All articles, notes, queries, corrigenda, and obituaries appearing in the following journals during the indicated years are indexed: Annals of mathematical statistics, 1961-1969; Biometrics, 1965-1969#3; Biometrics, 1951-1969; Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1956-1969; Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 1954-1969,#2; South African statistical journal, 1967-1969,#2; Technometrics, 1959-1969.--p.iv.
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.
WILEY-INTERSCIENCE PAPERBACK SERIES The Wiley-Interscience Paperback Series consists of selected books that have been made more accessible to consumers in an effort to increase global appeal and general circulation. With these new unabridged softcover volumes, Wiley hopes to extend the lives of these works by making them available to future generations of statisticians, mathematicians, and scientists. "Many examples drawn from the author’s experience of engineering applications are used to illustrate the theoretical results, which are presented in a cookbook fashion...it provides an excellent practical guide to the analysis of product-life data." –T.M.M. Farley Special Programme of Research in Human Reproduction World Health Organization Geneva, Switzerland Review in Biometrics, September 1983 Now a classic, Applied Life Data Analysis has been widely used by thousands of engineers and industrial statisticians to obtain information from life data on consumer, industrial, and military products. Organized to serve practitioners, this book starts with basic models and simple informative probability plots of life data. Then it progresses through advanced analytical methods, including maximum likelihood fitting of advanced models to life data. All data analysis methods are illustrated with numerous clients' applications from the author's consulting experience.
