Hiccupps

I was watching Stuart Hunter's  What is Design of Experiments?  ( 1 ,  2 ) lectures this morning. They were made in the mid-60s for Westinghouse Electric and, after a demonstration of the exploration of a space to find the interesting location guided by a cycle of experiment, data collection and analysis, the final sentences run like this: The purpose of statistics is to analyse the data in such a way as to lead to new conjecture ... the data are expensive and the data are variable and we don't know the true response function ... All of this is part and parcel of the arts of statistics.  But they're really not very valuable unless we can call upon the experience that people such as [you, the audience] have which comes only from working in an industrial environment. And our real objective is to wed together your experience with the practical uses of engineering and production and development and research with the arts of statistics so that you will be more ...

I'm wary of drawing parallels between managing and parenting, of analogising my team with my children (in a forum that I know some of them read, at least) but I find the proposition in “Helping” Versus “Being a Helper”: Invoking the Self to Increase Helping in Young Children   very appealing. Essentially it suggests that subtle differences in language used to describe behaviour can have an effect on observed behaviour. In the paper, the authors run experiments where they ask children to "be a helper" or "to help" and find that the former results in significantly more helpful actions. Even when the children are doing something else that they regard as enjoyable, they're more likely to stop it and help if they were asked to be a helper. There's similar research in adults linking the noun version of a behaviour more strongly to a sense of self than the verb version, both positively and negatively. For instance people are less likely to cheat when aske...