Guernsey McPearson's Statistical Menagerie

(As seen in ISCB News)

Frequency Freak
" Did you randomise? OK: so far so good. Now what would you have said if the third value from the left had been the second from the right. Hold on a minute. Are you sure you haven't looked at this question before?" Favourite reading: Casino Royale.

Bog Bayesian
" All you need is Bayes. It's the answer to everything. If only Adolf and Neville could have exchanged utility functions at Munich we could have saved the world a whole lot of bother round about the middle of the last century." Favourite reading: The Hindsight Saga.

Data Explorer
"Wow! It's all too beautiful. I mean, Man, the colours, the shapes and those rotations and dig those projections. It's like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds meets the Walrus and the Eggman." Favourite reading: The Glass Bead Game.

Robustnik
"These are the three laws of robustics. First law: get a computer. second law: get a bigger computer. Third law: what you really need is a much bigger computer." Favourite reading: I Robust, by Isaac Azimuth.

Third Degree Bayesian " Look there is no way I am letting you out of this room until you give me a prior. Have you heard of the jackknife? Yes? Well this is a thumbscrew." Favourite reading: Justine.

Subset Surfer
"OK, so the egg's rotten but parts of it are excellent." Favourite reading: Europe on $5 a day.

Gibbs Sampler
" First catch your likelihood. Take one Super Cray, a linear congruential generator, any prior you like and if the whole thing isn't done to a turn within three days my name's not Gary Rhodes." Favourite reading: Mrs Beaton

Complete Consultant
" First we test the randomisation. Then we look for homogeneity between centres. Then we run the Shapiro-Wilks over it and if you like we'll throw in a Kolmogorov-Smirnov at no extra cost. Then we test for homogeneity of variance and look for outliers and even if that's OK we'll do a Mann-Whitney anyway just to be on the safe side. All this will be fully documented in a report with our company logo on every page." Favourite reading: The Whole Earth Catalogue.

Mr Mathematics
"I just don't see the problem. All you have to do is define the null hypothesis precisely, define the alternative hypothesis precisely, choose your type I error rate and use the most powerful test." Favourite reading: Brave New World.

Bootstrapper
"Look, this is the way to build the football team of the future. You choose a player. You put him back in the pool. You choose again. Do that long enough and if you don't eventually get a team which has Becks in it three times my name's not Sven Goran Erikson." Favourite reading: Bradley's Shakksperrr.

Mr Megabyte
"Just you wait till virtual reality hits the statistical computing scene. The only thing holding us back is that we have been mentally crippled by having been brought up to use pencil and paper. In the third millennium we will all have statistical processing chips implanted behind our ears. Books are a thing of the past." Favourite video: Farenheit 451.

Unconditional Inferencer
"It's true that all the engines are on fire and the captain has just died from a heart attack but there's no need to worry because averaged over all flights air travel is very safe." Favourite reading: Grimm's Fairy Tales

Absolute Abacus
"Of course, no real statistical techniques worth talking about have been discovered since 1962. I grant you that in the occasional difficult case you might wish to use an electronic computer but not everyone wants to travel down to Manchester each time they need to calculate something." Favourite reading: The Anglo Saxon Chronicle.

Tabulator
"What you really need to do is understand the field of application thoroughly, become familiar with every data point, check each one against original records and present the whole thing with some simple graphs and tables. All this probability rubbish is just a conspiracy got up by a bunch of mathematicians who don't even understand the first thing about data." Favourite reading: The Little House on the Prairie.

Mrs P
"Now now. Nursey won't go away until you've filled this bottle. And if you don't produce something soon you'll never grow up to get published. Now, would a nice cup of t help?" Favourite reading: Winnie the Pooh.

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