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.     

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.     

A fair result in foul weather

The Duckworth–Lewis method for adjusting targets in rain-interrupted one-day cricket matches is used throughout the world, but, as Frank Duckworth explains, he originally came to statistics from physics via metallurgy, and only thought of applying statistical methods to sport when their power became apparent to him during his career in the nuclear energy industry     

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 .     

A Bayesian Analysis of a Poisson Random Effects Model for Home Run Hitters

The problem of interest is to estimate the home run ability of 12 great major league players. The usual career home run statistics are the total number of home runs hit and the overall rate at which the players hit them. The observed rate provides a point estimate for a player's “true” rate of hitting a home run. However, this point estimate is incomplete in that it ignores sampling errors, it includes seasons where the player has unusually good or poor performances, and it ignores the general pattern of performance of a player over his career. The observed rate statistic also does not distinguish between the peak and career performance of a given player. Given the random effects model of West (1985), one can detect aberrant seasons and estimate parameters of interest by the inspection of various posterior distributions. Posterior moments of interest are easily computed by the application of the Gibbs sampling algorithm (Gelfand and Smith 1990). A player's career performance is modeled using a log-linear model, and peak and career home run measures for the 12 players are estimated.     

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.     

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.     

Hilda Mary Woods MBE, DSc, LRAM, FSS (1892-1971): reflections on a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society

We have previously described the content of a text by Woods and Russell, An Introduction to Medical Statistics, compared it with Principles of Medical Statistics by Hill and set both volumes against the background of vital statistics up until 1937. The two books mark a watershed in the history of medical statistics. Very little has been recorded about the life and career of the first author of the earlier textbook, who was a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society for at least 25 years, an omission which we can now rectify with this paper. We describe her education, entry into medical statistics, relationship with Major Greenwood and her subsequent career and life in Ceylon, Kenya, Australia, England and South Africa.     

杰弗里统计思想的形成及其特征

本文比较全面地介绍了哈罗德?杰弗里的统计思想的形成及其特征,包括他对演绎推理局限性的看法、他的概率观点、他所提“简化式推理”的重要意义,等等;这对于理解杰弗里统计思想何以能对当代统计学及相关学科产生重大影响有一定的帮助。     

Dempster's combination rule and sufficient statistics

In his articles (1966-1968) concerning statistical inference based on lower and upper probabilities, Dempster refers to the connection between Fisher's fiducial argument and his own ideas of statistical inference. Dempster's main concern however focuses on the “Bayesian” aspects of his theory and not on an elaboration of the relation between Fisher's and his ideas. This article attempts to work out the connection between those two approaches and focuses primarily on the question, whether Dempster's combination rule, his upper and lower probabilty based on sufficient statistics and inference based on sufficient statistics in Fisher's sense are consistent. To be adequate to Fisher's reasoning, we deal with absolutely continuous, one parametric families of distributions.This is certainly not the usual assumption in context with Dempster's theory and implies a normative but straightforward definition concerning the underlying conditional distribution; this definition however is done in Dempster's spirit as can be seen from his articles, (1966, 1968,a,b). Under those assumptions it can be shown that - similar to Lindley's results concerning consistency in fiducial reasoning (1958) - the combination rule, Dempster's procedure based on sufficient statistics and fiducial inference by sufficient statistics agree iff the parametric family under consideration can be transformed to location parameter form.     

Current challenges in statistics: large-lecture courses

Each semester approximately 80% of the students taught by the Florida State University Department of Statistics are enrolled in STA 3014: Fundamental Business Statistics. During the academic year this course is taught in large lecture sections of 250 students each. It is either the only statistics course or one of two statistics courses taken in their undergraduate career for probably 90% of these students. A similar situation exists in many statistics departments around the nation.

These large introductory courses offer us the opportunity to introduce the power of statistics to a large fraction of our future business leaders. In the past it appears that this opportunity has often been missed. In fact, some suggest that these courses help contribute to the general public's negative attitude toward statistics courses, the discipline of statistics, and statisticians.

Hence, I propose that one of the current challenges in statistics is the challenge of improving the quality of these courses so that statistics may contribute to the improvement of quality and productivity in the United States, a vital national issue. In this paper I report on my experiences in grappling with this challenge in STA 3014.     

A growing concern

Having started out as a practical forester with an interest in ecology, John Jeffers found himself increasingly involved in statistics as a way of making sense of the world. His career led him ultimately to the planning and management of ecological research, and the monitoring of change in the British landscape, including the extent of fallout from the Chernobyl accident.     

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.     

Wild card

In 1992 Persi Diaconis of Stanford University told the world just how many times a pack of cards should be shuffled. He is one of the more colourful of professors of statistics. He tells Julian Champkin about crooked dice, tossing coins and conjuring tricks—and how statistics makes sense of his world.     

Teach statistics? You bet!

The study of statistics has a reputation among students for being difficult, irrelevant, boring and an unwanted compulsory intrusion into their studies—and that reputation is sometimes deserved. But it does not have to be that way. John Croucher used sport and gambling to transform his lecture theatre, and turned the teaching of statistics into an astonishing Australian success story.     

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".     

关于我国国际服务外包统计体系建立、演进和改革方向的研究

2006年以来,大力发展国际服务外包在扩增量、提质量、优结构、促发展等方面发挥着不可或缺的作用。建立健全统计体系是记录和承载我国国际服务外包发展足迹与功绩的系统性工程。本文对国际服务外包和服务贸易的定义、统计定义和范围,统计的历史沿革和面临的挑战等进行了研究,提出了新时期统计的改革方向和建议。     

Bill Cochran: His Contributions to Medicine and Public Health and Some Personal Recollections

There is a tremendous need in our technological society to train statisticians for all sectors of education, government, and industry. Because statistical training has largely been restricted to graduate schools, the profession is losing many good students to other fields of study. Members of the statistics community are encouraged to reach out to high-school students and undergraduate students to increase the awareness of statistics as a scientific field of study and as a professional career. The ASA Council of Chapters has recently completed a slide presentation entitled “Statistical Science: The Profession,” which was professionally developed to aid this endeavor. In addition, high-school teachers, high-school counselors, and professors of mathematics and science education are identified as important audiences for hearing this message and for broadening general public awareness of what our profession has to offer.     

Plutarch and Lucullus' Applied Sampling

Plutarch, in his book The Life of Lucullus, reports how the Roman general Lucullus estimated his enemies' food provisions. Lucullus' estimation was based on a sampling procedure. With respect to the history of statistics, this Plutarch's text is the earliest applied sampling ever written.