Table of Contents
Introduction: Why I hated calculus but love statistics ix
Acknowledgments xvii
1 What's the Point? 1
2 Descriptive Statistics: Who was the best baseball player of all time? 15
Appendix to Chapter 2 34
3 Deceptive Description: "He's got a great personality!" and other true but grossly misleading statements 36
4 Correlation: How does Netflix know what movies I like? 58
Appendix to Chapter 4 65
5 Basic Probability: Don't buy the extended warranty on your $99 printer 68
51/2 The Monty Hall Problem 90
6 Problems with Probability: How overconfident math geeks nearly destroyed the global financial system 95
7 The Importance of Data: "Garbage in, garbage out" 110
8 The Central Limit Theorem: The Lebron James of statistics 127
9 Inference: Why my statistics professor thought I might have cheated 143
Appendix to Chapter 9 164
10 Polling: How we know that 64 percent of Americans support the death penalty (with a sampling error ± 3 percent) 169
Appendix to Chapter 10 183
11 Regression Analysis: The miracle elixir 185
Appendix to Chapter 11 208
12 Common Regression Mistakes: The mandatory warning label 212
13 Program Evaluation: Will going to Harvard change your life? 225
Conclusion: Five questions that statistics can help answer 241
Appendix: Statistical software 257
Notes 261
Index 269