A famous saying goes as "The world does not lack beauty but lacks the eyes to discover the beauty". Perhaps, both the eyes to find beauty and the mind to sense the random world need to be trained.
Dr. Bradley Efron at Stanford University came to Iowa State three days ago for a biostatistics conference as well as Lawrence Baker lectures at our university. He gave a talk titled as "Learning the experiences from others" in which he provided several examples of empirical Bayesian ideas utilized in practical problems. His talk motivated me to find more of his works including this article.
This article points out that previously people believe science should be exact. Such as how exact time goes by; how sure the light speed is, etc. However, years ago, science began to unveil another side of its face - the science of randomness, and it is played nearly everywhere. Statistics repeats its principles all the time, such as the rainfall example at Palo Alto given in the article in the first paragraph. Thus, statistics study should not be restricted to classrooms or examples in books. It should be widely noticed and studied. People who study statistics should also open their mind.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
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