Introduction

Abstract

I had a long career as a research statistician, starting in the early fifties as a student and continuing till today. My first job was in 1954, at the Research Council of Israel, to assist an agronomist, Mr. N. Landau, in analyzing data on the effect of number of light hours on the yield of plants. This job continued for 2 years, doing mainly Analysis of Variance and Regression Analysis. I learned these methodologies from the books of Hald (Statistical Theory with Engineering Applications, Wiley, New York, 1952), and later from the books of Snedecor and Cochran (1980) and Fisher (1925). In 1956 I assisted Dr. M. Neeman, an organic chemist, in analyzing the effects of various synergists to DDT that he developed, on the mortality of mosquitoes. For this purpose the book of Finney (1978) on the methodology of bioassays was of great help. In 1956, I worked also with a physicist, Dr. J. Frenkel, in analyzing data from wind turbines, on the amount of electric energy that can be extracted at various sites in Israel. Here we used physical models converting the wind speed to amount of electric energy. A joint paper on this subject was published in 1958, at the Journal of the Research Council of Israel.