in reply to Re: (contest) Help analyze PM reputation statistics
in thread (contest) Help analyze PM reputation statistics

Heh, nice link. :-) Its particularly amusing to me because that second quote is reduced version of a quote I know very well. A friend of my family introduced me to computers at a very young age (or it was for the time, not nowadays of course) as part of his post-doc work in using computers as an educational medium. He used to a have a line printer terminal in his office (where I got my one and only chance to mess with APL), on the wall in front of it he had a print out that said (figlet style)

If you torture the data long enough it will confess to anything

Hes been a professor of psychology focusing on statistical methods of representing data for a long time and I suppose that quote was something important to him. All i can say is its a line I'll never forget.


---
demerphq

    First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
    -- Gandhi

    Flux8


  • Comment on Re^2: (contest) Help analyze PM reputation statistics

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Re^3: (contest) Help analyze PM reputation statistics
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Sep 15, 2004 at 04:25 UTC

    That is a great quote. I took some time too look, and it appears to originate from Ronald Coase, a British economist. So now you have an attribution. :-)

    Makeshifts last the longest.