Chance News 64

Quotations

We tolerate the pathologies of quantification — a dry, abstract, mechanical type of knowledge — because the results are so powerful. Numbering things allows tests, comparisons, experiments. Numbers make problems less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually. In science, in business and in the more reasonable sectors of government, numbers have won fair and square.
--Gary Wolf

Writing in The data-driven life, New York Times, 26 April 2010

Submitted by Bill Peterson

Fixing the census

Laura Chihara sent the following to the Isolated Statisticians List

The census will be wrong. We could fix it.
by Jordan Ellenberg, Washington Post, 1 May 2010