In Response/ Puzzle

SignificanceVolume 17, Issue 3 p. 46-47 In ResponseFree Access In response/ Puzzle First published: 27 May 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1740-9713.01408AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Correction Marx In Simon Raper's wonderful article, “Turning points: Pearson and the parameter” (June 2019, pages 22–25), the author writes: “Christened Carl Pearson, he later changed his first name to Karl in a rush of enthusiasm for German socialism and the ideas of Karl Marx.” The influence of Marx on Pearson's switch from a “C” to a “K” spelling of his first name is recounted in a number of books, and even features in Pearson's entry on the Japanese-language version of Wikipedia (bit.ly/3eydYod). But in the 2004 book Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age, author Theodore M. Porter argues that the story is not all that it seems. He writes: “A purely speculative suggestion by J. B. S. Haldane, in a centenary address on Pearson, introduced into the scholarship the idea that Pearson's switch in 1880 from Carl to Karl in the spelling of his first name may have owed to his admiration for Marx. This is now sometimes repeated as a fact, but there is no contemporary evidence for the claim, and there are reasons to doubt it.” More details are given in a footnote on page 78 of Porter's book.1 It is also pointed out in Porter's 2001 review of David Salsburg's book, The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century.2 Yusuke Ono Ehime, Japan Simon Raper replies: Thank you, Yusuke Ono. I am also reading Professor Porter's excellent book on Pearson and had just notified the editor of the error when he showed me your letter. My source was a comment in The Lady Tasting Tea, which I assume Porter also spotted. Glad these errors get corrected in the end! A protest I am writing to protest the proposals described in the article “UCL inquiry: Galton, Pearson names should be removed”, which appeared in the April 2020 issue (page 4). Removing the names of these statistics pioneers from buildings and lecture halls because they had ties to eugenics fits in with the currently popular if-you-ever-said-something-we-don't-like-you-should-lose-your-career movement. These pioneers were men of their times. How shameful it is that statisticians had the gall to want to even exist in society as it was back then. How shameful it was that people of their times didn't have the enlightenment of today. Progress and enlightenment are necessarily evolutionary and sometimes arrived at through pain. It is necessary that this be recognised. Finally, I propose that each of the unnamed individuals on the University College London commission that came up with the recommendation should never have anything named after them because they violate the sense of morality I have at this moment, and in fact that University College London close because there were once faculty there with the title “professor of eugenics”. Mick Norton, PhD Via email On target? I have recently had cause to read the article by Shaw and Shaw on “The flying bomb and the actuary” (October 2019, pages 12–17) and, while I understand that R. D. Clarke in 1946 was perhaps justified in making his first analysis, and while I acknowledge that the Shaws deserve their award [the 2019 Statistical Excellence Award for Early-Career Writing – Ed.] for the quality of their paper, I beg to question whether the time devoted to this analysis is justified since the German technicians could not control the flying bomb with the precision necessary to achieve cluster bombing. In 1944 (I am a contemporary of grandfather Shaw), when we watched the “doodle-bugs” (as they were called) flying over the Sussex countryside towards London, the general opinion was that they crashed and detonated in random fashion when they ran out of fuel. The Wikipedia article on the V-1 flying bomb explains, however, that this was not the case, and that they were indeed designed to reach certain predetermined targets (bit.ly/2Vq3Fv7). After the direction of flight had been chosen before launching, an odometer was preset to determine when the target had been reached, but it cannot have been easy to set these parameters with the required accuracy. The Wikipedia article says explicitly that only area bombing was possible and that the accuracy was initially a circle with a diameter of 31 km, and that this was later reduced to 11 km. It is thus clear that a study of the distribution of hits in squares with areas of 0.25 km2 lacks relevance to the actual situation and that such an analysis is of little merit, indicating only the relevance of the Poisson distribution rather than the skill of the German technicians. I have always maintained that a statistician is a person who does not waste time making unnecessary and meaningless statistical calculations. J. Anthony Bristow Tullinge, Sweden Liam P. Shaw and Luke F. Shaw reply: The enduring appeal of Clarke's analysis is that it reaches an important conclusion using basic statistics. Military intelligence were well aware that V-1s could not be targeted precisely: in Most Secret War, R. V. Jones describes how decoded transmissions from 1943 had given the British “a ringside seat at all the trials of the flying bomb”.3 Yet Clarke's table has remained in textbooks because it shows the power of the Poisson distribution; we were motivated to reproduce it independently. We welcome comments from readers – please email significance@rss.org.uk. Contributions should be no more than 300 words in length and clearly marked “for publication”. Published responses may be edited to fit. Clarke himself was inspired by past examples. His table goes from zero hits to “5 and over”. He would surely have known Bortkiewicz's famous 1898 analysis showing that deaths from horse-kicks in the Prussian Army were Poisson distributed: Bortkiewicz's table has precisely the same categories.4 More sophisticated computational methods were available to Clarke. The late Freeman Dyson – another contemporary of our grandfather – worked in the Royal Air Force Bomber Command during World War II. He was incisive about the deficiencies he saw in Clarke's analysis when he emailed us last year: Why did [Clarke] not use a Hollerith card-punch machine to analyse the data? In those days we did not have electronic computers to do our arithmetic, but we had Hollerith machines which were highly efficient for handling big data. He only needed to punch one card for each impact, giving information about place and time, and then the machine would read through the whole deck of cards in a few minutes and answer any questions about the statistics. Sadly, we do not have a Hollerith machine to experiment with! But Clarke's example continues to fascinate. Like other great statistical examples, in the words of Bortkiewicz about his own case study: “Die Kongruenz der Theorie mit der Erfahrung läßt … nichts zu wünschen übrig.” [“The congruence of theory with experience leaves nothing to be desired.”] References 1Porter, T. (2004) Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Google Scholar 2Porter, T. (2001) Statistical tales. American Scientist, 89(5), 469– 470. Google Scholar 3Jones, R. V. (1978) Most Secret War. London: Hamilton. Google Scholar 4Bortkiewicz, L. (1898) Das Gesetz der kleinen Zahlen. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner. Google Scholar Wiley Prize Crossword: A Foggy Day by Sam Buttrey Send your solution to: Significance Crossword Competition, Royal Statistical Society, 12 Errol Street, London, EC1Y 8LX (photocopies are acceptable), or scan it and email to signiflcance@rss.org.uk. The competition is sponsored by Wiley (wiley.com/statistics), who will give the winner £100 or $150 to spend on Wiley books. Closing date: 9 July 2020. The winner will be chosen randomly from the correct entries, and the solution published in a future issue. Across 8 Sahara begins before being really dry (4) 9 Bones broken, leaning on edge of bureau (5) 10 State a broken-down hut is found on coast's center … (4) 11 … but I am a mountain dweller (4) 12 Rocks said to be ever rotating about north pole, from sci-fi writer (5, 5) 13 Damp body at disease center (3) 14 It comes back to a Nicaraguan Contra (4) 15 Paper for every image (4) 16 Bouillabaisse, perhaps, moistens on counter (4) 18 Count is, oddly, cleanest American (6) 19 Sport with nets in disarray (6) 21 A bit of red-auburn paint (4) 23 Team of the French chasing, yes, Spanish (4) 25 Sadly, now I become alcoholic (4) 27 Noxious German waters? (3) 28 Disturbing Goya visual from the old country (10) 29 Arab leader is even seemlier (4) 30 Lake where sailor goes north (4) 31 It's better with cooked rice after noon (5) 32 That guy, the Spanish jerk (4) Down 1 Gee whiz, two articles about Greek water (6) 2 Fix irons I've broken (8) 3 Place to find spirits? Yes, yes, in Europe (5) 4 Modern times overcome last bit of reluctance in relative, now naked (6) 5 Times, perhaps, spawn peer behaving badly (9) 6 Compulsion by horribly rude Nazi group (6) 7 Relative trapped in disturbed rest by hecklers (8) 17 Italian executed Greek letters and therefore acquires heart of medical facility (9) 18 Short path to a Hindu starting to embrace British holiday (8) 20 Capital is wasted when idle (3, 5) 22 Yelling in a scary way? (6) 24 Gizmo to remove sin? (6) 26 Caught and sickened after onset of nausea (6) 27 Hidden in an outbuilding is one Scots child (5) Solution to April issue's crossword: Vaguely Familiar by Sam Buttrey At each of the seven symbols, the words BELL RING should be added, with each word used just once in either the Across or Down solution. BELL RING = ring a bell = vaguely familiar. Across: 1 anag COCAINE; 5 S(KEPT)IC; 9 anag YES GRINS; 10 2 defs; 11 E + (AGE)R; 12 anag CASE + HIRING; 13 anag TRACING HER; 14 EMI(G)RATES; 16 anag MEAD + R; 18 BEL(LA)GIUM – UM + O; 20 anag LOST AGAIN; 23 anag SNORE ILL BE; 25 anag MIRED GROWN; 26 anag RUSES; 27 A + DO; 28 anag MULLED over BB; 29 DE(S)ISTS; 30 rev PET + IDLY. Down: 1 rev IS in anag CLOSET – T; 2 anag HES MILLING with BE; 3 anag RETAINS; 4 CAM(PB)EL + L; 5 anag ICLOSE + SMS; 6 anag A RED ELM; 7 THIGH – H + T; 8 ANTEBELLUM – ANT + CER; 15 anag UNIT + (a)SIANS; 17 ENG + LOOM + ED; 18 2 defs; 19 anag BOOSTS + I; 21 anag DUPED DAD – D; 22 anag MILD GRAINY; 24 anag SENT GIRL; 25 anag WEB TROLL. Winner: Jonathan Wells, via email Volume17, Issue3June 2020Pages 46-47 ReferencesRelatedInformation