A Conversation with Ingram Olkin

Ingram Olkin was born on July 23, 1924 in Waterbury, Connecticut. His family moved to New York in 1934 and he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1941. He served three years in the Air Force during World War II and obtained a B.S. in mathematics at the City College of New York in 1947. After receiving an M.A. in mathematical statistics from Columbia in 1949, he completed his graduate studies in the Department of Statistics at the University of North Carolina in 1951. His dissertation was written under the direction of S. N. Roy and Harold Hotelling. He joined the Department of Mathematics at Michigan State University in 1951 as an Assistant Professor, subsequently being promoted to Professor. In 1960, he took a position as Chair of the Department of Statistics at the University of Minnesota. He moved to Stanford University in 1961 to take a joint position as Professor of Statistics and Professor of Education; he was also Chair of the Department of Statistics from 1973--1976. In 2007, Ingram became Professor Emeritus. Ingram was Editor of the Annals of Mathematical Statistics (1971--1972) and served as the first editor of the Annals of Statistics from 1972--1974. He was a primary force in the founding of the Journal of Educational Statistics, for which he was also Associate Editor during 1977--1985. In 1984, he was President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Among his many professional activities, he has served as Chair of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS), Chair of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Research Council, Chair of the Management Board of the American Education Research Association, and as Trustee for the National Institute of Statistical Sciences. He has been honored by the American Statistical Association (ASA) with a Wilks Medal (1992) and a Founder's Award (1992). The American Psychological Association gave him a Lifetime Contribution Award (1997) and he was elected to the National Academy of Education in 2005. He received the COPSS Elizabeth L. Scott Award in 1998 and delivered the R. A. Fisher Lecture in 2000. In 2003, the City University of New York gave him a Townsend Harris Medal. An author of 5 books, an editor of 10 books, and an author of more than 200 publications, Ingram has made major contributions to statistics and education. His research has focused on multivariate analysis, majorization and inequalities, distribution theory, and meta-analysis. A volume in celebration of Ingram's 65th birthday contains a brief biography and an interview [Gleser, Perlman, Press and Sampson (1989)]. Ingram was chosen in 1997 to participate in the American Statistical Association Distinguished Statistician Video Series and a videotaped conversation and a lecture (Olkin, 1997) are available from the ASA (1997, DS041, DS042).Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342307000000122 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Ion chambers simplify absolute intensity measurements in the vacuum ultraviolet

Single or double ion chamber technique measures absolute radiation intensities in the extreme vacuum ultraviolet region of the spectrum. The ion chambers use rare gases as the ion carrier. Photon absorbed by the gas creates one ion pair so a measure of these is a measure of the number of incident photons

Active Shooter Events: The Guardian Plan

The decision on how to protect the children and youth while at schools is a serious conversation with varying agreements on the best practices. Some feel that school personnel should not be trained nor expected to be able to react to an armed person while others believe that training of school personnel and allowing them to be armed will deter armed assailants in schools. Ultimately, each school board and district leadership need to choose an emergency safety plan that fits their community. The number of school shootings has brought emergency safety discussions to the forefront again. One school district, highlighted in this article, chose the implementation of a plan called the Guardian Plan

Application of airborne infrared technology to monitor building heat loss

The application of airborne infrared technology to the requirements for energy conservation in buildings was studied. Quantitative airborne data of the City of Ypsilanti, Michigan, were collected and processed to identify roof temperatures. A thermal scanner was flown at an altitude of 1,200 feet with two thermal bands 8.2-9.3 micrometers and 10.4-12.5 micrometers recorded by an analog system. Calibration was achieved by standard hot and cold plates. Using a thermal model to interpret ceiling insulation status, environmental factors were found to influence the relation between roof temperature and insulation. These include interior and sky temperatures, roofing materials, and the pitch and orientation of the roof. A follow-up mail survey established the ability to identify insulated and uninsulated houses from the airborne infrared data

OpenForensics:a digital forensics GPU pattern matching approach for the 21st century

Pattern matching is a crucial component employed in many digital forensic (DF) analysis techniques, such as file-carving. The capacity of storage available on modern consumer devices has increased substantially in the past century, making pattern matching approaches of current generation DF tools increasingly ineffective in performing timely analyses on data seized in a DF investigation. As pattern matching is a trivally parallelisable problem, general purpose programming on graphic processing units (GPGPU) is a natural fit for this problem. This paper presents a pattern matching framework - OpenForensics - that demonstrates substantial performance improvements from the use of modern parallelisable algorithms and graphic processing units (GPUs) to search for patterns within forensic images and local storage devices

New Insights on Hybridization in Potamogeton Floridanus (the Florida pondweed))

Freshwater ecosystems are some of the most important and highest threatened habitats in the world, and aquatic plants play an important, but often-overlooked, role in maintaining them. Potamogeton is a diverse and ecologically important aquatic plant genus well known for taxonomic difficulty and rampant hybridization. lbis study aimed to 1) test the hypothesis that Potamogeton jloridanus (Florida pondweed) is a hybrid between P. oakesianus and P. pulcher, and 2) to investigate correlations in ecological conditions for the focal species. This study revealed the discovery of a new population of P. jloridanus in Big Coldwater Creek in Santa Rosa Co., FL, and ruled out a suggested population in Baldwin Co., AL as P. jloridanus. In addition, it is the first to estimate the crown age for Potamogeton (1.6266 My). The hypothesis that P. jloridanus is a hybrid, and that the hybridization event likely occurred in the Pleistocene was supported by a combination of molecular methodologies. lbis study has begun to outline ecological variables that could be important for understanding the distributions of the focal species. Ultimately, this study highlights how aquatic plant biodiversity can be underestimated even in biodiversity hotspots and outlines the need for molecular and ecological sampling to resolve taxonomy and habitat preferences in Potamogeton

Effectiveness of a culturally tailored weight loss intervention for overweight and obese postpartum African American women

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityThe prevalence of obesity in the United States continues to rise with African American women being disproportionally affected. For some, pregnancy may contribute to overweight and obesity. Providing an efficacious weight loss program for overweight and obese postpartum African American women has proven difficult. The study’s aims were to pilot-test a culturally tailored weight loss intervention using a randomized control group design for overweight and obese postpartum African American women (n=20) and draw lessons from eating behavior and physical activity data. The intervention lasted either 8 or 12 weeks in conjunction with an assigned Birth Sister patient navigator at Boston Medical Center. Weight, eating behaviors, and physical activity data were collected at approximately 6 weeks and 15-20 weeks postpartum. Weight changes between the intervention and control groups were not significant. When compared to the control, the intervention did not have a significant average change in scores for the six categories of the Eating Behavior Patterns Questionnaire nor the active living habits section of the Kaiser Physical Activity Survey. The control group had a significant larger reduction in average scores for emotional eating (p=0.028), haphazard planning (p=0.034), and cultural/lifestyle behaviors (p=0.003), and a significant increase in average scores for the household and family care activities (p=0.034). Correlations were found between low fat eating and haphazard planning (r=-0.82). The results indicated that the intervention was unsuccessful in promoting weight loss and behavior change in this population. Other more flexible, individualized weight loss programs may be more successful in this population. The postpartum period can lead to weight retention, but it remains a challenge to engage African American women during this important transitional phase of their life

Three computer codes to read, plot and tabulate operational test-site recorded solar data

Computer programs used to process data that will be used in the evaluation of collector efficiency and solar system performance are described. The program, TAPFIL, reads data from an IBM 360 tape containing information (insolation, flowrates, temperatures, etc.) from 48 operational solar heating and cooling test sites. Two other programs, CHPLOT and WRTCNL, plot and tabulate the data from the direct access, unformatted TAPFIL file. The methodology of the programs, their inputs, and their outputs are described

Three-dimensional photoelastic evaluation of wire reinforced flexible windows

Three-dimensional photoelastic evaluation of wire reinforced flexible window