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I'm writing a book about the many ways well-intentioned scientists can (and usually do) screw up statistics: http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/ http://www.ref
by capnrefsmmat 13y ago
I'm writing a book about the many ways well-intentioned scientists can (and usually do) screw up statistics:
http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/ http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/
I started when I was an undergraduate physics major. My entire statistics education consisted of thirty minutes being told not to use R^2. I started reading about statistical abuses and realized that I would probably have committed most of them had I published research -- my training was entirely inadequate. Most scientists do only slightly better.
Combine this with a bit of unhealthy obsession and I ended up with 14,000 words of explanation, which I promptly published online.
My current draft is at 28,000 words and climbing, but I'm having more fun writing than figuring out what to do with it. I'm quietly hoping a serious publisher will notice and approach me, saving me the effort of writing a proposal and getting it rejected however many times before someone picks it up.
(happy to share a draft with anyone interested! Email is in my profile)
- scaphandre 13y agoLooks interesting. I don't see a prominent link to a full pdf version of the draft of the website. Any reason why not?
- capnrefsmmat 13y agoAt the time the website was done, I hadn't sufficiently hacked Sphinx to make good PDFs. My current draft has a nice PDF but it's still incomplete -- a couple half-finished chapters and such. I am also wondering whether I should release the PDF at all, if I could publish or self-publish it later.
- mkmkmmmmm 13y agoWhy not self-publish? There are quite a few distribution sites.
- sreejithr 13y agoInteresting. My statistics knowledge has become rusty lately. I want to re-learn the basics before reading this. Can you tell me any resource (doesn't necessarily have to be a book)? P.S: I'm interested in knowing stuff like 'why square-root of variance is standard deviation?". Concepts.
- capnrefsmmat 13y agoYou might find OpenIntro Statistics helpful: http://www.openintro.org/stat/textbook.php http://www.openintro.org/stat/textbook.php It's a free online statistics textbook, also available in print. I haven't used it extensively, so I can't vouch for its quality -- actually, I complain about it a bit in Statistics Done Wrong. But I've never come across a very good conceptual introduction to statistics, so this is roughly the best I know. There are also amusing variations, like the cartoon guide to statistics: http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Guide-Statistics-Larry-Gonick/dp/0062731025 http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Guide-Statistics-Larry-Gonick/... If you find a useful resource, I'd like to hear what worked for you.
- vdimarco 13y agoO'Rielly's 'Think Stats' is freely available in html/pdf online and is quite good. http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkstats/ http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkstats/