it corresponds to the choice of a truncated uniform kernel. The proposed procedure remains valid for testing non‐correlation between two stationary invertible multivariate ARMA time series. The author derives the asymptotic distribution of his test statistics under the null hypothesis and proves that his procedures are consistent. He also studies the level and power of his proposed tests in finite samples through simulation. Finally, he presents an illustration based on real data.     

Career story: Pharmaceutical Statistician

Nobody could accuse the Royal Statistical Society's President Andy Grieve of looking for a quiet life. As well as being a consultant statistician for pharmaceuticals company Pfizer, he has for many years been heavily involved with the Society and Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry. However, he claims to Helen Joyce that his early career was shaped by a fondness for "taking the easy option".     

How many people live in London?

It would seem an easy enough question—but the 2001 census missed out thousands, and London boroughs such as Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham have complained that their grants are based on inaccurate figures. So we asked John Hollis , demographer to the Greater London Authority, the answer.     

THE CONTRIBUTION OF W. H. ARCHER TO VITAL STATISTICS IN THE COLONY OF VICTORIA

William Henry Archer, as Assistant Registrar General, was responsible for implementing the 1854 Registration Act in the colony of Victoria, and thereby helped establish the framework for official statistics in Australia. Eminently suitable for this role, having served his apprenticeship as an actuary and statistician in London prior to emigration in 1852, his career paralleled that of Dr. William Farr, the famous vital statistician. The greatest contribution Archer made to statistics in Australia was to put the lessons learnt by the statisticians of early Victorian England to advantage and place government statistical practices on a sound footing. Archer had a special interest in infant and childhood mortality, then accounting for one-half of all deaths in the new colony, and showed that a major factor was the extent of dysentery and diarrhoea during the warmer part of the year. Despite the high prevalence, Archer calculated the incidence of infant mortality to be less than in Europe at the time. Had he established links with the medical profession or with persons in the Social sciences who could have appreciated the valuable information being collected in the new government records, as in England where the sanitary reformers made great use of data collected by Farr for their own ends, Archer could have had a far greater impact on the intellectual and medical life of Victoria. Instead he was deflected into an administrative career which ended prematurely for political and religious reasons.     

On wasps and club dinners

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth could be termed a Victorian gentleman polymath: born on the family's estate in Edgeworthstown, Ireland, and a trained classicist and barrister, he was capable of both working as a Lecturer in Greek and deriving in 1883 (using what we now call a Bayesian argument) "what may the earliest appearance in any form of the Student's t distribution"¹. His unusual second name arose from his Catalan refugee mother, whom his father is reputed to have met on the steps of the British Museum.     

Variance estimation for measures of change in probability sampling

Variance estimation of changes requires estimates of variances and covariances that would be relatively straightforward to make if the sample remained the same from one wave to the next, but this is rarely the case in practice as successive waves are usually different overlapping samples. The author proposes a design‐based estimator for covariance matrices that is adapted to this situation. Under certain conditions, he shows that his approach yields non‐negative definite estimates for covariance matrices and therefore positive variance estimates for a large class of measures of change.     

Estimating sensitive proportions by Warner’s randomized response technique using multiple randomized responses from distinct persons sampled

In 1965 Warner pioneered randomized response techniques to estimate the proportion of people bearing a sensitive characteristic. He restricted applying his randomized response device to gather data on sensitive issues from respondents chosen by simple random sampling with replacement (SRSWR). It has spawned numerous ramifications. We present results for the situation where the distinct persons chosen in an SRSWR are identified but each one independently gives a randomized response by Warner’s device, repeated as many times as he/she is selected. Two new estimators are proposed for the sensitive proportion and compared against relevant competitors.