The Random Vector: Editorial

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 107

The Random Vector
The Newsletter of the APL Statistics Library
Editor David Eastwood
July 1992

Contents¶

Editorial¶

This issue of Vector coincides with the annual international APL conference, which this year is being held in St Petersburg, and our regular readership will be increased to include delegates to APL92 who are being given copies of Vector. Alan Sykes, the ASL Deputy Chairman, will be one of the delegates from the UK and will be giving a presentation about ASL at the conference. Alan will be basing his presentation on areas of application for the ASL software, in Education, Research and Commerce and will be discussing some of the future plans for ASL. We will seek to print his presentation in a future issue but in the meantime I hope that it proves an interesting introduction to the ASL software for delegates at APL92 and in particular our Russian colleagues.

We have, at long last, begun distributing copies of ASL software and by the time this issue of Vector appears we will have added the Basic Statistics shelf to our release set. Order forms are available from the BAA or from members of the ASL Management Committee. It has been interesting to note that a substantial proportion of our initial ‘orders’ for ASL software has been from overseas APLers and we hope to encourage our overseas colleagues to contribute to ASL both in terms of additions to those shelves we have released and also by contributing to new shelves for ASL. Of necessity the initial ASL offerings have come from a relatively small nucleus of UK-based statisticians. Our conference last autumn included contributions from a number of new faces, and I shall be publishing some of their work in Random Vector, starting with Peter Hingley’s article in this issue. At that conference, ideas for a number of new shelves for ASL were discussed (see Vector 8.3, January 1992), and as the first phase of the ASL project is completed we are keen to turn some of these suggestions for new shelves into tangible offerings.

At the time of writing this copy, the ASL Management Committee has not settled on a venue for the next ASL conference, which means that we will probably miss the traditional autumn slot we have booked for our conferences in years gone by. We would be interested in canvassing views from readers as to whether we should alter the format of the ASL conference from a three-day residential conference to a one-day conference (say in London), thereby possibly allowing a wider attendance.

As a final point I would like to record our thanks to John Searle for the work he has put into the ASL project over the last few years. John is being posted overseas by his employer and has had to stand down from both the BAA Committee and the ASL team. Pending the results of the current BAA Committee elections, we would envisage the incoming Projects Officer of the BAA joining the ASL Management Committee.

As usual, I give contact addresses for the ASL Management Committee: