New Zealand Statistical Association Newsletter 56
October 2002
Campbell Estate Bequest - Jenny Brown
The NZSA were the recipients of a very
generous donation ($48,000) from Professor Campbell’s estate. A group of
the executive met to discuss options for use of this money, and
recommended to the executive that the bequest be invested and interest
from this be made available for special projects. The amount of funding
available each year would be roughly $1500.
Applications would be received twice a year (April/October) for funding of special projects that were within the interests of Professor Campbell. The use of the funds in this way was considered against the option of allocating all, or a substantial part of the money, to a major project now. Given there is no major project immediately obvious, and without wanting to preclude the money being available for a worthy project at a later date, the "spend interest-only" option was adopted. The use of the fund would be reviewed in 5 years. Projects funded for 2002/03 are creating electronic copies of back issues of the NZ Statistician and a contribution to Otago University for their survey of statisticians.
To better understand Professor Campbell’s interests, the following is summarised from a transcript of an interview of Professor Campbell with David Vere-Jones and Sharleen Forbes in 1987:
· the importance of a good mathematical foundation for any teaching of statistics;
· the likelihood of developments in mathematics being stimulated by the needs of the social sciences, and the role that women, in particular, will play in this;
· more generally the need to help women mathematicians;
· the responsibility he felt towards ‘second-tier’ students - the ‘elite’ ones were seen as ‘self-propelling’;
· effective connections between schools and universities;
· the importance of instilling intellectual honesty - much wider than just mathematics.
Overall he had a vision of mathematics and statistics as a unified whole.
Also, in recognition of Professor Campbell, the NZSA have the NZSA Campbell Award. The purpose of the award is to promote statistics in NZ and to recognise an individual’s contribution to the promotion and development of statistics. More details are on the webpage. The award was given to Stan Roberts in 1999 and Murray Jorgensen in 2001.
Professor Campbell is pictured below, lecturing a 1962 Honours class. The NZSA is extremely grateful for his generosity.
Jennifer Brown, Garry Dickinson
John Harraway and Richard Barker have
received a grant of $1000 from the New Zealand Statistics Association to assist
with a survey of "Statistical Procedures used by Graduates in the Workplace". A
Research into University Teaching Grant of $8500 from the University of Otago
has also been received and the study is well underway.
They have surveyed research graduates (PhD or Masters) in subjects which have Statistics pre-requisites at university, namely Statistics, the Biological Sciences including Zoology, Botany, Marine Science, Ecology and Environmental Science, Nutrition, Food Science, Psychology, Marketing, Finance and Economics.
The purpose is to see if the statistics courses being taught in the New Zealand Universities (and Otago in particular) are appropriate, to see if they need to be modified to meet the demands of the workplace, and possibly to identify areas where focused workshops could be provided for different groups. It is felt there are subject differences and it is hoped to identify these.
They have gained permission to use the Alumni databases at Auckland, Waikato, Victoria, Canterbury and Otago Universities after meeting ethical and privacy conditions. The target population comprises graduates who obtained their higher degrees between 1995 and 1999, as this ensures there is good chance they will be in the workforce now. About 2500 survey documents have been mailed, with about 900 responses so far. They are about to embark on follow-up of non-respondents, and the grant from the New Zealand Statistics Association will be used to fund this aspect of the sampling as well as some of the analysis. It is hoped to have the results by March next year.
John Harraway