News

U. S. National Income Series Revised—Congress Votes No on Censuses of Business and Manufactures—Britain Revises Living Cost Index-U. S. and U. K. Surveys Uncover Lacks in Statistical Training-Forthcoming Statistical Conferences     

A Mechanical Interpretation of the Coefficient of Rank Correlation and other Analogies

Periodically, the pyramid or “chain letter” scheme is offered to Americans under the guise of a business dealership. Recently, the FTC ordered Glen Turner's “Dare to be Great” firm to repay 44 million dollars to participants. In order to demonstrate that the potential gains are misrepresented by promoters, a probability model of the pyramid scheme is developed. The major implications are that the vast majority of participants have less than a ten percent chance of recouping their initial investment when a small profit is achieved as soon as they recruit three people and that, on the average, half of the participants will recruit no one else and lose all their money.     

Interval Estimation for the Difference of Two Independent Variances

Analytical methods for interval estimation of differences between variances have not been described. A simple analytical method is given for interval estimation of the difference between variances of two independent samples. It is shown, using simulations, that confidence intervals generated with this method have close to nominal coverage even when sample sizes are small and unequal and observations are highly skewed and leptokurtic, provided the difference in variances is not very large. The method is also adapted for testing the hypothesis of no difference between variances. The test is robust but slightly less powerful than Bonett's test with small samples.     

A Survey of the Teaching of Statistics in M.B.A. Programs

A survey of business schools was conducted to obtain information about the current state of the teaching of business statistics to students enrolled in M.B.A. degree programs. The survey was undertaken for and presented at a June 1986 conference on “Making Statistics More Effective in Schools of Business,” held at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. Information was elicited concerning both the required statistics sequence and elective statistics courses for M.B.A. students, as well as computer usage in these courses. This article summarizes the information obtained from the survey.     

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.     

A Theory for Coloring Bivariate Statistical Maps

Consideration of some practical uses of statistical bivariate maps—for example, display of association between variables—leads to principles for making effective use of color to represent data values. Effective color schemes for bivariate maps are viewed as continuous transformations from color models to the unit square with appropriate restrictions involving hue, saturation, and brightness. Several schemes, including those used by the U.S. Census Bureau, are criticized on the basis of this theory.     

Two Pitfalls of Using Standard Regression Diagnostics When Both X and Y Have Measurement Error

Modern exploratory data analysis produces models that are not based on physical theory but that are consistent with pictures of the data. When both X and Y have error this can be risky, because important features are hidden. Two examples are given that show that systematic model departures and heteroscedasticity may not be detectable with standard regression diagnostics.     

Interpreting an Inequality in Multiple Regression

This article provides a method of interpreting a surprising inequality in multiple linear regression: the squared multiple correlation can be greater than the sum of the simple squared correlations between the response variable and each of the predictor variables. The interpretation is obtained via principal component analysis by studying the influence of some components with small variance on the response variable. One example is used as an illustration and some conclusions are derived.     

An Empirical Comparison of Estimating Methods for the Ramberg–Osgood EIV Model

The standard tensile test is one of the most frequent tools performed for the evaluation of mechanical properties of metals. An empirical model proposed by Ramberg and Osgood fits the tensile test data using a nonlinear model for the strain in terms of the stress. It is an Error-In-Variables (EIV) model because of the uncertainty affecting both strain and stress measurement instruments. The SIMEX, a simulation-based method for the estimation of model parameters, is powerful in order to reduce bias due to the measurement error in EIV models. The plan of this article is the following. In Sec. 2, we introduce the Ramberg–Osgood model and another reparametrization according to different assumptions on the independent variable. In Sec. 3, there is a summary of SIMEX method for the case at hand. Section 4 is a comparison between SIMEX and others estimating methods in order to highlight the peculiarities of the different approaches. In the last section, there are some concluding remarks.     

Ranking paired contestants

The ranking of paired contestants (players) after a series of contests is difficult when every player does not play every other player. In the 1975 JASA Mark Thompson presented a maximum likelihood solution based on the assumption that the probability of any one player defeating any other is a function only of the difference in their ranks. Here the linear approximation to that likelihood is shown to lead to a nonparametric measure of the efficacy of the ranking, called the net difference in ranks (NDR) , which is the sum of the differences in ranks of the paired players in the observed contests that agree with the ranking minus the sum of the differences in ranks in the observed contests that disagree with the ranking (upsets) . The subject is part of a large literature that has been consolidated by H.A. David in The Method of Paired Comparisons (1963, 1988). The method was introduced by the psychophysicist Fechner in 1860 and has been widely applied to sensory testing,