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Author: Barbara Blatchley
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231552750
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
Winner, 2023 William James Book Award, American Psychological Association Division 1 in General Psychology Most of us, no matter how rational we think we are, have a lucky charm, a good-luck ritual, or some other custom we follow in the hope that it will lead to a good result. Is the idea of luckiness just a way in which we try to impose order on chaos? Do we live in a world of flukes and coincidences, good and bad breaks, with outcomes as random as a roll of the dice—or can our beliefs help change our luck? What Are the Chances? reveals how psychology and neuroscience explain the significance of the idea of luck. Barbara Blatchley explores how people react to random events in a range of circumstances, examining the evidence that the belief in luck helps us cope with a lack of control. She tells the stories of lucky and unlucky people—who won the lottery multiple times, survived seven brushes with death, or found an apparently cursed Neanderthal mummy—as well as the accidental discoveries that fundamentally changed what we know about the brain. Blatchley considers our frequent misunderstanding of randomness, the history of luckiness in different cultures and religions, the surprising benefits of magical thinking, and many other topics. Offering a new view of how the brain handles the unexpected, What Are the Chances? shows why an arguably irrational belief can—fingers crossed—help us as we struggle with an unpredictable world.
Author: Barbara Blatchley
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231552750
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Get Book Here
Book Description
Winner, 2023 William James Book Award, American Psychological Association Division 1 in General Psychology Most of us, no matter how rational we think we are, have a lucky charm, a good-luck ritual, or some other custom we follow in the hope that it will lead to a good result. Is the idea of luckiness just a way in which we try to impose order on chaos? Do we live in a world of flukes and coincidences, good and bad breaks, with outcomes as random as a roll of the dice—or can our beliefs help change our luck? What Are the Chances? reveals how psychology and neuroscience explain the significance of the idea of luck. Barbara Blatchley explores how people react to random events in a range of circumstances, examining the evidence that the belief in luck helps us cope with a lack of control. She tells the stories of lucky and unlucky people—who won the lottery multiple times, survived seven brushes with death, or found an apparently cursed Neanderthal mummy—as well as the accidental discoveries that fundamentally changed what we know about the brain. Blatchley considers our frequent misunderstanding of randomness, the history of luckiness in different cultures and religions, the surprising benefits of magical thinking, and many other topics. Offering a new view of how the brain handles the unexpected, What Are the Chances? shows why an arguably irrational belief can—fingers crossed—help us as we struggle with an unpredictable world.
Author: Bart K. Holland
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801869419
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 174
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Book Description
Roulette wheels and the plague -- Surely something's wrong with you -- The life table : you can bet on it! -- The rarest events -- The waiting game -- Stockbrokers and climate change.
Author: Steve Slavin
Publisher: Madison Books
ISBN: 146162293X
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Chances Are is the first book to make statistics accessible to everyone, regardless of how much math you remember from school.
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?
Author: Evelyn Shipp
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 1460209508
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 42
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Book Description
To recount some of the vicissitudes of life, be they little or big, welcomed or unwanted, funny or a cliff hanger in which the consequences can only be explained as a result of divine interference, not luck and certainly not by chance.
Author: Andrew C. A. Elliott
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198883668
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 483
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Book Description
Chance fills every day of our lives and affects every decision we make. Yet, for something woven so closely into the fabric of our being, we are not very good at thinking about uncertainty and risk. In this lively and engaging book, Andrew C. A. Elliott asks why this is so. He picks at the threads and, in showing how our world is built on probability rather than certainty, he identifies five obstacles to thinking about uncertainty that confuse us time after time. Elliott takes us into the casino, but this is not an invitation to gamble. He looks at financial markets, but this is not a guide to investment. There's discussion of health, but this is not a medical book. He touches on genetics and evolution, and music-making, and writing, because chance is at work there too. Entering many different fields, What are the Chances of That? is always following the trail of chance and randomness. One purpose of the book is to go cross-country, to show that there are connected ways of thinking that disrespect boundaries and cut across the domains of finance, and gambling, and genetics, and public health, and creativity. Through it, one visits the vantage points that give a broad view of the landscape and sees how these different areas of life and knowledge are connected - through chance. What are the Chances of That? discusses chance and the importance of understanding how it affects our lives. It goes beyond a mathematical approach to the subject, showing how our thinking about chance and uncertainty has been shaped by history and culture, and only relatively recently by the mathematical theory of probability. In considering how we think about uncertainty, Elliott proposes five “dualities” that encapsulate many of the ambiguities that arise.
Author: Steven P. Petcher
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1468565087
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 93
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Book Description
Do you believe life happens by chance, by coincidence, or perhaps it’s just plain luck? The truth is that God has a plan for your life. “For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord” (Jeremiah 29:11 NIV). He cares for you and desires to be in relationship with you. Read the stories of some who had reason to doubt. As they trusted God, He met their need. Like others, there may be times in your life when the pain you feel causes you to want to run away or possibly hide from reality. You will learn that you cannot run far enough, nor hide well enough to escape. It is often at that very critical, life changing point in life that our Heavenly Father softens hearts and encourages people to reach out to Him. Don’t rely on chance; rely on God. Reach out to the one who has a plan for you. He has been there, waiting all the while; waiting for you to trust Him!
Author: Dawn Griffiths
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
ISBN: 059680086X
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 721
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Book Description
A comprehensive introduction to statistics that teaches the fundamentals with real-life scenarios, and covers histograms, quartiles, probability, Bayes' theorem, predictions, approximations, random samples, and related topics.
Author: John Haigh
Publisher: Winning with Probability
ISBN: 0198526636
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
"What are the odds against winning the Lotto, The Weakest Link, or Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The answer lies in the science of probability, yet many of us are unaware of how this science works. Every day, people make judgements on a wide variety of situations where chance plays a role, including buying insurance, betting on horse-racing, following medical advice - even carrying an umbrella. In Taking Chances, John Haigh guides the reader round common pitfalls, demonstrates how to make better-informed decisions, and shows where the odds can be unexpectedly in your favour. This new edition has been fully updated, and includes information on top television shows, plus a new chapter on Probability for Lawyers."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Michael Kaplan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143038344
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
A compelling journey through history, mathematics, and philosophy, charting humanity’s struggle against randomness Our lives are played out in the arena of chance. However little we recognize it in our day-to-day existence, we are always riding the odds, seeking out certainty but settling—reluctantly—for likelihood, building our beliefs on the shadowy props of probability. Chances Are is the story of man’s millennia-long search for the tools to manage the recurrent but unpredictable—to help us prevent, or at least mitigate, the seemingly random blows of disaster, disease, and injustice. In these pages, we meet the brilliant individuals who developed the first abstract formulations of probability, as well as the intrepid visionaries who recognized their practical applications—from gamblers to military strategists to meteorologists to medical researchers, from blackjack to our own mortality.
