2005 Diary

These are some of the undertakings and travellings of members of the Department of Statistics during 2005. There are omissions.

2005 Annual Report (176KiB)

Autumn Graduands

Spring Graduands

Son born to Renate Meyer

Renate Meyer's son, as yet unnamed, was born on the 18th of December.

Ilze Ziedins receives Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence

Ilze Ziedins, lecturer of STATS 724: Operations Research, has received a Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence. In selecting Ilze, the panel noted the following:

Ilze has inspired many students to develop a deep appreciation and love for the field of applied probability. Drawing on her extensive consulting experience with telecommunications and network companies, undergraduate students have been introduced to reallife examples in operations research. Behind her teaching is a philosophy, which facilitates and promotes a two-way dialogue with her students and encourages students to think critically about what they are doing and what they are being taught.

Her colleagues report that the most able students in the Statistics Department gravitate towards her as their project supervisor. Apart from her rapport with students they suggest that Ilze has a particular talent for designing projects that stretch students to their maximum potential and that students are challenged from the outset to debate and criticize both their own and her ideas. Comments from her many past and present students such as: I owe a great deal to her high yet achievable expectations and her ability to put me as a postgraduate student in a position where I could work at the cutting edge of our field, and it is not the correct answer but the innovative thinking that is rewarded, attest to her ability to develop students research capabilities.

Ilze has played a major curriculum leadership role in developing operations research courses in the Statistics Department. As a mentor she cares deeply about students under her tutelage and has inspired no fewer than seven of her project students to progress to PhD research at top international universities. Her joint publication work with pre-PhD students is unparalleled in the department. Ilze radiates enthusiasm, a passion for teaching and research, has an infectious sense of humour and in the words of one student her vast energy created a positive, joyful learning environment which helped me realize and unlock my potential. Ilze is, without a doubt, a most distinguished teacher.

Marti Anderson and Rich Ford funded from VC's University Development Fund

Marti Anderson and Rich Ford (with Jenny Webster) were funded for $85,000 from the VC's University Development Fund for a project entitled Investigating the impact of multiple stressors on benthic communities.

Russell Millar at American Fisheries Society

Russell Millar gave two invited talks at the American Fisheries Society 135th Annual Meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, namely Reference priors for Bayesian fisheries models and Automatic calculation of the sensitivity of Bayesian fisheries models to informative priors.

In September, Russell gave a seminar on Local sensitivity of Bayesian inference to priors and data.

James Curran and Forensic Science Service

James Curran has obtained a 3-year $176,000 contract with the Forensic Science Service of the UK.

Alastair Scott at Washington Statistical Society

Alastair Scott has given invited week-long workshops on sampling to the Washington Statistical Society in DC and a shorter version to Statistics New Zealand. While in Washington he also gave an invited talk in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology Distinguished Lecture Series.

Annual Teacher's Day

Our Annual Teachers day drew over 90 participants despite prominently advertising that we were recycling many elements from the last 2 years. We also exploited synergies with our CensusAtSchool project and our involvement with the new curriculum. Comments like this from an HoD are pleasing, Reported back to my staff today that your stats course was one of the very best Ive been to in 35 yrs absolutely focused on what a teacher in front of a classroom needs to focus on.

James Russell and Rodent Invasion in Nature

A paper co-authored by James Russell and others from the Rodent Invasion Project / Research Group has been published in Nature. Other organisations, including the BBC, National Geographic, and New Scientist, have picked up the story.

Citation: Russell, JC, Towns, DR, Anderson, SH, Clout, MN. 2005-10-20. Intercepting the first rat ashore. Nature, 437(7062): p1107

33,000 Children Have Their Say

Meet Jessica, Jessica is fictional, but according to the most frequent responses from the 2005 CensusAtSchool survey Jessica starts the day with toast and a glass of milk for breakfast. ...

This is the introduction to a press release sent out at the end of the CensusAtSchool project.

Graduation

Spring graduation passed successfully with a large number of spring graduands (PDF), including Lecturer Yuichi Hirose.

12,000 students answer CensusAtSchool New Zealand

In the first week, 12,000 students have answered the CensusAtSchool New Zealand survey. Even after the first week, students are still answering the survey at the rate of one and a half thousand per school day.

Rachel Cunliffe on Breakfast

Rachel Cunliffe, actor Shane Cortese, and students at St Mary's in Northcote were shown on Breakfast, participating in CensusAtSchool.

Rachel Cunliffe on One News

Rachel Cunliffe and students at Clover Park Middle School were shown on One News and Late News, participating in CensusAtSchool.

Rachel Cunliffe on Te Kaea

Rachel Cunliffe was shown on Te Kaea talking about CensusAtSchool. She was at Ranui School in Waitakere City.

SRTL4: Conference on Statistical Reasoning, Literacy, and Teaching

From 2 to 7 June the SRTL-4 conference was held at Grafton Hall. It was largely organised by Ross Parsonage and Maxine Pfannkuch, along with input from Dani Ben-Zvi, Joan Garfield, and others.

Russell Millar on Campbell Live

Russell Millar was on Campbell Live explaining the probability of winning Lotto, and how much interest would have accumulated had the money been put into a savings account.

Tim Langlois submits his PhD thesis

Tim Langlois, has submitted his PhD thesis on the morning of 2 June to the Graduate Centre.

The title of Tim's thesis is: "Influence of reef-associated predators on adjacent soft-sediment communities". He has been based up at the Leigh Marine Laboratory.

Adam Smith awarded Scholarship

An NZIMA Postgraduate Scholarship has been awarded to Adam Smith for a Masters thesis project at the University of Auckland (from July 2005) on the statistical validation of the NZ Marine Environment Classification, under the supervision of Drs Marti Anderson and Clinton Duffy.

Dr Yuichi Hirose, PhD

Yuichi has completed the corrections to his thesis and has now completed the requirements for his PhD.

Fieldwork in the Bay of Islands

The Rodent Invasion Research Group spent a total of two weeks rat-catching in the Bay of Islands. With the Department of Conservation, Steven Miller helped set up the traps, then the next week Rachel Fewster went to bag the rats with Stephen Cope as camera-man. The trip was exceptionally successful with a total of 360 rats bagged for the DNA project.

Graduation

Autumn graduation passed successfully with a large number of graduands (PDF), including Senior Tutor Mike Forster.

Mike Manning on 60 Minutes

One of our MSc students, Mike Manning, will appear on the 60 Minutes program this coming Monday. He features in a piece about the satellite tagging of white sharks.

Mike is working on his MSc while employed by NIWA in Wellington.

IASS 55: Complex sampling, retrospective sampling and missing data

IASS 55 was organised and run by this Department and held at the Maritime Museum in Auckland, New Zealand. Alastair Scott chaired some of the sessions.

55th Session of the International Statistical Institute (ISI 55)

Rachel Cunliffe, Ross Ihaka, Chris Wild, and Ilze Ziedins were at ISI 55 in Sydney, Australia.

Faculty Teaching Excellence Awards for 2004

Rachel Fewster won the Faculty of Science Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching for 2004.

IASE at ISI 55

Rachel Cunliffe, Mike Forster, Chris Wild and others were at the sessions of IASE at ISI 55 in Sydney, Australia.

CR Rao talk

CR Rao spoke to a packed room in this Department. In his talk he covered a history of statistics.

International Workshop on Matrices and Statistics

The 14th International Workshop on Matrices and Statistics IWMS-2005 was held at Massey University - Albany from March 29th to April 1st. George Seber gave a Keynote Lecture on "Things my mother never told me about Matrices", Alan Lee & Alastair Scott gave an Invited Lecture on "Semi-parametric efficiency, projection and the Scott-Wild estimator", and Garry Tee gave an Invited Lecture on "Eigenvectors of block circulant matrices".

Alastair Scott in University News

An article on Alastair was published with the heading, Leading mathematician retires.

Wild, C & Triggs, C. March 2005. Leading mathematician retires. The University of Auckland News, 36(2): 15

Workshop on Bayesian Inference and MCMC

On February 24, Renate Meyer organized a workshop on Bayesian inference and MCMC which was very well attended with over 30 participants. For a list of speakers and abstracts, see the Bayesian Inference and MCMC website.

• Quentin Atkinson, "Bayesian inference for language phylogenies".
• Mik Black, "Estimating disease prevalence in the absence of a gold standard".
• Bill Bolstad, "A Monte-Carlo analysis of a mixture-based shrinkage estimator".
• Colin Fox, "Solving Inverse Problems using MCMC with an approximation".
• Ville Kolehmainen, "Parallelized Bayesian Inversion for three-dimensional dental X-ray imaging".
• Renate Meyer, "Bayesian semiparametric modelling of stratified survival data using mixtures".
• Russell Millar, "A simple case-deletion diagnostic for Bayesian models".
• Geoff Nicholls, "Deposition model-comparison from radiocarbon data".
• Allen Rodrigo.
• Angelika van der Linde, "Coefficients of determination and predictive model choice".
• Tim Watson, "A hierarchical Bayesian model and simulation software for the maintenance of water pipe networks".

PhD students

Our PhD students have been exceptionally busy recently. Monique Mackenzie (now at St Andrews University) and Andreas Berg successfully defended their theses, and Yuichi Hirose submitted his, all within the space of a week.

Debbie Leader has since received an Enterprise Scholarship in partnership with Pacific Edge Biotechnology Ltd to do her PhD with Brian McArdle and Mik Blak on "Multivariate analysis of bioinformatic data".

Sarah Song has since received a New Zealand International Postgraduate Research Scholarship to do her PhD with Yong Wang and Mik Black on the "Development of datamining techniques for microarray data".

Births

James Reilly and Mat Pawley are both the proud new fathers of baby girls, and Andreas Berg is a proud expectant father.

Dinner for Alastair Scott

On February 23 the Department held a dinner at Tamaki with Alastair Scott, family, colleagues, guests, and acquaintances.

Chris Wild gave a short speech, and Alastair said a few words as well.

Sharon Walker nearly brained!

Sharon narrowly escaped serious injury after a giant two kilogram bunya nut (pictured) fell from an Araucaria tree and missed her by millimetres. She paused to inspect that UFO, whereupon she was narrowly missed by a second one!

Health and Safety Officer Werner jumped into action, had a dozen reports filed and the gardeners examining the tree before the afternoon was out.

Otago Genomics Facility Microarray Meeting

Mik Black and his PhD students, Debbie Leader and Sarah Song, attended this meeting in Dunedin on February 11.

Daughter born to Mat Pawley

Mat Pawley's daughter Sofia was born on the 7th of February.

Marti Anderson's paper selected

Marti Anderson's 2003 paper Generalized discriminant analysis based on distances with John Robinson in the Australia and NZ J of Statistics was selected by ISI Esssential Science Indicators as the New Hot Paper for January 2005 in the Mathematics category.

• Main ISI ESI webpage
• Back issues of New Hot Papers
• Marti's entry

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