"How to Statisticulate"

"Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write." ~H.G. Wells

Our class is based off of the numerous ways people use to mislead others with statistics. Due to statistics becoming more and more involved with the media, it is critical that everyone becomes just as much educated in the topic of statistics and how they are utilized both in positive and negative ways. Statistical thinking is not just a set structure on observing, analyzing and identifying data sets and how they are presented. Statistical thinking also readily involves recognizing your own prejudice or misinformed information. It connects the reader or viewer to the numerous accounts of statistics in relation to one another, how they are perceived and how they are then registered from abstract numbers to a valued "sacraments." Within each of our class discussions, we have not mentioned the same, exact problems with statistics, nor have we brought up one permanent, set way in which to identify such issues. Statistical thinking allows for us to expand on the various aspects of statistics and how they are effected, in turn effecting us in daily lives. This way of statistical thinking is not only presented in class or on the web, but also in books such as How to Lie with Statistics, written by Darrell Huff in 1993. This book covers many of the same issues we have in class. This is easily recognized by only looking at the front cover-a man sweeping numbers "under the rug" to keep them out of view. This illustration is not only a symbol of fraud that could be attained through statistics, but it also represents the reader's or viewer's felt need to look at everything "face-value," with barely a notion of how valid the remaining image appears. As shown by many of ours' delight in window shopping or how we judge if someone looks nice or not based on what they look life, are both great examples of people trusting what they see on the outside, a passing glance of an article which may effect your stance on an important issue. That is why our class and others like it is so important. Darrell Huff calls it "How to statisticulate", H.G. Wells calls it "statistical thinking." Is there a newt of a difference? No! But the concepts  are convincingly the same: That reading between the lines does not only represent reading between sentences. It also represents reading between the numbers-a perceptive alternative to becoming a smart-...hm...cookie! (:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728

"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so." ~Artemus Ward