Campbell Bequest Fund
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. Applications should be made to the Convenor of the Awards Committee.  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.

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. For more details see the award page.

Professor Campbell is pictured below, lecturing a 1962 Honours class. The NZSA is extremely grateful for his generosity.

The Otago Survey of Statisticians
2003: A Campbell Bequest Fund grant of $1000 was made in 2003 to cover postage in a University of Otago survey of PhD graduates from six of the New Zealand Universities in a range of subjects which have statistics prerequisites. The graduates had had two years in which to find employment because the purpose of the study was to discover what statistical techniques these graduates were using in the workplace and discover if there were any deficiencies in their university statistics training. A total of 977 graduates responded to our postal survey.  This represented a 40% response rate after follow up, which raised the number of respondents from around 780 to the 977.

One paper has been published in SERJ (Statistics Education Research Journal). The reference is Harraway, J.A. and Barker, R.J. Statistics in the workplace: a survey of use by recent graduates with higher degrees. Statistics Education Research Journal, 4(2): 43-58 (2005).

A second report was presented at ICOTS7 in Brazil where an item response analysis on the data was reported. The reference is Harraway, J.A. and Andrade, D.F. An item response analysis of statistics use in the workplace. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Teaching Statistics, Salvador Bahia, Brazil. International Statistical Institute. Voorburg, the Netherlands (2006).
 

The New Zealand Statistician on CD project
2002-2004: The journal archive of the New Zealand Statistician (the official journal of the NZSA between 1966 and 1997) was converted to pdf format and a CD published of the entire contents of the NZS. This project was supervised by Murray Jorgensen and Harold Henderson. The total cost of the project was $1208.  About 100 copies of the CD have been distributed to September 2007.  For further information see:

NZSA 'New Zealand Statistician' Page

NZSA and the NZAMT Conference

The NZSA has supported the New Zealand Association of Mathematics Teachers' Conference, with grants of $1000 in 2003, $1250 in 2005 and $1250 in 2007.  In 2007 the grant supported the participation of Maxine Pfannkuch as an invited speaker.

The Educational DVD Project
2005-2006: The DVD: "Statistics in Research: A Visual Teaching Resource" was created by John Harraway (University of Otago) and filmed at and subsequent to the NZSA 2005 Conference in Dunedin.  It is now available through the CASM Unit, University of Otago.  It contains nine case studies, and has an accompanying data CD.  See the linked pdf file for full details. It was edited by John Harraway and Robert van der Vyver, and jointly sponsored by NZSA, with a $750 grant from the Campbell Bequest Fund, and HEDC, University of Otago.  Most of the publication run of 250 copies has now been sold; if you are interested in obtaining a copy please email Irene Goodwin at the CASM Unit, University of Otago. For further information see these web pages:

NZSA Newsletter Report
Promotional Flier
CASM Unit order form

John Harraway writes (12 September 2007):

The grant of $750 was received in 2005 to assist with development of a DVD and CD for school use and for use in teaching some preliminary classes at University. The DVD contains movies and powerpoints of seven researchers at the University of Otago plus some material from Statistics New Zealand. The CD contains the data used by the researchers and it is hoped this may provide ideas for project work in schools. 250 DVD/CD packs were produced. There are 27 remaining. About 195 have been purchased by schools in New Zealand for use in year 13 and the balance of 28 have been distributed to the presenters and the Education Committee of the New Zealand Statistics Association. The grant was used to pay for a member of staff of the Higher Education Development Unit at the University of Otago to travel to Christchurch to record the contributions from Statistics New Zealand. Also to help with the cost of production of the DVD/CD pack in Auckland. It was not intended to profit from the sales, just to break even.

The idea for the DVD/CD developed at the NZ Statistics Association Conference in Dunedin in 2005. Papers have been presented on the DVD at the NZ Statistics Association Conference in Christchurch in 2007. The material in the DVD/CD may be slightly complicated for school use. But the project was a move into the unknown. It is hoped that a second DVD/CD can be produced involving the advice from a school teacher to ensure that the product is presented at the appropriate level. There is some interest in this from the American Statistics Association Journal STATS: the magazine for students of statistics.

NZSA/ASC 2006 conference
2006-2007:  A grant of $5000 was provided to support student attendance at the 2006 NZSA conference. The conference was held in Auckland, 3-7 July, jointly with the Australian Statistical Congress. This grant was approved in 2007.