Deborah Jean Rumsey - Statistics for dummies

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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).

Dedication

To my husband, Eric, and my son, Clint Eric: You are my greatest teachers.

Author's Acknowledgments

I'd like to thank the people that made this book possible: Kathy Cox, for asking me to write the book I'd always dreamed of writing; Tere Drenth, for handling my dream with just the right touch to make sure it was finished on time and in the right format; Janet Dunn, for her thorough copyedit; John Gabrosek, Grand Valley State University, for his thorough technical review. Also, many thanks for the Composition Services department at Wiley Publishing, Inc., who created all of the equations in this book and managed the difficult layout issues beautifully.

To Peg Steigerwald, Mike O'Leary, and my colleague Jim Higgins: The many scribbling-on-a-napkin conversations we've had about statistics helped shape the way I think and talk about it. Thank you for making it real and for cheering me on. Thanks to Tony Barkauskas, UW-LaCrosse, the first and best professor I ever had, for inspiring me. I am so grateful to my friends in the Department of Statistics and the Mathematics and Statistics Learning Center at Ohio State who gave me constant support and encouragement. And a big thank you to my family for their love and faith in me.

Publisher's Acknowledgments

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The purpose of this book is to get you ready to sort through and evaluate the incredible amount of statistical information that comes to you 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 (for example, the results of the latest medical studies), being ever aware of the ways in which people can mislead you with statistics and how to handle them.

This book is chock-full of real examples from real sources that are relevant to your everyday life: from the latest medical breakthroughs, crime studies, and population trends to surveys on Internet dating, cellphone use, and the worst cars of the millennium. By reading the chapters in this book, you begin to understand how to use charts, graphs, and tables, and you also know how to examine the results of the latest polls, surveys, experiments, or other studies. You even find out how to use crickets to gauge temperature and how to win a bigger jackpot in the lottery.