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Bibliographic Details

Title

Statistics on the Table : The History of Statistical Concepts and Methods

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Publication Date

2002

Language

English

ISBN 10

0674009797

ISBN 13

9780674009790

Binding

Paperback

Condition

Near Fine

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About this title

Synopsis

This lively collection of essays examines in witty detail the history of some of the concepts involved in bringing statistical argument "to the table," and some of the pitfalls that have been encountered. The topics range from seventeenth-century medicine and the circulation of blood, to the cause of the Great Depression and the effect of the California gold discoveries of 1848 upon price levels, to the determinations of the shape of the Earth and the speed of light, to the meter of Virgil's poetry and the prediction of the Second Coming of Christ. The title essay tells how the statistician Karl Pearson came to issue the challenge to put "statistics on the table" to the economists Marshall, Keynes, and Pigou in 1911. The 1911 dispute involved the effect of parental alcoholism upon children, but the challenge is general and timeless: important arguments require evidence, and quantitative evidence requires statistical evaluation. Some essays examine deep and subtle statistical ideas such as the aggregation and regression paradoxes; others tell of the origin of the Average Man and the evaluation of fingerprints as a forerunner of the use of DNA in forensic science. Several of the essays are entirely nontechnical; all examine statistical ideas with an ironic eye for their essence and what their history can tell us about current disputes.

About the Author

Stephen M. Stigler is Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago.

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Blue Whale Books is a used and rare bookstore on the historic downtown mall of Charlottesville, Virginia, about equidistant from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and the University of Virginia. We have a stock of about 25,000 volumes in most subjects; our general tendency is towards scholarly books. We also stock antiquarian maps, and have a very large selection of antiquarian prints.

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Blue Whale Books, Inc.
115 West Main St., Charlottesville, VA, 22902, U.S.A.

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