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Among many contributions to civil society, Tukey served on a committee of the American Statistical Association that produced a report critiquing the statistical methodology of the Kinsey Report, Statistical Problems of the Kinsey Report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which summarised "While much remains to be done, our overall impression of their work to date is favorable".
From 1960 to 1980, Tukey helped design the NBC television network polls used to predict and analyze elections. He was also a consultant to the Educational Testing Service, the Xerox Corporation and Merck & Company.
His statistical interests were many and varied. He is particularly remembered for his development with James Cooley of the Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm. In 1970, he contributed significantly to what is today known as the jackknife estimation--also termed Quenouille-Tukey jackknife. He introduced the box plot in his 1977 book, "Exploratory Data Analysis".
Though he believed in the utility of separating the two types of analysis, he pointed out that sometimes, especially in natural science, this was problematic and termed such situations uncomfortable science.
A. D. Gordon offered the following summary of Tukey's principles for statistical practice:
... the usefulness and limitation of mathematical statistics; the importance of having methods of statistical analysis that are robust to violations of the assumptions underlying their use; the need to amass experience of the behaviour of specific methods of analysis in order to provide guidance on their use; the importance of allowing the possibility of data's influencing the choice of method by which they are analysed; the need for statisticians to reject the role of "guardian of proven truth", and to resist attempts to provide once-for-all solutions and tidy over-unifications of the subject; the iterative nature of data analysis; implications of the increasing power, availability, and cheapness of computing facilities; the training of statisticians.
Tukey coined many statistical terms that have become part of common usage, but the two most famous coinages attributed to him were related to computer science.
While working with John von Neumann on early computer designs, Tukey introduced the word "bit" as a contraction of "binary digit". The term "bit" was first used in an article by Claude Shannon in 1948.
In 2000, Fred Shapiro, a librarian at the Yale Law School, published a letter revealing that Tukey's 1958 paper "The Teaching of Concrete Mathematics" contained the earliest known usage of the term "software" found in a search of JSTOR's electronic archives, predating the OED's citation by two years. This led many to credit Tukey with coining the term, particularly in obituaries published that same year, although Tukey never claimed credit for any such coinage. In 1995, Paul Niquette claimed he had originally coined the term in October 1953, although he could not find any documents supporting his claim. The earliest known publication of the term "software" in an engineering context was in August 1953 by Richard R. Carhart, in a RAND Corporation research memorandum.
^Carhart, Richard (1953). A survey of the current status of the electronic reliability problem(PDF). Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation. p. 69. [...] It will be recalled from Sec. 1.6 that the term personnel was defined to include people who come into direct contact with the hardware, from production to field use, i.e., people who assemble, inspect, pack, ship, handle, install, operate, and maintain electronic equipment. In any of these phases personnel failures may result in unoperational gear. As with the hardware factors, there is almost no quantitative data concerning these software or human factors in reliability: How many faults are caused by personnel, why they occur, and what can be done to remove the errors. [...]