1. INTRODUCTION. It has become a truism, at least among statisticians, that while statistics is a mathematical science, it is not a subfield of mathematics. We even have apho-risms to express some ways in which our science differs from mathematics. George Box: " All models are wrong, but some are useful. " George Cobb: " In mathematics, context obscures structure. In data analysis, context prov...

A popular approach to significance testing proposes to decide whether the given hypothesized statistical model is likely to be true (or false). Statistical decision theory provides a basis for this approach by requiring every significance test to make a decision about the truth of the hypothesis/model under consideration. Unfortunately, many interesting and useful models are obviously false (th...

account of the several works that came from Digby's pen and, if one might judge from his Private Memoirs, his over-active brain. But even in this involved field of authorship one fails to find a solution to the strange uncertainties and contradictions that made Digby, Digby. Even the "powder of sympathy" in all its implications affords no explanation. Nevertheless, Sir Kenelm could not well be ...

Environmental philosophers spend considerable time drawing the divide between humans and the rest of nature. Some argue that humans and our actions are unnatural. Others allow that humans are natural, but maintain that humans are nevertheless distinct. The motivation for distinguishing humans from the rest of nature is the desire to determine what aspects of the environment should be preserved....

The Vaccine and Related Biologic Products Advisory Committee meets at least once a year to decide the composition of the influenza vaccine in the U.S. Past evidence suggests that the Committee could use a more systematic approach to incorporate observed information and to quantify the risks associated with different options. There are two key tradeoffs involved in this decision. One, if the Com...

Standard models of choice assume that the weight given to information from different sources depends exclusively on its diagnosticity. In this paper we study whether the same piece of information is weighted more heavily simply because it was directly experienced rather than merely observed. We investigate this possibility by conducting repeated game experiments in which groups of players are r...

On the basis of the half-Cauchy distribution, we propose the called beta-half-Cauchy distribution for modeling lifetime data. Various explicit expressions for its moments, generating and quantile functions, mean deviations, and density function of the order statistics and their moments are provided. The parameters of the new model are estimated by maximum likelihood, and the observed informatio...