Statistics For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Table of Contents

Introduction

About This Book

Conventions Used in This Book

What You're Not to Read

Foolish Assumptions

How This Book Is Organized

Part I: Vital Statistics about Statistics

Part II: Number-Crunching Basics

Part III: Distributions and the Central Limit Theorem

Part IV: Guesstimating and Hypothesizing with Confidence

Part V: Statistical Studies and the Hunt for a Meaningful Relationship

Part VI: The Part of Tens

Icons Used in This Book

Where to Go from Here

Part I: Vital Statistics about Statistics

Chapter 1: Statistics in a Nutshell

Thriving in a Statistical World

Designing Appropriate Studies

Surveys

Experiments

Collecting Quality Data

Selecting a good sample

Avoiding bias in your data

Creating Effective Summaries

Descriptive statistics

Charts and graphs

Determining Distributions

Performing Proper Analyses

Margin of error and confidence intervals

Hypothesis tests

Correlation, regression, and two-way tables

Drawing Credible Conclusions

Reeling in overstated results

Questioning claims of cause and effect

Becoming a Sleuth, Not a Skeptic

Chapter 2: The Statistics of Everyday Life

Statistics and the Media: More Questions than Answers?

Probing popcorn problems

Venturing into viruses

Comprehending crashes

Mulling malpractice

Belaboring the loss of land

Scrutinizing schools

Studying sports

Banking on business news

Touring the travel news

Surveying sexual stats

Breaking down weather reports

Musing about movies

Highlighting horoscopes

Using Statistics at Work

Delivering ...