 What was an error in Caswell's theories (in reference to how they were applied)?
Wilton Caswell, Ph.D., was head of my Sociology Department, and right then he was mad enough to chew nails. He bit off each word with great restraint: "Sociology is the study of social institutions, Mr. Halloway." He had a book in his hand and I was expecting him to throw it, but he spoke instead: "This department's analysis of institutional accretion, by the use of open system mathematics, has been recognized as an outstanding and valuable contribution to—" The words were impressive, whatever they meant, but this still didn't sound like anything that would pull in money. If they got the idea that sociology professors are giving advice and guidance—No, we have to stick to brass tacks and leave Washington out of this. "The reason can be traced to little quirks in the way they were organized, a matter of positive and negative power feedbacks. Such simple questions as, 'Is there a way a holder of authority in this organization can use the power available to him to increase his power?' provide the key. But it still could not be handled until the complex questions of interacting motives and long-range accumulations of minor effects could somehow be simplified and formulated. In working on the problem, I found that the mathematics of open system, as introduced to biology by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and George Kreezer, could be used as a base that would enable me to develop a specifically social mathematics, expressing the human factors of intermeshing authority and motives in simple formulas. "By these formulations, it is possible to determine automatically the amount of growth and period of life of any organization. They have to be convinced that by, 'furtherance of research into human ills,' he meant that the money should go to research fellowships for postgraduate biologists at the university, rather than to a medical foundation." I shook hands and left him standing there, sure of his place in the progress of science and the respect of his colleagues, yet seething inside because I, the president and dean, had boorishly demanded that he produce something tangible. I nudged Caswell and murmured, "Did you fix it so that a shover has a better chance of getting into office than a non-shover?" "I think there's a way they could find for it," Caswell whispered back, and went to work on his equation again. We left the diagram of organization and our typed copy of the new bylaws with her and went off soberly, as befitted two social science experimenters.
 Their experiment assumed that only women would be interested in the test at hand
 Their experiment assumed that only men would be interested in the test at hand  Their experiment assumed that only women would be interested in the test at hand  Their experiment was using too small a sample size  Their experiment was using too large an initial sample size