No comments about Essentials of Statistics for Business and Economics (with CD-ROM).

1 comments about The Practice of Business Statistics w/CD.

1. I teach a college course in basic statistics at least once a year and for some time have used the book "The Basic Practice of Statistics" by one of the authors of this one. I have no intention of switching to this book, but I did examine it with the idea of determining if it would be appropriate for a course in basic statistics for business.
   My conclusion is affirmative; there are a large number of worked examples that are applications of business scenarios. The discussions are clear, concise and there are a large number of associated diagrams, which are essential to the learning of statistics. I strongly recommend this book for courses in basic business statistics.

No comments about Business Statistics: For Contemporary Decision Making.

4 comments about Statistical Techniques in Business and Economics with Student CD.

1. I was pleased from start to finish. It was the correct book, in great condition, it had the CD as stated and it came in a timely fashion.



2. Its a text book, examples are good and the link to excel has been benificial. Good luck on your course.



3. the book was new and was shipped on time! I love it. My books are time sensative and I was able to get them on time. Thanks!



4. The book is a textbook and purchased for class, so of course it fulfills its purpose. I do want to say that Amazon.com's service has been exceptional.

3 comments about Statistics for Business & Economics (10th Edition) (MyStatLab Series).

1. The seller contacted me promptly after i send him/her a message. The book arrived shortly after the order was placed and was in a great shape.



2. The fact that this book is in its tenth edition is an indication of its popularity. Many years ago I taught courses in business statistics at the advanced undergraduate and first year graduate level in the business school at Cal State Fullerton. I found it to be an excellent text to teach out of at that time. Since many editions have occurred since then and Terry is a third authored introduced in editions after the one I taught out of I really can't give a review of this edition. But I do think it will be helpful to amazon readers to know that McClave and Benson have a very good track record as authors of business statistics texts and Terry Sinich has coauthored a number of successful introductory and intermediate level statistics books. I am confident that this book is well written and has kept up with the advances in time series analysis that affects typical business related statistical problems.



3. I taught out of the 9th edition of this book and I liked it a lot. This is the perfect book for a second course in "methods statistics", i.e. a book about how to do the calculations, when to do them, and what they mean. There are no proofs or derivations, just recipes, but supplied with a lot of worked out examples, and an excellent discussions of when what methods are appropriate.
   
   My gripe with the 10th edition is that the last two chapters, Time Series, and Non-parametric Statistics, are not printed on paper, but only available on the supplied student CD. These are two of the chapters that I teach, and I find it unacceptable that the students will not have these chapters in the book, but will have to look at them on the screen. Or, if they decide to print them out, our department budget for printing and copying will be bancrupted. The publisher's explanation was that this was done "to save printing costs". Yet, the new edition is not any cheaper than the previous one!
   
   Reluctantly, I am switching to an inferior text by a different publisher, just because it has all its chapters printed.

5 comments about Data Analysis and Decision Making with Microsoft Excel, (with CD-ROM and Decision Tools and Statistic Tools Suite), Revised.

1. I find the text and software a useful set of tools. It assumes familiarity with basic statistics and Excel, and builds on them to develop a powerfull ability to analize data and make decisions from it. I experienced no trouble with the software install or operation.



2. The text book is great. I have many of Winston's other books and they are all great. The Palisade stuff works just fine. However, the StatPro Addin that accompanies this text does not work with MS Excel 2000. I contacted the IT guy that the authors directed me to--he was stumped. He just gave up and suggested I return my book for a refund because he could not figure out it out. Again, the book is great but the StatPro Addin sucks!



3. On the positive side, this book has many excellent case studies and examples. It is well written and interesting. However, I was disappointed, as I was expecting use of Excel to rigorously solve decision making and data analysis problems. The focus of the book is mostly traditional statistics solved using a group of commercial add-ins for Excel. If this is what you want, then the book would get five stars. However, for data analysis and decision making, I think a more thorough treatment using Excel without relying so much on the add-ins would have been appropriate.



4. The book is very good with really good explanations and examples on descriptive analysis and inferential analysis.



5. It was the text book the professor wanted me to buy.
   It was good.

5 comments about Cartoon Guide to Statistics.

1. This book is so cool! It makes the topic clear and fun at the same time.



2. this is great as a refresher and a road map of what to study in-depth.



3. I wrote a short review of this book previously for Amazon and my opinions have not changed very much. However, Gonick deserves credit for coauthoring his cartoon books with experts in the field. This way he avoids mistakes and brings out the important messages that, in the case of this book, a statistician would want to teach his students.
   Recently, I used the cartoons on p-values to help another statistician with a presentation on p-values for an audience of medical researchers. I found the relevant cartoons to be humorous and very instructive.
   
   Also, I discovered that in addition to the standard topics of estimation, hypothesis testing, regression, correlation and analysis of variance, Chapter 12, simply titled "Conclusion" has a brief description of many advanced topics, particularly in multivariate analysis.
   
   Multivariate topics include Chernoff faces, cluster analysis, factor analysis and discriminant analysis. Other advanced topics mentioned are random walks, time series analysis, image analysis and even resampling (bootstrap, jackknife and randomization).
   
   Each is described with a single cartoon. This reminds me to again warn that these cartoons alone cannot do justice to the various topics being taught. However, careful selection and placement into the context of a course can bring home important points to students better than just conventional teaching methods. I wouldn't hesitate to use this material to supplement and liven up an introductory statistics course.
   
   The bibliography at the end provides a number of very fine introductory texts and other topics and software that could interest the general public (also done in the cartoon fashion of Gonick).



4. Not as easy to understand as I thought it would be based on the title.



5. Cartoons definitely make the subject of statistics seem less-intimidating. I bought this book for self-study and found it difficult to follow. Though the cartoons made me smile at times, I was unhappy with the lack of material substance. For instance, equations and topics are thrown out there with little explanation on how they were derived. On multiple occasions, I looked for supporting information that wasn't there. Ultimately, I cannot recommend Cartoon Guide to Statistics. I am, however, finding success with a more expensive book, take a look: Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics

5 comments about Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.

1. My husband has been struggling in the market for a good 5 or 6 years. Its really opened his eyes though. Of course its all common senses but when you've lived in denial for so long its a real eye opener. He was able to put himself into many of the positions and has stopped living on the if's and could've or should've been position. There's no more hoping for him he's looking for the signs now.



2. One of the most self-congratulatory, didactic books I've ever read. Taleb is a convinced ideologue whose expertise in stock trading has created the conviction that he sees the invisible hand at work.
   
   He constantly reminds the reader that he is writing, restating and recasting sections with a reference to his earlier statements (never trust a writer that quotes himself) while dismissing whole schools of thought by selectively quoting from philosophers to make them look silly and misguided--if you read any philosopher, they will eventually prove themselves silly and misguided. It happens when they take themselves too seriously, which Taleb certainly does.
   
   Overall, his ode to skepticism is well conceived, but very thin. Unfortunately, it seems to be the only idea he ever tested. He makes the frequent mistake of confusing the success of a rigorous analysis for the justification of a philosophy as a guiding system to thought for others.
   
   Ultimately, philosophy is what Taleb suggests science is, taking the ideas of Karl Popper over the top and placing them on an alter, "science is mere speculation, mere formulation of conjecture." Popper was a solid skeptic, while Taleb is a convinced acolyte.



3. This book reads a lot like a self-absorbed blogger's rant, but it is a rant that is highly satisfying to read. Almost all of us have a distant relative or friend who is allegedly a "stock market genius". Taleb argues that it is usually hard to know whether that person is truly skilled or just lucky. Those of us who tend toward schadenfreude (enjoyment taken from the misfortune of someone else) can take solace in the fact that this person might just be a dolt who is likely to blow up one day. He argues that most often trading success is either the result of ones arbitrary trading style happening to jibe with market conditions or a product of exposure to volatility in a way that allows for small regular gains followed eventually by a spectacular blowup.



4. Every once in a while, someone really intelligent focuses his thoughts on the most valuable skill a human can have--how to think. Nassim Taleb has done an admirable job at just that: not telling us what to think--but showing us how to think in ways we can apply to innumerable life situations. I'm talking about what Charlie Munger refers to as "multiple mental models."
   
   The most important ideas explored are those of Popper--the idea of the open society--one in which no theory is known with certainty--only with probability, and theories continually replace one another as more information comes in. Interestingly Taleb continually cites Soros as a famous investor who utilized Popper's ideas, but Warren Buffett, the ultimate realist, if queried, would no doubt acknowledge Popper in influencing his thinking. In contrast to Soros and Buffett would be Bill Miller, an intensely philosophic investor, who recently has classified himself as an optimist--but not a realist. In any case, the methods of thinking propounded by Taleb fit nicely into what Charlie Munger classifies as "mental models"--doubtlessly useful stuff for the introspective, philosophical investor.



5. Some years ago, I had a colleague who organized a Mark 6 pool among friends. They had a database of previous Mark 6 results and from it derived that some numbers were more easily drawn than others. They then collectively bet on such numbers which they believed would have a higher probability of winning. I asked him the basis of his action. He explained that the fact some numbers appeared more frequently was real as proven by the statistics. The reason could be the material of the paint of different colour, the difference in the shape of the numbers painted, or their different position before drawing. Although the factors would be too complex to compute, the results shown in the statistics were sufficient to show the bias. By the time I left the department, the pool was still losing money.
   
   It is not a coincident that the essence of the book is exactly on the same thinking. Taleb points out that human beings always overestimate causality, and we tend to view the world as more explainable than it really is. An example used in the book is the performance of stock and option investors. These investors use sophisticated statistical methods to analyze the performance of the market in the past and predict the future. The information they derived from analyzing the past may adequately explained what happened. However, the performance of the market on the following day has no relevance to the past. It is a Brownian movement which only depends on the factors at present. It is actually more random than expected.
   
   For that matter, people always confuse between randomness and causality. The book gives an illustration on the two corresponding sides of such thoughts:
   Randomness v Determinism
   Probability v Certainty
   Belief v Knowledge
   Coincident v Law
   Forecast v Prophecy
   Lucky idiot v Skilled investor
   Survivorship bias v Market out-performance
   Stochastic variable v Deterministic variable
   Noise v Signal
   
   It is not surprising that such thinking would attract objection from the skilled investors. There are a lot of comments on this book defending the reliability and almost certainty of statistical analysis and prediction of market movements. However, from the market performance in recent months, I tend to believe that the market is much more random than we thought.
   
   Since human being developed self-consciousness, or the soul if one likes to call it, we always wonder why things happened. This quest for reasons has also developed into the religion delusion. This innate property of the human mind makes it easy for us to attach reasons, whatever they are, to nearly everything. Thus we are easily fooled by the randomness of nature, which is now beginning to be recognized in modern science such as evolution biology and quantum physics. For the ordinary people, it is useful to reflect on the randomness misconceptions discussed in the book.
   
   There is a survivorship bias in many statistical data we gather. We see the winners and try to learn from them, while forgetting the huge number of losers. The case study used in the book is the survey of the earning ability of the stock and option traders. While a lot of data on the traders in business can be gathered, the survey is actually gathering only the data from the survivors. Data on many traders who lost money and dropped out in the previous years are all ignored. Thus the statistics is unreliable. Let's say we want to survey among government executive officers on how the university graduates adapt to government work. We are only surveying the survivors of the government recruitment. University graduates who do not make it are all missed. If we conduct a survey in an online forum on the habit of people using computer, we are only surveying those surviving in the forum. Such statistics need to be qualified on their target participants. However, there is a misconception that survey with survivorship bias can be applied universally.
   
   Many probabilities have skewed distributions. Many real life situations do not have a 50% probability like the two sides of a coin, but have unusual and counter-intuitive distributions. People can often be fooled by the fact that they won a bet 50 times and think that they will win next time with absolute certainty. Taleb opines that some aggressive stock and option traders eat like chickens and go to the bathroom like elephants. They earn a steady small income from selling the stocks and options, but when a disaster happens they lose a fortune. They are fooled by the randomness of the market which is hidden from them.
   
   There is the story of black swan on probability, on which Taleb eventually wrote another book. Swans in Europe are white. People may take numerous observations to prove that swans are white. So a fact is established that all swans must be white, and the probability is 100%. However, it only takes one twist in the DNA to turn one swan black and the probability is re-written. In fact, black swans are found in Australasia. The impact of the highly improbable is severe. The more improbable it is, the harder the impact when it happens. Another joke on the false improbability is when Taleb observes an old man everyday to see if he is still alive. For eighty years, there have been about 30,000 observations and the old man is still alive. With such a large number of observations, he could conclude that this old man must be a superman who is highly improbable to die. By the track record, he may even live forever. But it only takes one death to turn the probability to zero. The truly scary thing is that the black swan could be a random event. That means it is capable of happening any time to turn a high probability totally upside down.

4 comments about Statistics for Business and Economics (with CD-ROM).

1. Statistics for Business and Economics (with CD-ROM)
   
   This book is geared toward business majors who need to have a solid understanding of statistical data as it relates to business concepts. Algebra was a pre-requisite when I took this course, but being familiar with algebra and its concepts won't help you much. Topics are not explained thoroughly which leaves the task of finding the missing pieces to understand the concept to the reader. Working the sample problems provides you with an answer, but doesn't walk you through the steps to solving the problem.
   
   The book also skips over some topics that are in other broader based basic statistics books. Some of which I feel are important for business majors to know as they work with their clients, who may not be business majors. I had to purchase another book to de-code what this one was saying. Once I did, I was able to understand the material better.



2. The book arrived in brand new condition. The price paid at the time was lowest on the internet as brand new but still not a great deal. Recommend buying used for cheaper if possible.



3. The material was straightforward and easy to understand, although it may have helped that our school requires us to take calculus first. I found the examples helpful...however it was brought to my attention that our faculty likes some of their "own" formulas better than the shall we say long, drawn-out tedious formulas of the book. Same answers, just different ways of getting them. Anyhow, excited to buy and resell this book through Amazon! Even more excited to be through with that class! :D



4. Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1HTD6NMK6E1E2 This is one of the better textbooks I have
   on the subject. One will have to put the
   time in but the book does a
   good job explaining concepts.
   If I may suggest something that
   has helped my studies greatly, a little book called
   Don't Like to Read, Then Don't, Listen!: How to
   Turn Any Type of Text Into Audio Files That Can
   Be Read to You!. I know that many students out
   there are like me and would rather listen to
   material than have to read it themselves. I use
   programs like the one that is reading this review
   to have my texts read to me. This is a god send
   for me. One can get this title on amazon.

5 comments about The Basic Practice of Statistics w/CD-ROM.

1. This book is pretty well organized in terms of content. It also works especially well when used with the study guide you can purchase as a supplement.



2. The content is this book is awful. This book is for a low level statistics class and fails at teaching even the basic concepts. If you want to learn math with words instead of numbers and symbols this is the book for you. I would not recommend this book to anyone. A better buy is Mathematical Statistics with Applications Sixth Edition Wackerly, Mendenhall, Scheaffer. I had that book for my MATH 483 class and it was a breeze. Can you believe it I actually enjoyed my statistics class!



3. I notice that most of the reviews for Moore's THE BASIC PRACTICE OF STATISTICS have been written by students. I found these reviews insightful to read. My students (like the ones who composed the reviews) are not math majors and do NOT want to enroll in a statistics course.
   
   Being sensitive to that fact, I spent a great deal of time selecting a statistic text. I had several concerns which directed me toward adopting Moore's text:
   
   1. Oftentimes, one can find typos in textbooks. This isn't a major problem, but if there is a typo in a formula, the problems for students are enormous! If the professor is from the math or statistics department, he/she can quickly catch the error and explain it to the students. If the professor is from the social sciences, he/she is less likely to catch the error. I've actually found errors in statistics textbooks. These critical errors usually can be found in books which are written by social scientists (someone like me). Thus, I've concluded that stat books written by statisticians are less apt to have typos than stat books written by social scientists. Moore is a statistician with a considerable reputation.
   
   2. I needed a book with excellent graphic illustrations. A good graphic will help a student understand a complex statistical concept better than the written word. Moore's text is filled with great graphics that explain complex concepts. Page 347 is a great example and has produced an epiphany for several students.
   
   3. I needed an introductory book that included information on control charts. Moore offers this. Frankly, I haven't found another intro stat book that does this.
   
   I've reviewed a large number of statistic textbooks. In my estimation, Moore offers the best book for non math majors.
   
   For more reading about the use of THE BASIC PRACTICE OF STATISTICS, check out volume 27 issues 3-4, 2007, pages 199-213 of THE JOURNAL OF TEACHING IN SOCIAL WORK.



4. I am not an educator but I am someone who used to be an instructor of statistics in a junior college. As a current corporate human resources director, I cannot stress the importance of statistics in the business world.
   
   Many years ago, I became enthralled with the teaching of Edwards Deming. I searched high and low for material that would enhance my ability to apply statistics to the manufacturing world. After a attending numerous train the trainer sessions and buying every book I could find on stats, I soon became a recognized leader in the world of statistical process control which later became known as continual improvement. Indeed, it was this skill that I believe led to numerous promotions in the corporate world.
   
   For the student, let me say this. Proving the value of your contributions to an organization or the value of your own efforts within that organization is most easily and readily achieved by statistics. Learn it, own it and excel in it.
   
   The book offered on the Amazon page I found to be one of the very best on statistics and the nuances thereof. I highly recommend this book and give it 5 stars. Michael L. Gooch, SPHR Author of Wingtips with Spurs



5. Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3ALP5NZLRYGL3 I am taking the second semester of this class right now.
   I had this book for the first semester. One will
   have to do a lot of reading but the book does a
   good job explaining concepts. The CD that
   comes with the book is awesome for testing
   your knowledge. If I may suggest something that
   has helped my studies greatly, a little book called
   Don't Like to Read, Then Don't, Listen!: How to
   Turn Any Type of Text Into Audio Files That Can
   Be Read to You!. I know that many students out
   there are like me and would rather listen to
   material than have to read it themselves. I use
   programs like the one that is reading this review
   to have my texts read to me. This is a god send
   for me. One can get this title on amazon.