Product Description

In the numbers explosion all around us in our modern-day dealings, the buzzword is data, as in, “Do you have any data to support your claim?” “The data supported the original hypothesis that . . .” and “The data bear this out. . . .” But the field of statistics is not just about data. Statistics is the entire process involved in gathering evidence to answer questions about the world, in cases where that evidence happens to be numerical data.

Statistics For Dummies is for everyone who wants to sort through and evaluate the incredible amount of statistical information that comes to them on a daily basis. (You know the stuff: charts, graphs, tables, as well as headlines that talk about the results of the latest poll, survey, experiment, or other scientific study.) This book arms you with the ability to decipher and make important decisions about statistical results, being ever aware of the ways in which people can mislead you with statistics. Get the inside scoop on number-crunching nuances, plus insight into how you can

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12067 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780764554230
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"…it would certainly help many students, particularly those on service courses, to grasp the concepts and see the wider picture." (MSOR Newsletter, September 2007)

From the Back Cover
Work through real-world problems

From mean to median to probability -- understand the terms and crunch the numbers with ease

Stymied by statistics? No fear -- this friendly guide offers clear, practical explanations of statistical ideas, techniques, formulas, and calculations, with lots of examples that show how these concepts apply to your everyday life. You’ll see how to take the margin of error out of opinion polls and how to analyze and interpret data for improved classroom or on-the-job performance.

The Dummies Way

• Explanations in plain English
• "Get in, get out" information
• Icons and other navigational aids
• Tear-out cheat sheet
• Top ten lists
• A dash of humor and fun

Discover how to:

• Interpret and critique graphs and charts
• Determine the odds with probability
• Guesstimate with confidence using confidence intervals
• Set up and carry out a hypothesis test
• Compute statistical formulas

About the Author
Deborah Rumsey earned her Ph.D. in statistics from Ohio State University (OSU) in 1993. Upon graduating, she joined the faculty in the Department of Statistics at Kansas State University, winning the distinguished Presidential Teaching Award and earning tenure and promotion in 1998. In 2000, she returned to OSU as the Director of the Mathematics and Statistics Learning Center, where she is today. Deb is the Editor of the “Teaching Bits” of the Journal of Statistics Education; she has also published papers and given professional presentations on the subject of statistics education, with a particular emphasis on statistical literacy (skills for understanding statistics in everyday life and the workplace) and immersive learning environments (environments that promote students’ discovery of ideas on their own). Her passions include fishing, bird watching, and Ohio State Buckeye football (not necessarily in that order).

Customer Reviews

Not the college refresher I'd hoped for
This book covers material that would be found in the early to mid-level phases of a college Statistics course. I was hoping for a deeper refresher, short of re-reading my college texts and notes, and this wasn't the place to find it.

Nonetheless, there are positives worth considering. This book spends a good amount of time discussing normal distributions, the errors encountered in sampling a population, and the testing of hypotheses based on sample statistics. In particular, the explanations for using a Z-distribution or t-distribution were much clearer than any I'd ever read in several university texts. In fact, the textual descriptions are among the most valuable portions of the book, in part because the quantitative portions are scarce.

On the bad side, waaay too much space is devoted to public surveys and the confidence you should or should not place in them. Those chapters could have been condensed into a single entry, and the repeated examples of misleading or incorrect statistical measures were not necessary. There's also virtually nothing on probabilities, the study of which is usually linked to statistics in the introductory courses.

There's simply not enough valuable material to make this a good choice for college prep or refresher material, and as an introductory text, you'll find better alternatives as well.

Lots missing
I agree that this is a fair OVERVIEW. But where the entire Dummies series focuses on making complex topics simple and practical, this book fall short. For instance, there is very little value in the Probabilities section; the examples used as so simplistic that they cannot be applied by the reader to any larger question. Want to know the odds of something happening with multiple independent trials? Want to really understand games of chance or card games? Want to figure out for yourself the likelihood of being called on in class over the course of a week? This book can't help you answer these questions. No formulas for individual or multiple trials, dependent or independent events, or the like are presented to enable you to use the examples that are given.

As for general statistics, again this is a fair vehicle to understand statistics in their application, not so good at explaining how they are derived or allowing the reader to apply the information.

In the end I gave this book to my college-bound daughter and she will use it as a companion guide in her stats class. It remains to be seen whether it will add any value even there.

Not a waste of money for someone wanting to understand stats in the media and the like, but certainly a disappointment if you want a refresher on how to crunch the numbers yourself.

An excellent overview and/or review
Statistics for Dummies is an excellent overview of the fundamentals of statistics for those who have forgotten some of what they previously learned, those whose instructors left them dazed and confused, or those who just need a quick reference. Like all of the "for Dummies" books, it's not really intended to be a comprehensive instructional program or a definitive reference book. In my view, the book does exactly what it's intended to do.

Several reviewers have mentioned the lack of examples or exercises. They're right; however, there is a companion volume by the same author, Statistics Workbook for Dummies, that solves that problem. Why didn't they do it all in one book? Probably because it would have totaled over 600 pages.

So, this book won't teach you statistics from scratch, but it is a very good introductory level overview of the subject. Like all of the Dummies books, the format is attractive, the organization is clear, and the information is presented in small, easily digestible blocks. More importantly, the author uses just the right approach. She is both thorough and authoritative, but she doesn't assume much expertise among the readers. At the same time, she's never condescending.

This book is well worth the cost, and I recommend it highly.