John Bowman has put together two clips based on interviews with R. C. Geary to commemorate the ESRI at 50. The first of these was broadcast on RTE last Sunday (March 21st) and may be played back here.
It is vintage stuff and well worth listening to. He tells a great joke about old age at the end of the clip.
Younger econometricians among you will be amused to learn that the reason he advocated the Geary tau test for autocorrelation as an alternative to the Durbin-Watson was that it saved on computational effort!
The next programme with be on Sunday morning (28th March).
3 replies on “Interviews with R. C. Geary”
Great pointer to the John Bowman show Brendan. I had not came across those podcasts before. Pity one cannot download them as mp3’s to take on the move. Thanks. BOH.
The quotation from Roy Geary I have heard most often is “There is no such thing as the Normal Distribution”. He is supposed to have recomended that it be engraved over the door of every Statistics Department.
No sure if John Bowman is going to ask him that, but it would be great to know in what context he meant what he said. Maybe, overuse of the Normal was a hot button for him.
RG was wonderful to listen to. His comments about ‘keeping active’ by having a current intellectual interest are most appropriate for to-day. John Fleetwood Snr. was also great, specially his comments about “senility starting at 40”. Its not your chronological age that matters: its the state of your mind.
RG’s comment about the ND might have to do with the fact that ND is a virtual reality only within the minds of statisticians. Nature, and life, are a tad different. Caveate enumerator I presume!
I’ll miss to-morrow’s live episode, but will catch it later.
B Peter.