You know that in order to drive your car you are required by law to have car insurance. If you have a mortgage on your house, you must have it insured as well. The rate that an insurance company charges you is based upon statistics from all drivers or homeowners in your area.
Wal-Mart, a worldwide leading retailer, keeps track of everything they sell and use statistics to calculate what to ship to each store and when.
From analyzing their vast store of information, for example, Wal-Mart decided that people buy strawberry Pop Tarts when a hurricane is predicted in Florida! So they ship this product to Florida stores based upon the weather forecast.
Companies make thousands of products every day and each company must make sure that a good quality item is sold. But a company can't test each and every item that they ship to you, the consumer. So the company uses statistics to test just a few, called a sample, of what they make. If the sample passes quality tests, then the company assumes that all the items made in the group, called a batch, are good. Another topic that you hear a lot about in the news is the stock market.
As such examples show, a main takeaway from the book is a sense of circumspection about our confidence in what is known. That humility can be lacking when statistics are used in debates about contentious issues such as the costs and benefits of cancer screening.
The book does an admirable job of covering a great deal of ground in limited space. Some concepts would have benefited from a deeper treatment: notably, bootstrapping, or estimating the distribution of a statistic on the basis of random resampling; and the central limit theorem, which holds that averages of increasingly large subsets of the data in many sets tend towards a normal distribution.
However, Spiegelhalter had difficult decisions to make about how much of each topic he would unpack. A book covering the ideas of regression, null-hypothesis testing, Bayesian inference and much, much more cannot be comprehensive.
The robust notes and bibliography will be useful for readers who wish to delve deeper. Spiegelhalter does not shy away from discussions of subtle statistical issues such as the nature of different types of uncertainty.
So, as he warns at the beginning of chapter 9, where the rubber of mathematical probability theory hits the road of statistical inference, some material will prove challenging even to scientifically sophisticated readers. Some passages require pencil, paper and a few passes through to fully digest, but the approachable big-picture explanations and end-of-chapter summaries help, as does the glossary. Spiegelhalter touches, too, on how both scientists and journalists can improve public understanding by running better studies and reporting on them responsibly.
After wading into the statistical depths earlier in the book, readers can start using these tangible, easily applicable lessons immediately. The Art of Statistics will serve students well. To succeed in psychology, you not only need to be able to pass a statistics class. You need to be able to understand statistics, too. Statistics allow us to make sense of and interpret a great deal of information.
Consider the sheer volume of data you encounter in a given day. How many hours did you sleep? How many students in your class ate breakfast this morning? How many people live within a one-mile radius of your home?
By using statistics, we can organize and interpret all of this information in a meaningful way. In psychology, we are also confronted with enormous amounts of data. How do changes in one variable impact other variables? Is there a way we can measure that relationship?
What is the overall strength of that relationship and what does that mean? Statistics allow us to answer these kinds of questions. Statistics allow psychologists to:. Having a solid understanding of statistical methods can help you excel in almost all other classes. Whether you are taking social psychology or human sexuality, you will be spending a great deal of time learning about research. Your foundation of statistical knowledge will allow you to make better sense of the research you'll find described in your other psychology courses.
Secondly, think about all the claims about psychology that you encounter on a daily basis outside of class. Magazines publish stories about the latest scientific findings, self-help books make proclamations about different ways to approach problems, and news reports interpret or misinterpret psychology research.
They also work with conservationists to ensure the safety and propagation of wildlife. In major hospitals, medical schools and government agencies, statisticians study the control, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases, injuries and other health abnormalities. They also investigate the efficiency of health delivery systems and practices. In the pharmaceutical industry, statisticians design experiments to measure the efficacy of drugs in treating illnesses and to assess the likelihood of undesirable side effects.
Statistical methods are also commonly used in business practice, e. Actuaries use statistical methods to assess risk levels and set premium rates for the insurance and pension industries.
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