25 lines
1.0 KiB
Plaintext
25 lines
1.0 KiB
Plaintext
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From: JRP1@phoenix.cambridge.ac.uk (Jonathan R. Partington)
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Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
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Subject: How to be a Statistician (believed to be true)
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Date: 12 Aug 90 10:30:03 GMT
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A friend of a friend, who is a probabilist, made a bet that he
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could write a publishable paper in Statistics within 24 hours.
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He did this as follows: first of all he went to his filing
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cabinet and found some unfinished work on probability
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distributions which he'd given up because he couldn't prove
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anything. He then invented a 'cover story' involving sheep and
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fruit trees, and wrote a Statistical paper on the subject,
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including the results he couldn't prove together with 'heuristic'
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arguments, i.e. hand-waving. He then sent it to a well-known
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journal which shall remain nameless but for the sake of argument
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we'll call Biometrika.
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Some time after he received an acceptance letter for his
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content-free paper, with a comment from the editor that he hoped
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the author would revise the paper to make it less theoretical. So
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he had won his bet.
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