Statistician

Steve Ardis, manager of the Sunshine House water sports store in Marley Station, spins the cash register display around to show what business has been like lately.All zeros.It's 1:30 p.m. and the store hasn't had a sale since it opened three and a half hours ago."Scary slow," Mr. Ardis said. "That's the way I describe it. It's not that people come in and don't buy anything. It's just that they don't come in."And at Severna Plaza, in response to a question about the number of customers she has seen in the Dress Barn lately, the shopkeeper said, "Clothes.

As Angel Cordero allegedly approached the 7,000-win milestone last week, there was a question of just how many winners the jockey had ridden.Thursday, Cordero supposedly became just the third rider to reach the milestone, following Bill Shoemaker and Laffit Pincay, but whether his 7,000th winner was really his 7,000th may never be known.His winners as a teen-ager in his native Puerto Rico were not tallied by Daily Racing Form, and the pin-point accuracy of the paper's statistics are also in question.

Ella Jacquelyn "Jackie" Watts, a retired statistician, died Wednesday of heart failure at Good Samaritan Hospital. The Cross Keys resident was 82. She was the widow of Robert B. Watts, a civil rights lawyer and judge who served on the Baltimore City Circuit Court. He died in 1998. Born in Atlanta, Ella Jacquelyn Johnson graduated from Clark University in Atlanta in 1941 before coming to Baltimore to live with relatives. She met her future husband while taking a typing class at the Cortez W. Peters Business School in Baltimore.

Evelyn E. Singleton Thon, a world traveler with a doctorate in economics from the Johns Hopkins University, died Wednesday of a heart attack at Good Samaritan Hospital. The Glen Arm resident was 92. Born in Lancaster, Pa., she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Goucher College in 1930. While doing her graduate work she met her future husband, Robert W. Thon Jr., a student in the political economics doctorate program at Hopkins. They were married in 1936. After graduation, Mrs. Thon (pronounced "tone")

THE ODOR OF DEATH now permeates the halls of the General Assembly, where legislators have been told that capital punishment is unfair because of racial bias. This is a familiar argument with a slightly different wrinkle. It is not just that a black criminal's life is considered more disposable than a white criminal's; it is that a white victim's death is considered more tragic than a black victim's. This, anyway, was the argument made last week in Annapolis by those seeking a moratorium on the death penalty here.

Dennis E. Hinkle, the dean of Towson University's College of Education and a statistics scholar, died Wednesday while undergoing surgery for a heart ailment at Prince George's Hospital Center in Cheverly. The Cockeysville resident was 60. Named the school's dean in 1993, Dr. Hinkle published and taught widely in the field of educational statistics. "He was a diligent, tireless worker who reached out to people and was open and eager to share his personal interests," said Patricia Waters, an assistant professor of early childhood education at Towson.

The nation's largest rotisserie baseball statistics keeper has filed a "computer programming malpractice" lawsuit, claiming faulty software caused it to suspend its operations early in the 1992 Major League Baseball season.USA Stats Inc. of Baltimore filed the $500,000 suit Monday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore against Bradley T. Marshall, who operated the Bradley T. Marshall Co. in Washington. Mr. Marshall said yesterday that his software program was not responsible for the shutdown in April.

It didn't surprise Ron Morse when the first orders for his new book came from Japanese businessmen.The Annapolis resident and Japan specialist figured the competitive Japanese would love to get hold of the names and phone numbers in "Data: Where It Is and How To Get It."Now he and economist Ed Coleman, the book's co-author, are betting that a "new America" needs their directory of more than 2,500 data sources with expertise in business, energy and the environment."Clinton is trying to imitate the Japanese system of having business and government work together to get the economy going," said Mr. Morse, the former executive vice president of a Washington think tank, the Economic Strategy Institute.

Milton O. Price Sr., a retired Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. statistician who had been a prisoner of war during World War II, died of a heart attack Saturday at Perry Point Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He was 89. Mr. Price was born in Baltimore and raised on Garrett Avenue. After graduating from Polytechnic Institute in 1937, he served for four years in the Naval Reserve before he began working at BGE. Drafted into the Army on April 23, 1941, Mr. Price was to have served one year of active duty.

Take heart, Orioles fans. Statisticians say Wednesday's 30-3 loss was an aberration - a fluke. Twins@Orioles Tonight, 7:05, MASN, 105.7 FM Starters: Johan Santana (13-9, 2.88) vs. Jeremy Guthrie (7-4, 3.44)