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Daily Speculations The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer & Laurel Kenner Dedicated to the scientific method, free markets, deflating ballyhoo, creating value, and laughter; a forum for us to use our meager abilities to make the world of specinvestments a better place. |
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11/22/04
The Cartoon Guide to Statistics, a Review by Steve Wisdom
"The Cartoon Guide to Statistics", Harper 1994 by Larry Gonick & Woollcott Smith. A few Specs have written to ask for a good, quick & dirty "Stats 101" book. This weekend I ran across the very good "Cartoon Guide", written by a stats professor & illustrated by a (de rigueur) Harvard dropout. The book predates the (well-edited) "Dummies" series, but is in the same vein, though (happily) without the low-IQ "humor" that mars some "Dummies" books. "Cartoon" doesn't shy away from details and fine points, but brings forward only those of practical significance. Surprisingly, it speaks as much about proportions (and differences thereof) as about means. This is to allow a tie in to election polling data, and also to bring in the Pascal et al gambling back story. In 3-4 hours the reader will absorb enough to be at the 99th percentile of the general public in stats understanding. The data sets are simple, and there's some tabular output from Minitab as well as graphs from S-PLUS, though many of the numbers are worked "by hand". Brief but good comments on experimental design, biases, Latin Squares. Also a good intuitive treatment of regression and of the Central Limit Theorem. Nothing on distributions other than binomial or Normal; probably a good decision, given the scope of the book. Also "modern" methods are discussed only en passant. Brief historical references to Galton, Student, Fischer, and in the bibliography the reader is referred to Steve Stigler for more. All in all, much smarter and better than expected.
11/22/04
Gibbons Burke adds:
Another good well written and concise resource to useful applied
statistics and other calculations useful in business and finance comes
from The Economist Magazine, published by Wiley:
Numbers Guide: The Essentials of Business Numeracy
and
Guide to Economic Indicators: Making Sense of Economics, Fifth Edition