The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century by David Salsburg

and Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You're Doing It by Howard S. Becker

In the past few years, the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) has gone through an educational super-audit by the organizations that accredit colleges. If a college loses accreditation, its future prospects are zippo, as shown by the demise of my alma mater New College earlier this year. (New College lost accreditation finally due to sloppy bookkeeping -- a no-no when you're working with Federal student loans. The doors closed within a few months.) Anyway, it's a big deal. We passed, but there are successive stages of re-review in which they check to see if we're doing the stuff they recommended. This has resulted in pressure on the school to prove educational effectiveness through data collection and analysis. This I tell you to explain part of my interest in these two books. Along with my colleagues -- I don't think there's a one of us on the faculty who has any real training in this kind of research -- I am wobbling through attempts to "collect data" and do something with it.

The Becker, which Galen got me for Christmas, would have been the first book I read this year had I not bogged down in the chapter on logic and thought "I'll just go back and re-read that before trying to review it." Becker does a great job of demystifying the process of such research, starting with taking a look at the imagery that is guiding your questions -- the assumptions you're making that you might not be aware of. The Salsburg sort of provides the motivation for going to the trouble, by telling the history of statistics and thus showing what a logical mess and bunch of deadends research could get into without them. There's also plenty of "gossip" about academic rivalries and skullduggery in which a "grand old man" of statistics fends off new ideas through his control of the pioneering Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Just in case you thought it wasn't a subject with much room for drama...

These would doubtless be more interesting remarks if I remembered more about the books in question. But I did read them. And I'll probably go back to them in the future when it's not summer and I'm not blocking all thought of "freshperson retention figures" from my mind.