[from Joel Judd 930507]
Greg, Rick others waiting with baited breath:
Rather than just disappear until forming a response I'll
acknowledge the queries and THEN disappear to dig up some
thoughts I had put down about this some time ago. This will
hopefully avoid continued "disparates" as they say in Spanish
on my part (comments off the top of my head. As I said before,
this type of discussion previously ended with a sort of "it's
not 'scientific'" conclusion but I'm willing to discuss it on
the net if others are.
On an unrelated note: anyone remember having read _The Numbers
Game_ by Toch from the early seventies? A little long with
some dated examples, but an intriguing thesis about how the
fixation on numbers and statistics has influenced people in
society. One piece of trivia: Toch claims that the word
"statistics" was borrowed by an English mathematician from the
German for his book, and he did so, and I paraphrase, because
a new word would probably get people's attention(!). Lucky us.
Joel
jjuud@inter.ui.clu.edu