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"Road Accident Statistics" ....Click here

"Continuous Bivariate Distributions, Emphasising Applications" ....Click here

"The Datasets from CBDEA" ....Click here

"The Engineering Statistician's Guide to Continuous Bivariate Distributions" ....Click here

"Ability, Partial Information, Guessing: Statistical Modelling Applied to Multiple-Choice Tests" ....Click here

"Index to Corrections, Addenda, and Comments That Were Published in Statistics Journals, 1970--1991" ....Click here

"Corrections, Addenda, and Comments Published in Journals of Statistics and Mathematics Applied to Psychology and Education, 1970--1991: An Index" ....Click here

A feature of this book is the international coverage --- the U.S.A. and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Great Britain and many countries of continental Europe, Japan, and the developing world are dealt with. It is both a sourcebook of data and a text on the methods. Though primarily for specialists in road safety, the book is also useful background for the many students who conduct projects in this area. Read what reviewers say about it.

• "First, is there a need for such a book, and second, if there is, is this particular book successful. I believe that the answer to both questions is an unequivocal yes... I found the book to be thorough, scholarly, and complete. I think that it is an extremely valuable addition to the traffic safety literature. Everyone with a broad interest in traffic safety will be rendered more effective by having all the information contained in this volume so logically and neatly packaged for fingertip convenience." (L Evans, writing in Transportation Science, 22, 1988, pp 290--291.)
• "A book of numbers in the form of well organized statistics is a valuable asset in the field of vehicular trauma... The author's crisp style of writing will be envied by many a medical author... I would highly recommend this book to those health professionals who are involved with research in the field of `Automotive Medicine'." (R F Larkin, writing in American Journal of Emergency Medicine, 7, 1989, pp 117--118.)
• "If you use statistics of any sort this is a useful book filled with informative and constructive comment on the process of collecting and analysing data. If you use road accident statistics it is indispensable both as a source of statistical information and as a guide to where the vast amount of published material may be found and how it should be interpreted." (M A Macaulay, writing in International Journal of Impact Engineering, 7, 1988, p 369.)
• "It is an easy book to read, written in an open, informal and accessible manner... I think that it will become an essential reference work for anyone interested in the international dimensions of the road safety problem." (J P Nicholl, writing in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 152, 1989, p 263.)
• "This book is extremely valuable... [and] can make an international contribution to the improvement of the methods and to the formation of more comparable statistics." (P Verhaegen, writing in Psychologica Belgica, 28, 1988, pp 180--181.)
• "This is an invaluable collection of data on interest not only to the traffic engineer or police department, but also to those interested in the factors contributing to the causes of accidents. The transport geographer can safely be counted among those interested parties... The catalogue of worldwide injury and death that the publication presents makes fascinating though sobering reading." (J H Farrington, writing in Scottish Geographical Magazine, 105, 1989, p 186.)

There are 14 chapters.

1. Introduction.
2. How many road deaths?
3. Collection and processing of data from the police.
4. Major deficiencies of police data.
5. Special features of developing countries.
6. Comparison of six road accident statistical yearbooks.
7. A miscellany of data tables.
8. Injury classification.
9. Data from death statistics.
10. Nature of injury, hospital patients.
11. Comparison of police and medical data.
12. Features of injury coding in individual countries.
13. Prospects for matching police and hospital data.
14. Insurance data.

Published November 1987. A4 format. Casebound (i.e., hard covers). xxvi + 292 pages. 175 tables. 18 figures. 255 references, plus bibliography of 247 statistical sources. Index of 2000 entries. Price: $77 (Australian currency), $55 (U.S. currency), 34 pounds sterling, $70 (Canadian currency), or the equivalent in any major convertible currency. Please order from: Rumsby Scientific Publishing, P.O. Box Q355, Q.V.B., Sydney, N.S.W. 2000, Australia.

Whether one approaches statistics in a data-driven fashion, or by constructing a mathematical model of reality, distributions are central to the subject --- in the first case, because of the desire to describe the data parsimoniously, in the second case, to specify the behaviour of the random terms in the equations. When a single variable is thought of, we have univariate distributions; when there are many, multivariate distributions are of concern. This book is about the important intermediate case of variables taken two at a time --- the simplest situation in which the form of the associations between variables needs to be considered.

Over the last 20 years, an important change has come about in the way bivariate distributions are viewed. No longer does the form of the marginals dominate the picture --- monotonic transformations of the X and Y axes can make these any shape we please. The specifically bivariate espects of the subject enter when we have decided on some standard form for the marginals (e.g., uniform, normal, or exponential).

A feature of the book is the importance given to applications. Some of the topics are as follows. Air, earth, water, climate --- including compositions of rocks, river flows and floods, and height and period of waves. Biology --- including the size and shape of living things, and bivariate quantal response. Medicine --- including competing risks, injury severity in accidents, and the multifactorial model of hereditary disease transmission. Physical and technological sciences --- including destructive testing, selection procedures, and structural safety. Psychology --- including signal detection theory, and the modelling of performance in multiple-choice tests. Reliability --- including failure times, concepts of ageing, and exposure to a common environment (compounding model). Sociology, economics, and business --- including bivariate probit analysis, and handling ordinal-scale variables.

The book is arranged in four parts, with 24 chapters.

Part I. Background.

1. Introduction. 2. Univariate distributions. 3. Overview of methods of constructing bivariate distributions.

Part II. Families of continuous bivariate distributions.

4. The bivariate normal distribution. 5. Distributions expressed as copulas. 6. Simple forms for the bivariate density function. 7. Further distributions related to the bivariate normal. 8. Bivariate distributions constructed by the conditional approach. 9. Bivariate distributions arising in reliability contexts. 10. Miscellaneous bivariate distributions.

Part III. Mostly theory.

11. Measures of correlation. 12. Concepts of stochastic dependence. 13. Rank correlation properties. 14. Diagonal expansion. 15. Variables in common. 16. Overview of generating random variates. 17. Reliability models leading to bivariate distributions. 18. Reliability classes: Concepts of ageing.

Part IV. Mostly applications.

19. Applications of the bivariate normal distribution. 20. Construction of the bivariate Pareto distribution by compounding, with applications. 21. Joint distributions of injury severity: A bivariate normal model. 22. Bivariate generalisations of probit analysis. 23. Bivariate models in signal detection theory. 24. Examples of data.

• This book is included in Library Recommendations for Undergraduate Mathematics (Mathematical Association of America, 1992).
• "What you cannot tell from a list of contents is that it is an extremely good reference book. It is not a mere catalogue. There is much good statistical sense, helpful explanation, convincing motivation and the occasional smile as an opinion is put in a telling way... The authors are to be congratulated for this work of scholarship. I would recommend every statistician to obtain access to it." (M Crowder, writing in Applied Statistics, 42, 1993, p 236.)
• "The purpose of the work seems to be to provide a compendium of the various continuous bivariate distributions that have appeared in print. This end the authors have achieved admirably... What is particularly of interest to the reviewer is the large number of applications that have been referenced with each of the distributions. This makes the book a very worthwhile effort... The index is complete and detailed... Despite the gaps mentioned [statistical inference, and robustness], this book would be an excellent addition to any personal or statistical library... The reviewer found many interesting ideas for further research. This is exactly what a good research monograph is supposed to do." (S Kocherlakota, writing in Biometrics, 47, 1991, pp 783--784.)
• "Filled with facts, references, and examples. The writing style is concise, but scattered throughout are bits of helpful advice, personal opinions, and humorous comments... Such specialised monographs will become indispensable as sources of information, examples, and references for applied statisticians seeking the latest results... The authors are to be congratulated for their efforts." (W I Notz, writing in Technometrics, 34, 1992, p 236.)
• "Generally I enjoyed the style and I think most readers will. There are very few obscurities and very few typographical errors... This is an important scholarly (but not stiff) contribution." (B C Arnold, writing in Mathematical Reviews, 92e:62097, 1992.)
• This fascinating and useful monograph... ...will benefit students as well as researchers in the fields of statistical modelling and characterizations of statistical distributions... It is a valuable piece of work... and is essential for those interested in the applications of distributions." (W Y Wong, writing in Bulletin of the Malaysian Mathematical Society, 14, 1991, pp 55--56.)
• "An excellent reference volume which may serve for many years to come. It will be a welcome addition to any library collection supplementing the older standard texts covering the area." (A Chatterjee, writing in Calcutta Statistical Association Bulletin, 41, 1991, pp 211--212.)

Published January 1990. A4 format. Casebound (i.e., hard covers). xxxii + 412 pages. 1600 references. Index of 900 entries. Price: $98 (Australian currency), $73 (U.S. currency), 44 pounds sterling, $89 (Canadian currency), or the equivalent in any major convertible currency. Please order from: Rumsby Scientific Publishing, P.O. Box Q355, Q.V.B., Sydney, N.S.W. 2000, Australia.

This document consists of a reproduction of Chapter 24 of Continuous Bivariate Distributions, Emphasising Applications, along with the appropriate references. There may be a number of people, particularly teachers of statistics, who will appreciate having the tables of data, without the rest of the book.

• "A nice structure to the presentation [that] should enable the reader to find easily suitable data sets for his various but specific purposes. The wide range of examples covers some interesting but non-standard types of data where quirks of various kinds lead to a need for imagination in developing suitable analysis procedures. In these senses this is a useful and interesting reference text that should command wide use." (A Fielding, writing in The Statistician, 44, 1995, pp 288-289.)

Published September 1993. A5 format. Paperback. iv + 76 pages. Price: $14 (Australian currency), $10 (U.S. currency), 6 pounds sterling, $12 (Canadian currency), or the equivalent in any major convertible currency. Please order from: Rumsby Scientific Publishing, P.O. Box Q355, Q.V.B., Sydney, N.S.W. 2000, Australia.

Statistical methods pervade all fields of engineering. And increasingly the nature of the dependence between variables is of concern. Here are some areas of application covered in this book: Geology --- composition of rocks. Geotechnics --- slope stability, two interdependent forces acting. Reliability --- association between the failure times of two components; changes of failure rate with ageing. Selection procedures --- effectiveness when based on a variable imperfectly correlated with the criterion. Structures --- probability of failure when load and resistance are not independent. Water --- rainfall, river flow, or sea level at two points separated in space or time.

There are 15 chapters.

1. Introduction.
2. Elementary matters.
3. How to invent a bivariate distribution.
4. Reliability: Bivariate distributions arising from models for failures of components.
5. Notions of ageing, and notions of dependence.
6. The conditional approach in modelling bivariate distributions.
7. Compounding: The bivariate Pareto distribution, and variants.
8. Extreme-value models.
9. Compositional data.
10. Distributions expressed as copulas.
11. The bivariate normal distribution.
12. Miscellaneous bivariate distributions.
13. Measuring correlation.
14. Bivariate distributions as part of a simulation.
15. How to understand bivariate data.

• "The final impression of this postgraduate level text is that it deserves a place in every statistical library, and on the bookcase of every engineering statistician, and of anyone modelling continuous bivariate data. A list of apposite adjectives without exaggeration would include comprehensive, elegant, scholarly, readable, structured and applicable... Even at its Rand price this book is a gift." (T T Dunne, writing in South African Statistical Association Newsletter, June 1991, p 20.)
• "User-friendly... The presentation is cheerful and encouraging, the authors obviously enjoying their mastery and anxious to pass on the good news." (Earth Science and Related Information: Selected Annotated Titles, 20(7), 1992.)
• "Anyone working with bivariate data in an engineering context will find this book to be an excellent source of information and a useful reference." (W I Notz, writing in Technometrics, 34, 1992, p 489.)
• "The authors have made an excellent effort in collecting and consolidating the research work... Organised in a very systematic manner... Strongly recommended for researchers in applied sciences." (A Kumar, writing in Opsearch, June 1992, pp 151-152.)
• "An outstanding monograph... Short and adequate examples illustrate the chapters in a large amount of engineering problems... Well-written." (A Mebarki, writing in European Journal of Mechanics, A/Solids, 11, 1992, p 420.)
• "A very smooth text that presents an abundance of information and still allows the reader to choose what is personally important." (K S Booksh, writing in Process Control and Quality, 2, 1992, pp 300-301.)
• "Will undoubtedly prove useful to many individuals seeking information on bivariate distributions." (J C Helton, writing in Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 40, 1993, pp 97-98.)

Published March 1991. A5 format. Paperback. xxii + 346 pages. 700 references. Index of 900 entries. Price: $44 (Australian currency), $32 (U.S. currency), 19 pounds sterling, $40 (Canadian currency), or the equivalent in any major convertible currency. Please order from: Rumsby Scientific Publishing, P.O. Box Q355, Q.V.B., Sydney, N.S.W. 2000, Australia.

From pre-school to postgraduate medicine, multiple-choice tests are a pervasive feature of education. Yet the statistical models of the psychological processes involved in answering the items have been surprisingly primitive. And the contributions of cognitive psychology have generally been too specialised to be of real use in educational practice. This book puts forward an approach, the mismatch theory, which helps overcome these problems. In addition, there is much in the book of value without any particular commitment to mismatch theory --- about item response theory, about empirical studies of variant formats of multiple-choice test, and about the nature of partial information that the subject may have available in attempting an item.

There are 11 chapters.

1. Outline of this book.
2. Item response theory.
3. The mismatch theory.
4. Finite-state theories.
5. Variant formats of multiple-choice test.
6. Answer-until-correct tests: Analysis of some data.
7. Guessing on nonsense items: Analysis of some data.
8. Criticisms of the mismatch theory.
9. Melding the mismatch theory and item response theory.
10. Ideas for the future.
11. Some student assignments.

• "My overall impression of the book was that it represents an important development in psychometrics... Hutchinson shows clear evidence of having read widely and deeply in the test literature: the book is very thorough in its coverage of what is now known and what the controversies and various opinions are about many contentious issues. I would comment the author on his thorough and balanced integration of the literature in every step of the development and empirical testing of his theory." (R W Cooksey, writing in Australian Educational Researcher, 19, 1992, pp 74--76.)
• "The book begins by pointing out that conventional theories of performance in multiple-choice tests are conceptually deficient and goes on to describe the author's theory in detail... I found this an informative and clearly written volume." (D J Hand, writing in Short Book Reviews (International Statistical Institute), 12, 1992, p 2.)
• "Discussions on guessing in MCQ... have never satisfied me by their rigour. Now I know why... The main thesis is very thoroughly explored, and is fairly set within an equally thorough context of competing theories." (M Buckley-Sharp, writing in Medical Education, 26, 1992, p 343.)
• "This is an interesting book which raises important points for those who set, use and analyse multiple-choice tests." (A Kimber, writing in International Journal of Nursing Studies, 30, 1993, pp 549-550.)
• "The book discusses many interesting ideas concerning the philosophy and format of multiple-choice questions, and should be on the bookshelf of any student who is seriously researching the subject." (J H Koeslag, writing in South African Medical Journal, 81, 1992, p 488.)
• "A clearly written, useful contribution." (L Wood, writing in Journal of College Science Teaching, 23, 1994, pp 244-245.)

Published June 1991. A5 format. Paperback. xiv + 266 pages. Price: $33 (Australian currency), $24 (U.S. currency), 14 pounds sterling, $30 (Canadian currency), or the equivalent in any major convertible currency. Please order from: Rumsby Scientific Publishing, P.O. Box Q355, Q.V.B., Sydney, N.S.W. 2000, Australia.

• "A good idea... Ought to be available in any library with a good collection of statistical journals." (C A Toase, writing in Refer, 9(1), 1993, p 8.)

Mistakes occurring in scholarly journals are often corrected by a notice in a later issue of the journal. This book provides a means of discovering whether a given article has had any corrections or addenda to it, or comments on it, published. All the major English-language journals of statistics (numbering 78) for the years 1970--1991 have been searched, and the published corrections, addenda, and comments have been listed, each under the name of the author of the original article and its bibliographical details. There are over 3200 entries, and an index is provided of authors of comments and of coauthors of the original articles.

Those chiefly interested in biometrics and medical statistics will wish to know that among the journals searched were the following: Biometrical Journal, Biometrics, Biometrie-Praximetrie, Journal of the Indian Society of Agricultural Statistics, and Statistics in Medicine.

Engineering statisticians will wish to know that among the journals searched were the following: IEEE Transactions on Reliability; Journal of Quality Technology; Naval Research Logistics; Probabilistic Engineering Mechanics; Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences; Reliability Engineering and System Safety; Reports of Statistical Application Research, Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers; Technometrics.

Published June 1992. A5 format. Paperback. x + 296 pages. Index of coathors and of authors of comments. Price: $55 (Australian currency), $40 (U.S. currency), 25 pounds sterling, $50 (Canadian currency), or the equivalent in any major convertible currency. Please order from: Rumsby Scientific Publishing, P.O. Box Q355, Q.V.B., Sydney, N.S.W. 2000, Australia.

The major English-language journals of statistical psychology for the years 1970--1991 have been searched, and the published corrections, addenda, and comments have been listed, each under the name of the author of the original article and its bibliographical details. There are 276 entries, and an index is provided of authors of comments and of coauthors of the original articles.

The journals searched were: Applied Psychological Measurement; British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology; Educational and Psychological Measurement; Journal of Educational Measurement; Journal of Educational Statistics; Journal of Mathematical Psychology; Language Testing; Multivariate Behavioral Research; Psychometrika.

Published July 1992. A5 format. Paperback booklet of ii + 29 pages. Index of coauthors and of authors of comments. Price: $11 (Australian currency), $9 (U.S. currency), 5 pounds sterling, $10 (Canadian currency), or the equivalent in any major convertible currency. Please order from: Rumsby Scientific Publishing, P.O. Box Q355, Q.V.B., Sydney, N.S.W. 2000, Australia.

T P Hutchinson

phutchin@bunyip.bhs.mq.edu.au

6.Mch.96