ybooks

Readers

David Spiegelhalter

Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge and author of The Art of Statistics.

5 books on the record · 25 Sep 2011 – 25 Sep 2011 · @d_spiegel

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

liked it

Damned Lies and Statistics by Joel Best

I like this book because one of the things that really irritates me as a statistician is when numbers are bandied around as though they are God-given truths and can't be argued with.

on fivebooks.com · 25 Sep 2011

recommends it

Dicing with Death by Stephen Senn

This book is somewhat similar to The Drunkard's Walk in that it covers the history of probability. But since Stephen's background is in medical statistics, he looks at clinical trials and other medical studies.

on fivebooks.com · 25 Sep 2011

loved it

Do You Feel Lucky? by Kjartan Poskitt

This is part of the Murderous Maths series, and is my favourite book. It is great. It is a book for secondary school kids full of cartoons and lovely characters like this filthy boy called Pongo McWhiffy, or the one I like best is an upper-class idiot called Binky Smallbrains who falls for every trick. It is a book about chance, luck and probability, and these are difficult things that people have to learn about at school. This book really cracks through it. It starts with probability trees

on fivebooks.com · 25 Sep 2011

recommends it

How Risky Is It, Really? by David Ropeik

Yes, this is a completely non-technical book, which is looking at things from the point of view of psychology. It is essentially a review of the recent research on risk perception.

on fivebooks.com · 25 Sep 2011

recommends it

The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

This is a general introduction to the history of probability and the way it comes into everyday life. It intersperses the historical development with modern applications, and looks at finance, sport, gambling, lotteries and coincidences.

on fivebooks.com · 25 Sep 2011

Everything David Spiegelhalter recommends — not just books — on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.