Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Introduction: Seeking Certainty in an Uncertain World 1
4. Part I Descriptive Statistics and Core Concepts
5. 1 How to Weave the Two Strands of Statistics: Data Quality and Analysis 7
6. 2 How to Decide How Fast to Drive: Measures of Location and Dispersion 31
7. 3 How to Measure the Mortality of COVID-19: Empirical Probability and Counterfactuals 52
8. 4 How to Convince the Queen That British Soldiers Are Dying Needlessly: Empirical Distributions and Data Visualization 69
9. 5 How Not to Be Misled by Medical Studies or Retirement Planning: Weighted Means, Simpson’s Paradox, and Standardization 92
10. 6 How to Win a Nobel Prize by Eating Chocolate: Correlation and Regression 114
11. Part II Probability: Meaning, Rules, and Uses
12. 7 How to Win Dumb Bar Bets and Make Smart Bets Against Nature: Probability and Its Meaning 143
13. 8 How to Catch a Killer and Kill a Theory: Three Rules of Probability 163
14. 9 How to Elicit Truth from People Inclined to Lie: Conditional Probability 184
15. 10 How to Find a Lost Nuclear Submarine: Bayes’ Theorem 202
16. Part III Probability Distributions: The Workhorses of Statistics
17. 11 How to Achieve Fairness in the US Draft Lottery: The Uniform Distribution 227
18. 12 How to Win Free Coffee in Canada: The Binomial Distribution 246
19. 13 How to Save Holland from the Sea: The Geometric and Exponential Distributions 261
20. 14 How to Tell If You Might—or Might Not— Need to Start That Diet: The Normal Distribution 276
21. Part IV Inferential Statistics: Confidence Intervals and the Testing of Hypotheses
22. 15 How to Brew Better Beer: The Sampling Distribution 301
23. 16 How to Measure the Speed of Light Using a Microwave Oven: Confidence Intervals 324
24. 17 How to Grow Frankenstein Barley: Testing a Difference of Means 341
25. 18 How to Test Whether Salk’s Polio Vaccine Is Effective: Experimental Design and Testing a Difference of Two Proportions 363
26. 19 How to Pick Cherry Blossom Data and Not Cherry- Pick Blossom Data: Forecasting and Hypothesis Testing Using Regression 387
27. Epilogue: How to Build a Community of Truthfulness and Respect 411
28. Appendix to Chapter 10: The Formula for Bayes’ Theorem 421
29. Appendix to Chapter 12: The Equation for the Binomial Distribution 423
30. Appendix to Chapter 19: Background on Ordinary Least Squares and Serial Correlation 424
31. Appendix to Epilogue: Selections from the 2022 Ethical Guidelines for Statistical Practice of the American Statistical Association 430
32. Notes 433
33. Acknowledgments 469
34. Index 471