Stat-Spotting

Stat-Spotting PDF Author: Joel Best
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520279980
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
This edition updates benchmarks, includes a new chapter on rhetoric, updated a few examples, and thoroughly updated the bibliography.

Stat-Spotting

Stat-Spotting PDF Author: Joel Best
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520279980
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
This edition updates benchmarks, includes a new chapter on rhetoric, updated a few examples, and thoroughly updated the bibliography.

Stat-Spotting

Stat-Spotting PDF Author: Joel Best
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520957075
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Does a young person commit suicide every thirteen minutes in the United States? Are four million women really battered to death by their husbands or boyfriends each year? Is methamphetamine our number one drug problem today? Alarming statistics bombard our daily lives, appearing in the news, on the Web, seemingly everywhere. But all too often, even the most respected publications present numbers that are miscalculated, misinterpreted, hyped, or simply misleading. This new edition contains revised benchmark statistics, updated resources, and a new section on the rhetorical uses of statistics, complete with new problems to be spotted and new examples illustrating those problems. Joel Best’s best seller exposes questionable uses of statistics and guides the reader toward becoming a more critical, savvy consumer of news, information, and data. Entertaining, informative, and concise, Stat-Spotting takes a commonsense approach to understanding data and doesn't require advanced math or statistics.

Damned Lies and Statistics

Damned Lies and Statistics PDF Author: Joel Best
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520953517
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Here, by popular demand, is the updated edition to Joel Best's classic guide to understanding how numbers can confuse us. In his new afterword, Best uses examples from recent policy debates to reflect on the challenges to improving statistical literacy. Since its publication ten years ago, Damned Lies and Statistics has emerged as the go-to handbook for spotting bad statistics and learning to think critically about these influential numbers.

More Damned Lies and Statistics

More Damned Lies and Statistics PDF Author: Joel Best
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520930029
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
In this sequel to the acclaimed Damned Lies and Statistics, which the Boston Globe said "deserves a place next to the dictionary on every school, media, and home-office desk," Joel Best continues his straightforward, lively, and humorous account of how statistics are produced, used, and misused by everyone from researchers to journalists. Underlining the importance of critical thinking in all matters numerical, Best illustrates his points with examples of good and bad statistics about such contemporary concerns as school shootings, fatal hospital errors, bullying, teen suicides, deaths at the World Trade Center, college ratings, the risks of divorce, racial profiling, and fatalities caused by falling coconuts. More Damned Lies and Statistics encourages all of us to think in a more sophisticated and skeptical manner about how statistics are used to promote causes, create fear, and advance particular points of view. Best identifies different sorts of numbers that shape how we think about public issues: missing numbers are relevant but overlooked; confusing numbers bewilder when they should inform; scary numbers play to our fears about the present and the future; authoritative numbers demand respect they don’t deserve; magical numbers promise unrealistic, simple solutions to complex problems; and contentious numbers become the focus of data duels and stat wars. The author's use of pertinent, socially important examples documents the life-altering consequences of understanding or misunderstanding statistical information. He demystifies statistical measures by explaining in straightforward prose how decisions are made about what to count and what not to count, what assumptions get made, and which figures are brought to our attention. Best identifies different sorts of numbers that shape how we think about public issues. Entertaining, enlightening, and very timely, this book offers a basis for critical thinking about the numbers we encounter and a reminder that when it comes to the news, people count—in more ways than one.

Star and Planet Spotting

Star and Planet Spotting PDF Author: Peter Lancaster Brown
Publisher: Blandford
ISBN: 9780713706550
Category : Astronomy
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description


Answering Questions With Statistics

Answering Questions With Statistics PDF Author: Robert Szafran
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1412991323
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
"The book is divided into three Parts: Part One has chapters that introduce data analysis and SPSS; Part Two contains eight chapters on descriptive statistics that begin with frequency tables and go through multiple regression; and Part Three includes six chapters on inferential statistics. Part One: Getting Started begins by answering some questions most students have right at the start © questions like why study data analysis and how much math and computer knowledge is required? Essential concepts from research methods relevant for data analysis are also explained. Part Two: Descriptive Statistics: Answering Questions about Your Data demonstrates procedures to use when the analyst is only concerned with describing the cases for which he or she actually has data. Statistics summarizing single variables (univariate statistics) are presented first and then statistics summarizing relationships between variables (multivariate statistics). Frequency tables, measures of central tendency, measures of dispersion, crosstabs, measures of association, subgroup means, and regression are all covered as are bar charts, pie charts, histograms, and clustered bar charts. Part Three: Inferential Statistics: Answering Questions about Populations explains procedures which allow the analyst to draw conclusions about the population from which his or her sample of cases was randomly selected. It begins with a simple chapter on the statistical theory behind inferential statistics. A four-step approach to hypothesis testing is introduced in the next chapter and demonstrated with one-sample t test hypotheses. The remaining chapters present different types of hypothesis tests including paired-samples, independent-samples, one and two-way ANOVA, and chi-square"--Provided by publisher.

Constructing Research Questions

Constructing Research Questions PDF Author: Mats Alvesson
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1446290484
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
All researchers want to produce interesting and influential theories. A key step in all theory development is formulating innovative research questions that will result in interesting and significant research. Traditional textbooks on research methods tend to ignore, or gloss over, actual ways of constructing research questions. In this text, Alvesson and Sandberg develop a problematization methodology for identifying and challenging the assumptions underlying existing theories and for generating research questions that can lead to more interesting and influential theories, using examples from across the social sciences. Established methods of generating research questions in the social sciences tend to focus on ′gap-spotting′, which means that existing literature remains largely unchallenged. The authors show the dangers of conventional approaches, providing detailed ideas for how one can work through such problems and formulate novel research questions that challenge existing theories and produce more imaginative empirical studies. Constructing Research Questions is essential reading for any researcher looking to formulate research questions that are interesting and novel.

Reading Educational Research

Reading Educational Research PDF Author: Gerald Watkins Bracey
Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Stats, stats, stats. It seems everything written about education today is full of stats. With this book, nimble-minded number cruncher and award-winning researcher Gerald Bracey takes your hand and walks you through the process of figuring out the meaning behind the figures. You don't need to be a math whiz to follow Bracey because he writes with clarity and humor, explicitly defining statistical terminology in easy-to-understand language and even offering you thirty-two specific principles for assessing the quality of research as you read it.

Know Your Chances

Know Your Chances PDF Author: Steven Woloshin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520252225
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Understanding risk -- Putting risk in perspective -- Risk charts : a way to get perspective -- Judging the benefit of a health intervention -- Not all benefits are equal : understand the outcome -- Consider the downsides -- Do the benefits outweight the downsides? -- Beware of exaggerated importance -- Beware of exaggerated certainty -- Who's behind the numbers?

Spotting and Discovering Terms Through Natural Language Processing

Spotting and Discovering Terms Through Natural Language Processing PDF Author: Christian Jacquemin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262100854
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
The acquired parsed terms can then be applied for precise retrieval and assembly of information."--BOOK JACKET.