Art Kendall: Intelligence is cognitive capacity in speed or magnitude of learning information, methods and process. So I consider the ability to dance or play music a talent rather than intelligence, although those are very valuable and worthwhile things. In a casual sense, I guess it may be the depth to which they discuss ideas—lesser intelligences discuss people, middle intelligences discuss things and higher intelligences discuss ideas—and the relative mix of these.

King Douglas: What is your approach to problem solving?

Art Kendall: Define your terms. The first step, I believe, is to get the problem right, to understand the context and meaning of the problem, to get beyond the presenting problem to a fuller understanding of what the real problem is. A thorough exploration of the meanings and concepts underlying the problem is, important, I think, in order to be sure that you do have good problem solving. Otherwise you just come up with the typical solution in search of a problem. As Tukey said, “An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.”

King Douglas: Do you like to have quiet while problem solving, or do you prefer to listen to music or something else other than silence?

Art Kendall: Quiet. Did you ever dream in FORTRAN? Sometimes when I’m worried about something, I keep a pad and pencil next to the bed. Sometimes it does help to back away from the problem.

King Douglas: What is your earliest experience with computers?

Art Kendall: In 1970 we had this little room with a teletype and we used it to interact with a DEC 10 and we had no idea where on earth the DEC 10 was…it was somewhere on the other end of this telephone line. So my very first experiences were with character cell terminals and direct-interactive computing. The main system booted up from a punch tape.

King Douglas: Say you have creatively solved a particularly difficult problem, with even a flash of brilliance. Whom do you tell?

Art Kendall: No one. You just post it to the SPSSX list and hope that someone else recognizes it.

King Douglas: What advice do you have for the participants at the SPSS Users Conference?

Art Kendall: I predict that you will go back and change your code.