New Zealand Statistical Association Newsletter 60
September 2004
Chris Glasbey, Erskine Fellow
Sheila Williams, DSc
Festschrift for Peter Johnstone
Murthy Mittinty, ASA JSM Student Prize Winner
HRS Student Prizes at the NZSA Conference
David Vere-Jones - Marsden Fund Award10/9/4
NZSA Campbell Award Criteria
Chris
Glasbey has a Visiting Erskine Fellowship to Canterbury University Sept 18
- Oct 16, 2004. He is Head of Research in BioSS (Biomathematics and
Statistics Scotland). He has an MA in mathematics from Cambridge
University, and a PhD and DSc from Edinburgh University.
His research interests are in image analysis, spatio-temporal models, meteorological and biological applications, microarrays and bioinformatics, and he has co-authored a book "Image Analysis for the Biological Sciences" (Glasbey and Horgan, 1995, Wiley). He is joint editor of "Applied Statistics", and holds honorary professorships at Heriot-Watt University and the Scottish Agricultural College.
University
of Otago biostatistician Sheila Williams received a Doctor of Science
degree at the May graduation, recognizing her role in research teams
including those studying cot deaths and psychiatric disorders in children.
The doctorate is earned for published works of "special excellence".
Sheila comments, "The work we have done on cot death, not particularly my papers, has reduced the incidence of cot deaths enormously. It is much, much lower than it was when we started doing these studies in the mid 1980s."
Sheila has also worked on the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, which is following 1000 people born in 1972, assessing the effects of early life experiences on subsequent health. She joined this study as a volunteer when it was set up in 1975. She has been working as a statistician in the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at the University of Otago since the mid 1980s.
She did her BSc (Hons) in Applied and Pure Maths at the University of Hull, followed by a Postgraduate Diploma in Science at Otago in 1979.
Festchrift for Peter Johnstone
Table of Contents
To
celebrate Peter Johnstone’s 65th birthday, the AgResearch Statistics group
presented him with a book of recent research and analysis, including his
own essay on experimental design, enriched with travellers’ tales from his
family and friends. The book is entitled "Collaborations, Designs and
Explorations", nicely reflecting his professional and social interests. A
limited number of copies of the book plus a CD version are still available
from the volume’s editor, Roger Littlejohn (roger.littlejohn@agresearch.co.nz), at $25 each.
Peter Johnstone. Planning
comparative experiments.
1
Bryan Manly. A mixture model for
estimating the proportion
of deaths caused by different predators. 21
Martin Upsdell. A Bayesian
smoother / mixed model approach
to estimating spatial patterns in kiwifruit orchards. 36
Lilian Morrison, Roger Littlejohn,
Wayne Hein, Anton
Pernthaner. Immunity to gut nematodes in sheep.47
John Waller. The use of Latin
square designs for animal
preference studies in the field.56
Roger Littlejohn, Colin Boswell,
Alison Rutherford. Where
have all the GDDs gone? 64
Katarina Domijan, Neil Cox.
Modelling thermal destruction
of viruses and bacterial cells. 73
Dave Saville, Graham Wood. The
geometry of the p-value.
91
Fred Potter. Blocks and Plots.
112
David Baird, David Leathwick.
Competition between larvae of
three blowfly species. 121
Ken Dodds. Analysis of
quantitative trait loci interaction effects.
129
Mark Schreiber, Chris Brown. The
limitations of Bioinformatics.
138
Harold Henderson. Dynamic
graphics for microarray data.
147
Gwenda Hill. Royal Society of
New Zealand Teaching Fellowship.
159
Anne Johnstone. Peter the
Traveller.
161
Limbo Thompson. Peter the
Alpinist.
165
Ron Smoothy. Peter the Climber.
168
Graeme Bremner. Forensic Forays.
170
Stuart Crosbie. Statistics and
Beyond.
182
Roger Littlejohn. How to make a
dumb objective smart.
193
Peter Johnstone. The history of
Invermay Biometrics.
196
Murthy Mittinty, ASA JSM Student Prize Winner
HRS Student Prizes at the NZSA Conference We thank Ray Hoare of HRS for sponsoring the student prizes which were
awarded to Caroline Roughneen for
"The Attraction of Engineering" and Steven Johnston for
"A Point Process Model for Accelerating Seismic Energy Release".
Narasimha
(Murthy) Mittinty (below), a PhD student at the University of Canterbury,
was one of 5 students to be awarded a student prize at the ASA JSM in
Toronto. His award winning paper was entitled "Imputation by propensity
matching". Propensity score is a sufficient summary of the covariate
information and thus should be a good matching variable to find a donor to
missing cases. He compared it to the well known regression based matching
method and also a method developed by the authors called multivariate
nearest neighbour. Murthy is very thankful for the opportunity to attend
the conference and workshops, which was made possible by the prize
sponsorship from the Social Statistics/Government Statistics/Survery
Research Methods Sections of the ASA. He attended workshop courses taught
at the conference and also met experts from the field of survey sampling
and imputation. There were around 20 sessions on survey sampling, which
had some interesting papers on recent advances in this area. Murthy
writes, "I would like to take this opportunity to thank my supervisors,
Dr Easaw Chacko and Mr Richard Penny, who have been a constant source of
motivation and help in achieving this award".
David Vere-Jones - Marsden Fund Award
Congratulations to David Vere-Jones, who received
a Marsden Fund
Award in this year's round, announced on 10 September. The title of
his project is "Hidden Markov models for earthquake processes with ancilliary measurements".
NZSA
Campbell Award Criteria
This award was initiated in 1999 to promote statistics
within NZ and to recognise an individual’s contribution to the promotion
and development of statistics. The first recipient was Stan Roberts. Stan
will be remembered most recently for his efforts in the NZ statistics
history project. The award was given to him at the conference in
Wellington in 1999. The second recipient was Murray Jorgensen and the
award was given to him at the conference in Christchurch in 2001. The criteria for the award are: publishing the best, recent, original statistical
research undertaken within NZ, or, making an outstanding contribution to statistical
education, or, playing a key role in consulting on a major,
innovative research project that has direct relevance to NZ, or, making a significant contribution to promoting
statistics within NZ. One point worth noting is that the award may only be
given to fully paid up members of the NZSA. All membership categories are
eligible. This could be a way of encouraging new members - promise new
members that they may one day be given an award! Please send your nominations to Jennifer Brown (J.Brown@math.canterbury.ac.nz)
or Harold Henderson (Harold.Henderson@agresearch.co.nz) Jennifer Brown