Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do

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Edition: 1st
Format: Hardcover
Pub. Date: 2010-02-15
Publisher(s): McGraw Hill
List Price: $32.00

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Customer Reviews

Extremely Insightful  August 16, 2011
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Most statistics books are filled with mathematics which makes the subject dry and not easily connected to the life of most people. Instead, this textbook makes statistics fun. It's filled with practical stories that show the connection of applied statistics to everyone's daily life. If you want to enjoy reading about how statistics affects your life, then get this textbook.






Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do: 5 out of 5 stars based on 1 user reviews.

Summary

WHAT ARE THE ODDS YOU'LL WIN THE LOTTERY?How long will your kids wait in line at Disney World?Who decides that "standardized tests" are fair?Why do highway engineers build slow-moving ramps?What does it mean, statistically, to be an "Average Joe"?NUMBERS RULE YOUR WORLD In the popular tradition of eye-opening bestsellers like Freakonomics, The Tipping Point, and Super Crunchers, this fascinating book from renowned statistician and blogger Kaiser Fung takes you inside the hidden world of facts and figures that affect you every day, in every way.These are the statistics that rule your life, your job, your commute, your vacation, your food, your health, your money, and your success. This is how engineers calculate your quality of living, how corporations determine your needs, and how politicians estimate your opinions. These are the numbers you never think about-even though they play a crucial role in every single aspect of your life.What you learn may surprise you, amuse you, or even enrage you. But there's one thing you won't be able to deny:Numbers Rule Your World..."For those who have anxiety about how organization data-mining is impacting their world, Kaiser Fung pulls back the curtain to reveal the good and the bad of predictive analytics." --Ian Ayres,Yale professor and author ofSuper Crunchers: Why Thinking By Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart"A book that engages us with stories that a journalist would write, the compelling stories behind the stories as illuminated by the numbers, and the dynamics that the numbers reveal." --John Sall, Executive Vice President, SAS Institute

Author Biography

About the Author

Kaiser Fung is a statistician with more than a decade of experience in applying statistical methods to unlocking the relationship between advertising and customer behaviors. He leads a team of statisticians at Sirius Satellite Radio that is responsible for gleaning insight into customers and operational best practices. His blog, Junk Charts, pioneered the genre of critically examining data and graphics in the mass media. Since 2005, Junk Charts has received rave reviews from Science magazine, The Guardian, Yahoo!, Stanford University Libraries. He is an adjunct professor at New York University where he teaches practical statistics to professionals, and holds statistics, business, and engineering degrees from Cambridge, Harvard, and Princeton Universities. Fung is also a fellow of the Royal Statistics Society..

Table of Contents

Acknowledgmentsp. vii
Introductionp. ix
Fast Passes Slow Mergesp. 1
The Discontent of Being Averaged
Bagged Spinach Bad Scorep. 25
The Virtue of Being Wrong
Item Bank Risk Poolp. 63
The Dilemma of Being Together
Timid Testers Magic Lassosp. 95
The Sway of Being Asymmetric
Jet Crashes Jackpotsp. 137
The Power of Being Impossible
Conclusionp. 155
Notesp. 183
Indexp. 205
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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