Page 26 - Statistics for Dummies

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Part I: Vital Statistics about Statistics
cereal box while you eat breakfast. At work you pull numbers from charts
and tables, enter data into spreadsheets, run diagnostics, take measure-
ments, perform calculations, estimate expenses, make decisions using statis-
tical baselines, and order inventory based on past sales data.
At lunch you go to the No. 1 restaurant based on a survey of 500 people. You
eat food that was priced based on marketing data. You go to your doctor’s
appointment where they take your blood pressure, temperature, weight, and
do a blood test; after all the information is collected, you get a report show-
ing your numbers and how you compare to the statistical norms.
You head home in your car that’s been serviced by a computer running sta-
tistical diagnostics. When you get home, you turn on the news and hear the
latest crime statistics, see how the stock market performed, and discover
how many people visited the zoo last week.
At night, you brush your teeth with toothpaste that’s been statistically
proven to fight cavities, read a few pages of your New York Times Best-Seller
(based on statistical sales estimates), and go to sleep — only to start it all
over again the next morning. But how can you be sure that all those statistics
you encounter and depend on each day are correct? In Chapter 2, I discuss
in more depth a few examples of how statistics is involved in our lives and
workplaces, what its impact is, and how you can raise your awareness of it.
Some statistics are vague, inappropriate, or just plain wrong. You need to
become more aware of the statistics you encounter each day and train your
mind to stop and say “wait a minute!”, sift through the information, ask ques-
tions, and raise red flags when something’s not quite right. In Chapter 3, you
see ways in which you can be misled by bad statistics and develop skills to
think critically and identify problems before automatically believing results.
Like any other field, statistics has its own set of jargon, and I outline and
explain some of the most commonly used statistical terms in Chapter 4.
Knowing the language increases your ability to understand and communicate
statistics at a higher level without being intimidated. It raises your credibil-
ity when you use precise terms to describe what’s wrong with a statistical
result (and why). And your presentations involving statistical tables, graphs,
charts, and analyses will be informational and effective. (Heck, if nothing
else, you need the jargon because I use it throughout this book; don’t worry
though, I always review it.)
In the next sections, you see how statistics is involved in each phase of the
scientific method.

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