A Conversation with Dorothy Gilford

In 1946, Public Law 588 of the 79th Congress established the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Its mission was to plan, foster and encourage scientific research in support of Naval problems. The establishment of ONR predates the National Science Foundation and initiated the refocusing of scientific infrastructure in the United States following World War II. At the time, ONR was the only source for federal support of basic research in the United States. Dorothy Gilford was one of the first Heads of the Probability and Statistics program at the Office of Naval Research (1955 to 1962), and she went on to serve as Director of the Mathematical Sciences Division (1962 to 1968). During her time at ONR, Dorothy influenced many areas of statistics and mathematics and was ahead of her time in promoting interdisciplinary projects. Dorothy continued her career at the National Center for Education Statistics (1969 to 1974). She was active in starting international comparisons of education outcomes in different countries, which has influenced educational policy in the United States. Dorothy went on to serve in many capacities at the National Academy of Sciences, including Director of Human Resources Studies (1975 to 1978), Senior Statistician on the Committee on National Statistics (1978 to 1988) and Director of the Board on International Comparative Studies in Education (1988 to 1994). The following is a conversation we had with Dorothy Gilford in March of 2004. We found her to be an interesting person and a remarkable statistician. We hope you agree.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342307000000023 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A deterministic method for robust estimation of multivariate location and shape

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Assessing the carcinogenic potential of low-dose exposures to chemical mixtures in the environment: the challenge ahead.

Lifestyle factors are responsible for a considerable portion of cancer incidence worldwide, but credible estimates from the World Health Organization and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) suggest that the fraction of cancers attributable to toxic environmental exposures is between 7% and 19%. To explore the hypothesis that low-dose exposures to mixtures of chemicals in the environment may be combining to contribute to environmental carcinogenesis, we reviewed 11 hallmark phenotypes of cancer, multiple priority target sites for disruption in each area and prototypical chemical disruptors for all targets, this included dose-response characterizations, evidence of low-dose effects and cross-hallmark effects for all targets and chemicals. In total, 85 examples of chemicals were reviewed for actions on key pathways/mechanisms related to carcinogenesis. Only 15% (13/85) were found to have evidence of a dose-response threshold, whereas 59% (50/85) exerted low-dose effects. No dose-response information was found for the remaining 26% (22/85). Our analysis suggests that the cumulative effects of individual (non-carcinogenic) chemicals acting on different pathways, and a variety of related systems, organs, tissues and cells could plausibly conspire to produce carcinogenic synergies. Additional basic research on carcinogenesis and research focused on low-dose effects of chemical mixtures needs to be rigorously pursued before the merits of this hypothesis can be further advanced. However, the structure of the World Health Organization International Programme on Chemical Safety 'Mode of Action' framework should be revisited as it has inherent weaknesses that are not fully aligned with our current understanding of cancer biology

Assessing the carcinogenic potential of low-dose exposures to chemical mixtures in the environment: the challenge ahead

Lifestyle factors are responsible for a considerable portion of cancer incidence worldwide, but credible estimates from the World Health Organization and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) suggest that the fraction of cancers attributable to toxic environmental exposures is between 7% and 19%. To explore the hypothesis that low-dose exposures to mixtures of chemicals in the environment may be combining to contribute to environmental carcinogenesis, we reviewed 11 hallmark phenotypes of cancer, multiple priority target sites for disruption in each area and prototypical chemical disruptors for all targets, this included dose-response characterizations, evidence of low-dose effects and cross-hallmark effects for all targets and chemicals. In total, 85 examples of chemicals were reviewed for actions on key pathways/mechanisms related to carcinogenesis. Only 15% (13/85) were found to have evidence of a dose-response threshold, whereas 59% (50/85) exerted low-dose effects. No dose-response information was found for the remaining 26% (22/85). Our analysis suggests that the cumulative effects of individual (non-carcinogenic) chemicals acting on different pathways, and a variety of related systems, organs, tissues and cells could plausibly conspire to produce carcinogenic synergies. Additional basic research on carcinogenesis and research focused on low-dose effects of chemical mixtures needs to be rigorously pursued before the merits of this hypothesis can be further advanced. However, the structure of the World Health Organization International Programme on Chemical Safety ‘Mode of Action’ framework should be revisited as it has inherent weaknesses that are not fully aligned with our current understanding of cancer biology

Assessing the carcinogenic potential of low-dose exposures to chemical mixtures in the environment: the challenge ahead

Lifestyle factors are responsible for a considerable portion of cancer incidence worldwide, but credible estimates from the World Health Organization and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) suggest that the fraction of cancers attributable to toxic environmental exposures is between 7% and 19%. To explore the hypothesis that low-dose exposures to mixtures of chemicals in the environment may be combining to contribute to environmental carcinogenesis, we reviewed 11 hallmark phenotypes of cancer, multiple priority target sites for disruption in each area and prototypical chemical disruptors for all targets, this included dose-response characterizations, evidence of low-dose effects and cross-hallmark effects for all targets and chemicals. In total, 85 examples of chemicals were reviewed for actions on key pathways/ mechanisms related to carcinogenesis. Only 15% (13/85) were found to have evidence of a dose-response threshold, whereas 59% (50/85) exerted low-dose effects. No dose-response information was found for the remaining 26% (22/85). Our analysis suggests that the cumulative effects of individual (non-carcinogenic) chemicals acting on different pathways, and a variety of related systems, organs, tissues and cells could plausibly conspire to produce carcinogenic synergies. Additional basic research on carcinogenesis and research focused on low-dose effects of chemical mixtures needs to be rigorously pursued before the merits of this hypothesis can be further advanced. However, the structure of the World Health Organization International Programme on Chemical Safety ‘Mode of Action’ framework should be revisited as it has inherent weaknesses that are not fully aligned with our current understanding of cancer biology

Document Clustering and Social Networks

Text Mining has become a specialized offshoot of Data Mining, Information Retrieval, and Natural Language Processing. One of the major tools of this area is the vector space representation of documents. On the other hand, social network analysis has found its mathematical underpinnings primarily in mathematical graph theory. A graph has a dual representation as an adjacency matrix. So-called two-mode social networks have actors of two different types, frequently individuals and organizations. The adjacency matrix for these two-mode social networks has the same structure as the so-called term-document matrices used in text mining. In the talk we discuss these connections and show how these ideas can be exploited in both fields. In particular, methods for block modeling in social network analysis can be used for document clustering.Army Research Office, Contract W911NF-04-1-0447Army Research Laboratory, Contract W911-NF-07-1-0059National Institute on Alcohol Abuse And Alcoholism, Grant Number F32AA015876Isaac Newton Instituteunpublishednot peer reviewe

The Grand Tour in k-Dimensions

The grand tour introduced by Asimov (1985) is based on the idea that one method of searching for structure in ddimensional data is to "look at it from all possible angles," more mathematically, to project the data sequentially in to all possible two-planes. The collection of two-planes in a d-dimensional space is called a Grassmannian manifold. A key feature of the grand tour is that the projection planes are chosen according to a dense, continuous path through the Grassmannian manifold which yields the visual impression of points moving continuously