Going back to the mathematics - boring old quadratics and stuff - I find that statistics is far more important in everyday Technical Services work than any of the stuff I learned back in basics. Given the importance of statistics in reliability analysis, I often wonder why we were taught only the most rudimentary statistics in our engineering training - a PhD student of Linguistics knows more about statistics than the typical engineer. My first year economics started with a book called "Elementary Statistics for the Social Sciences" The first eight chapters were fairly easy reading, the remaining twelve took me to places I'd never been before. Then came Advanced Statistics! I find that I use all that stuff more than any of the mathematics that I learned in engineering studies.
I'd like to see more statistics included into the secondary school syllabus - its used in almost every field of endeavour today but is second only to sociology in the list of the most misunderstood subjects.
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Through difficulties to the cinema