Art of Statistics by David Spiegelhalter, Chapter 4- What Causes What?

Learning a causal explanation for a phenomenon is satisfying. However, deciding what causes what is a very complicated issue. Anyone who has taken even a single statistics course would remember hearing the phrase "correlation does not mean causation." Why not? One of the ways of answering it says it is because the association between two...

Art of Statistics by David Spiegelhalter, Chapter 1: Getting Things in Proportion: Categorical Data and Percentages

Data science provides powerful information that we can't have without it. The book starts out with a concrete example of that which illustrates how useful statistics can be in uncovering a truth. Two surgeons and ex-chief executive were found guilty of serious misconduct for performing a heart surgery for children in Bristol despite knowing that...

Art of Statistics by David Spiegelhalter, Introduction

Data science is where you can't ask the question: "So do you use it in life?" That's probably the most common question math instructors get. But to a certain extent, no matter how complicated the mathematics gets, in a statistics class, students will not ask existential questions about what they learn in class. Maybe that's...

Tackling Anxiety (as suggested by Originals by Adam Grant)

First, you need to ask yourself if you are sufficiently motivated to carry out the challenge. If you are swerving in your decision whether to carry out a certain challenge, you must convince yourself to become determined. If it's the case that you are too scared of failure, you must channel your fear into excitement...

A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel

Modern Portfolio Theory attributed to Harry Markowitz says that you can maximize your rate of return by amalgamating a portfolio of diverse stocks in such a way that the risk of the portfolio as a whole is less than that of the individual stocks in it. This is another way of diversifying your portfolio. For...

Alex’s Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos

This book is as close as it can get to a concise encyclopedia of mathematical concepts. The best way to introduce it would be to show the notes I made for each chapter. These are not necessarily the best concepts that are mentioned in each chapter but are those that I thought were most interesting...

Bailout by Neil Barofsky

Modern Age Military Campaign for Power The financial crisis of 2007-2008 is barely ten years old but, upon reading Bailout by Neil Barofsky and A Little History of the World by Ernst Gombrich at the same time, I couldn't resist making the connection between the financial crisis of the modern era and the ancient conquests...

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Some of the most difficult ideas Few things I want to remember later on. The Earth is not flat Aristotle had at least two supporting evidence that the earth was not flat: 1) The earth's shadow on the moon was round, not flat, which would not happen unless the moon happened to come exactly in...

How Not to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff

Be Careful of Half Truths and Statisticulations Something New I Learned I didn't know that the word "average" could mean two different things. I always thought that the word referred to the mean and not the median. But Huff writes that it could refer to the mean, median, or mode, and authors usually pick one...

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

Don't Fall Prey This book starts out somewhat boring with some lessons I knew to be obvious, such as that one should live up to one's professional ethics, but it is a loss if one gets bored by them and stops reading before the end of the book. It contains some of the lessons that...