Recommended Books

Textbooks

Your textbook is fine, but formal. If you’d like something a little less formal, I recommend

• Gonick, Larry, & Woollcott Smith. (1993). The Cartoon Guide to Statistics. HarperPerennial, ISBN 0-06-273102-5.

Despite its lighthearted appearance, this is actually a pretty good statistics book. Its advantages include high readability, brief explanations, and low cost (under $12 new at Amazon in March 2004). On the down side, it presents things in a different order from our course, it doesn’t cover data types or χ², and you need to look elsewhere for practice problems. Still I think it’s great value for the money.

Availability: buy it from any bookseller, or borrow it from the TC3 library or public libraries.

Here’s a cross reference to the chapters in Sullivan:

Statistics for Citizens

For more practical applications, written in a non-technical way, I recommend:

• Dewdney, A.K. (1993). 200% of Nothing. John Wiley & Sons.

  An excellent and highly readable tour through probability. Dewdney presents lots of situations, many from advertising, and helps you see how to use statistical thinking (educated comon sense, really) to avoid being taken in.

  The book runs out of steam toward the end, but the first nine or ten chapters are excellent — I particularly recommend “The Great Pepsi Challenge” (page 24), the lottery discussion (pages 56–59), and the decision whether to buy a store’s extended warranty (page 91).

  You might like this interview with the author.

• Gigerenzer, Gerd. (2002). Calculated Risks. Simon & Schuster.

  For ordinary people making legal or medical decisions. Some applications include AIDS counseling and DNA evidence. A very enjoyable read.

• Latzko, William J., and David M. Saunders. (1995). Four Days with Dr. Deming. Addison-Wesley.

  Dr. W. Edwards Deming is famous for teaching first Japanese and then American businesses to apply statistical methods to management, especially to quality. This book is in the form of a CEO’s “thought journal” at one of Dr. Deming’s seminars, as he finds that pretty much everything he knew about managing his company is wrong. It’s kept lively with lots of pictures and conversations, plus of course quotes from Dr. Deming’s lectures. You’ll want to read this book slowly and let the ideas expand in your mind.

  “It’s so simple,” says Dr. Deming, and he’s right. You don’t actually need a statistical background to understand this book, but you’ll recognize that the key ideas come from our week 9, sample variability. (The recommended video for week 9 includes a profile of Dr. Deming and an example of one of his methods, the control chart.)

• Lewis, H.W. (1997). Why Flip a Coin? John Wiley & Sons.

  Lots of illustrations of how thinking in a statistical way can help you make decisions. Applications include voting, gambling, war, and the stock market. A very enjoyable read.

• Malkiel, Burton G. (2003). A Random Walk down Wall Street. W.W. Norton & Company.

  Malkiel has done exhaustive statistical analysis of the stock market, to help you make wise decisions. He doesn’t just tell you what to do, he shows you the statistical evidence and explains what the statistics mean.

  You’ll probably find a later edition; Malkiel updates the book every couple of years.

All except Malkiel are available in the TC3 library for regular checkout. Ask a TC3 librarian to get Malkiel from another library for you, or get it from a bookseller or a public library.

What’s New

• May 10, 2004: new document
• May 28, 2004: add 200% of Nothing
• Aug 15, 2006: update edition information for Just the Essentials
• Aug 27, 2007: add A Random Walk down Wall Street; lose Just the Essentials; update Cartoon Guide cross references for new textbook Sullivan, Michael, Fundamentals of Statistics (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008)