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J.P. Shaffer 51with enough full-time years to be eligible, I decided to use the sabbatical year(1973–74) to improve my statistics background. I chose the University of California(UC) Berkeley, because I had been using a book, “Testing StatisticalHypotheses,” by E.L. Lehmann, as background for my statistics teaching inthe Psychology Department.As life sometimes evolves, during that year Erich Lehmann and I decided tomarry. After a one-year return to Kansas, and a one-year visiting appointmentat UC Davis in the Mathematics Department, I joined the Statistics Departmentat UC Berkeley as a lecturer, later becoming a senior lecturer. AlthoughIhadnodegreeinstatistics,myextensiveconsultinginthePsychologyDepartmentat Kansas gave me greater applied statistical experience than mostof the Statistics faculty at UC Berkeley, and I supervised a Berkeley StatisticsDepartment consulting service for many years. We probably had about 2000clients during that time, mostly graduate students, but some faculty, retiredfaculty, and even outside individuals of all kinds. One of the most interestingand amusing contacts was with a graduate student studying caterpillar behavior.The challenge for us was that when groups of caterpillars were beingobserved, it was not possible to identify the individuals, so counts of behaviorscouldn’t be allocated individually. He came to many of our meetings, and atthe end invited all of us to a dinner he was giving in his large co-op, giving usa very fancy French menu. Can you guess what kind of a menu it was? Muchto my regret, I didn’t have the courage to go, and none of the consultantsattended either.During this early time in the department, I was also the editor of JEBS(see above) for four years, and taught two courses in the Graduate School ofEducation at Berkeley.It’s interesting to compare teaching statistics to psychologists and teachingit to statisticians. Of course the level of mathematical background was fargreater among the statisticians. But the psychologists had one feature thatstatisticians, especially those going into applied work, would find valuable.Psychological research is difficult because the nature of the field makes it possibleto have many alternative explanations, and methods often have defectsthat are not immediately obvious. As an example of the latter, I once read astudy that purported to show that if shocks were given to a subject while aparticular word was being read, the physiological reactions would generalizeto other words with similar meanings. As a way of creating time between theoriginal shock and the later tests on alternative words, both with similar anddissimilar meanings, subjects were told to sit back and think of other things.On thinking about this study, it occurred to me that subjects that had justbeen shocked on a particular word could well be thinking about other wordswith similar meanings in the interim, thus bringing thoughts of those wordsclose to the time of the shock, and not separated from it as the experimentersassumed.Thus psychologists, as part of their training, learn to think deeply aboutsuch alternative possibilities. One thing that psychologists know well is that in-