Massey University
CAST was written by Doug Stirling, while employed at Massey University in
Palmerston North, New Zealand. Massey University has given considerable support
both directly through grants from its Fund for Innovation and Excellence
in Teaching and indirectly with encouragement at all levels. CAST could
not have existed without Massey's support.
Many colleagues at Massey have also helped with discussions about how to
approach topics in CAST. They used CAST in their teaching and have given valuable
feedback. In particular, I would like to thank Greg Arnold, Howard Edwards,
Jeff Hunter, Graham Wood, Geoff Jones and Alasdair Noble for their contributions
to CAST and its predecessors.
Other personal help
Several friends and colleagues from outside Massey University have also had
a major influence in the approach taken by CAST.
In particular, I wrote an introductory statistics textbook with David Griffiths
(University of Wollongong, Australia) and Larry Weldon (Simon Fraser University,
Canada) and our discussions about the textbook also had a great influence
on the approach to teaching statistics in CAST.
More recently, Roger Stern from the Statistical Services Centre at the University
of Reading has been an enthusiastic supporter of CAST who has also been full
of suggestions for improvements. Not only has Roger contributed ideas directly
to topics in CAST, but he has also been a source of contacts for ongoing funding.
External funding
Several bodies outside Massey University have provided financial support
for various stages in the development of CAST.
- International Rice Research Organisation
- IRRI provided early funding for development of a customised version of CAST
with biological examples that later became the Biometric version of CAST.
- Rockefeller Foundation
- Parin Kurji from the University of Nairobi in Kenya is passionate about teaching
statistics in Africa. Through her efforts, we obtained Rockefeller Foundation
funding to start development of a version of CAST with African data for use in
teaching agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. Some improvements for this version
of CAST were also applied to the general versions.
- UK Met Office and Department for International Development
- Both the UK Met Office and the UK Department for International Development
have provided funding to help teach basic statistics to climatologists in Africa.
Most of this work is being done by staff at the Statistical Services Centre of
the University of Reading, but both agencies have also contributed towards development
of a customised version of CAST using African climatic data. Several improvements
from this project have also been applied to the general versions of CAST.
- Nestlé
- The CAST material about design of industrial experiments was developed with
funding from Nestlé. Ahmed Bousbaine from Nestlé Research Centre
helped considerably with the approach and level of that material.
- World Food Programme
- The World Food Programme funded development of the first chapter of the Official
Statistics e-book about Data Presentation.
- RUFORUM
- The Regional Universities Forum in East Africa provided funding to develop the e-book about the design and analysis of experiments in agriculture and biology.