Cook-Book Statistics

In my post yesterday I wrote about a remark made by the well-known statistician, Michael Stephens. Here's another interesting comment from him, referring to his departure from post-World War II England for the U.S.:

"Out of the blue came an offer from Case Institute of Technology (now Case-Western Reserve) and off I went to Cleveland. Case had a huge Univac computer, all whirling tapes and flashing lights, and I decided to learn programming. Next to computing was Statistics, so I thought I would learn some of that too. I took some cook-book classes, and thought I was learning statistics. For the life of me, I can't understand why I didn’t wonder why the ratio of this to that would be called F and looked up on page 376."

(Michael Stephens, in A Conversation With Michael A. Stephens, by Richard Lockhart)

Seems I'm not alone when it comes to cook-book courses (and here)!

© 2011, David E. Giles