International Journal of Epidemiology 2003;32:694-698
© International Epidemiological Association 2003
Reprints and Reflections |
Commentary: Worthwhile polemic or transatlantic storm-in-a-teacup?
University College London, Department of Statistical Science, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. E-mail: mervyn@stats.ucl.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Berkson’s quotation of Karl Pearson were true for all applications of the higher statistics? Readers will know from experience that it is not, and that journals such as this must keep alive the search for that elusive common sense—by letting voices from the past speak again and pro-voke responses that may help reduce the number of misapplications.
From the perspective of Berkson’s 1942 paper1 we can look both ways—backward to the heady ferment of ideas in the four decades since Pearson pushed out the statistics boat into uncharted biological waters, or forward to the decades in which statistical thinking was heavily influenced by war-time demand for industrial utility and operational effectiveness, and then to the later decades in which not so much thinking as practice was free to blossom with the speed of electronic computation.
 |
1901–1942: Formative years |
|---|
Berkson’s paper is a polemic that takes lively
|
Salvo of the 100-faced die ... |
|---|
|
... of the problem of middling P-values for tests of Poissonianity |
|---|
|
... of ‘Student’ and his haemocytometer |
|---|
|
... of fetal sex |
|---|
|
... of hospital mortality rates |
|---|
|
Salvo six and Return Fire: The Drosophila eye-facets |
|---|
|
1943–2003: Sixty years of schism and realignment |
|---|
|
A personal footnote |
|---|
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
 |
|
  G. Davey Smith Uncertainty and significance Int. J. Epidemiol., October 1, 2003; 32(5): 683 - 683. [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
J. Sterne Commentary: Null points--has interpretation of significance tests improved? Int. J. Epidemiol., October 1, 2003; 32(5): 693 - 694. [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|