William L. Harkness

William L. Harkness
Professor of Statistics
Ph.D.: Michigan State University, 1959

Dr. Harkness's interests are in the theory and application of loglinear models and logistic regression. Although the development of statistical methods for analyzing categorical data has progressed rapidly and broadly over the past twenty to twenty-five years, many researchers in a variety of other disciplines are still quite unfamiliar with the power and usefulness of this methodology. Dr. Harkness is particularly interested in problems related to assessing goodness-of-fit in situations where the data is sparse or there are other violations of assumptions underlying the models. In addition, he is interested in disseminating new developments computationally (for example, use of polytomous logistic regression procedures).

A secondary, but long-standing, research interest is in moment problems, especially growth rates of moment sequences. With past Ph.D. students, he has looked at the limiting behavior of sequences of iterated transforms of distribution functions depending on ratios of Nth moments of nonnegative random variables.

In the last several years Dr. Harkness has actively been exploring alternative teaching strategies for elementary courses in statistics, including the use of `mini-research' projects and `expert systems'. He has also incorporated non-traditional motivational methods to enhance student participation and interest.

Dr. Harkness was head of the Department of Statistics from 1970 to 1987. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, American Statistical Association, and the International Statistical Institute.

Representative Publications

Harkness, W. L., and P. A. Rubba. 1993. An examination of pre-service and in-service secondary science teachers' beliefs about science-technology-society (STS) interactions. Science Education.

Harkness, W. L., M. Tomasko, J. Finley, and E. Rajotte. 1993. A sequential sampling scheme for detecting the presence of trachael mite (acerapis woodi) infestations in honey bee (apis mellifera L) colonies. PSU Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 871.

Harkness, W. L., T. Morrell, and R. Yahner. 1991. Factors affecting detection of great horned owls by using broadcast vocalizations. Wildlife Society Bulletin 19:481-488.

Harkness, W. L. 1980. Growth rates of moment sequences. Stanford University, Department of Statistics, Technical Report, No. 289.

Harkness, W. L. 1972. On a certain class of limit distributions. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 48:1954-1959.