The ESRC are in the process of revising their training requirements for
research students, available on
http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ptd/guidelns/postgradguidelines.htm
The following extract strikes me as bizarrely prescriptive and out of date:
* How many of us have made serious use of "measures of asymmetry" except to
note the need to transform? - but power transforms are NOT mentioned;
* How much competence in "graphical methods" is expected? - given that it
has no expanded explanation (I teach a full module in graphics);
* Why "*including* the normal distribution"? - given that the items
following appear to conform to a 1960s statistics course.
[extract]
"Training provision for students in the following areas is compulsory.
Students are expected to acquire proficiency in the use of frequency
distributions, measures of central tendency and dispersion, measures of
asymmetry, and graphical methods. Students should acquire an
understanding of conditional probabilities and independence, including an
understanding of Bayesian theory. Methods of statistical inference
including the normal distribution and its use in statistical tests,
confidence levels, statistical power; two-way contingency tables, trend
tests, correlation coefficients and multivariate regression, should also
be understood."
[end of quote]
Note the *compulsory* aspect; I was contacted by a department alarmed at
what the ESRC might do to dissenters. But from a statistician's point of
view, where are the seriously useful topics?: data cleaning and the
identification and understanding of outliers; data modelling and the need
to interpret results and exceptions; appropriate models and the variety of
error distributions; understanding variation and NOT EXPECTING
UNCOMPREHENDING CONFORMITY.
Comments on the guidelines may be sent to me, but more usefully can be
sent to the ESRC as described in the web pages.
R. Allan Reese Email: [log in to unmask]
Associate Manager Direct voice: +44 1482 466845
Graduate Research Institute Voice messages: +44 1482 466844
Hull University, Hull HU6 7RX, UK. Fax: +44 1482 466846
====================================================================
English is becoming an aggregate of vocabularies only loosely in
connection with each other, which yet have many words in common, so
that there is much danger of accidental ambiguity, and you have to
bear firmly in mind the small clique for whom the author is writing.
Willam Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|