Does Measurement Measure Up?: How Numbers Reveal and Conceal the Truth

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Trevor Lipscombe saw something of merit in the early stages of this book, for which I will always be grateful. The patient guidance he provided to a first-time author is much appreciated. Peter Dreyer’s incisive editing is likewise gratefully acknowledged. The rest of the staff at the Johns Hopkins University Press has been friendly, professional, and patient. John Shadley has been a friend and colleague for nearly twenty years. His support helped me finish this book, and he provided useful suggestions on the material on Wallace Sabine in Chapter 2. My department chairman, Ed Rybicki, and dean, Steve Bellovich, granted me sabbatical leave and encouraged me to pursue this project, a relatively unusual one for an engineering academician. Hank Knight’s ideas and encouragement helped the book get off the ground. My students at the University of Tulsa deserve thanks as well, for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that they have had to listen, over and over again, to many of the same stories I tell in this book. My mother and father raised their son in a home where good conversation was the finest pleasure and where words and ideas were things to be cherished—only to watch him grow up and become an engineer. My wife Mia read the manuscript all the way through when it was pretty rough and provided constant support, encouragement, and a whole bunch of good ideas and provocative questions. Over the years, I have occasionally been told that I ‘‘write well for an engineer.’’ This sort of backhanded compliment (not unlike being told that you surf well for a guy from Oklahoma) was, I suppose, among the reasons why I had always wanted to write a book. More of us engineers, especially A CKNOWLEDGMENTS xiv those who surf better than I do, ought to do the same. If this book inspires any future surfing expeditions by my colleagues in the engineering profession , the effort will have been worth it. DOES MEASUREMENT MEASURE UP? This page intentionally left blank ...