-----Original Message-----
From: JIM SLATTERY [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, December 27, 2000 8:50 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Ray,
A purely factual answer to your final question, to be added to whatever
highly selected sample you elicit, is yes, I find what you are saying
difficult to understand.
Disturbing? Only in as much as it seems to run somewhat contrary to what
I perceive as common sense. This being that 'statistics' is what
statisticians do, and this has changed over time and is now taken to
include any mathematical description with a random variable in it.
Clearly this is a wider area of application than Social Sciences.
However, I agree totally with your call for statisticians who happen to
be working in any field of science, social or otherwise, to get deeply
involved in creating sensible definitions. There are far too many
complex papers published discussing the solutions of trivially
inadequate models.
Jim Slattery.
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