I think that there is some misunderstanding. Statistics, in the original
sense of the word (probably coined by Sir John Sinclair in the last
century), meant 'information useful to the state'. This is the sense in
which the census is statistics.
The other use of statistics, the maths, research design, science sense,
is what I think William Chambers (old hippie) has in mind. It is the
sense in which I understood the word when I signed up to radstats, too,
and it took me a while to realise that the stats that the rads are rad
about are definition 1 statistics. While it is useful for the British to
have a forum in which to turn a critical eye on statistics (1) and their
uses by the British state, it leaves people like William and myself still
in search of a forum in which we might air ideas about rad stats (2).
I admit that it is laziness, rather than an interest in British politics,
that has kept me from signing off, combined with the fact that radstats
doesn't overburden my inbox.
So all I can do is
a) extend my sympathies,
b) mention that edstat-l is often a good forum for discussions of the
what-are-we-all-at-anyway sort (and has a wonderfully diverse membership)
and
c) that making your students read TS Eliot will not make them better
people - you need to fill them with aspirations, dammit. I would throw at
them, instead, the article from about 4 years ago in Sci Am on why the
church wanted to silence Galileo. I would prefer to hold out the
revolutionary as a role model than that old curmudgeon hiding behind his
initials like a bank manager...
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
_/_/_/ _/_/ _/_/_/ _/ Ronan M Conroy ([log in to unmask])
_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ Lecturer in Biostatistics
_/_/_/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ Royal College of Surgeons
_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ Dublin 2, Ireland
_/ _/ _/_/ _/_/_/ _/ +353 1 402 2431 (fax 2329)
http://www.rcsi.ie
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
I'm not an outlier; I just haven't found my distribution yet
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