Statistics Today

This book offers a broad selection of statistical applications to everyday situations, illustrating how exciting and diverse statistical analysis can be. It covers a wide variety of topics, including offering hearing-impaired people the option to enjoy music, extracting meaningful quantitative data from texts, and modeling flood disasters to help get a better grip on them. Most of the examples are not typically found in textbooks but directly relate to real-life problems encountered by the "average person", including topics relevant for sustainable development.
Technical jargon and formalism have been avoided as much as possible, and a detailed statistical background is not assumed of the reader, making the book accessible to anyone interested in current research in statistical applications. Providing an unobscured look at a thoroughly fascinating science, it will help students to develop enthusiasm for statistical issues and methods, and may even inspire ideas for their own projects.

Preface. -
Part I Human Life, Medicine, and Genetics. -
Season of birth and human longevity: A new theory why children born in November live longer. - Where do drugs work in the body? A systematic statistical data analysis. - Drug studies: Using statistics to achieve the optimal dose. - Statistical alarm systems in intensive care medicine. - Personalized medicine: How statistics helps not to drown in the flood of data. - Modulating genetic effects on bladder cancer risk in an area of coal, iron, and steel industries. - Statistics and the maximum human lifespan. -
Part II Sports and Entertainment. -
Statistics and soccer. - The players anxiety at the penalty kick: Who is the best penalty taker, who the best goalkeeper? . - Music data analysis. - Statistics and horse race betting favorites vs. longshots. - The statistics of the German 6/49 lotto. -
Part III Money and Business. -
Statistics at the stock exchange. - Statistics in the risk assessment of bank portfolios. - On rating the raters: Statistics in the rating industry. - Gross domestic product, greenhouse gas emissions, and global warming. -
Part IV Nature and Technology
. - Flood statistics: Still on the river bank or already in the water? . - How statistics helps to reduce rejects. - Statistics and reliability of technical products. - Durable machine components: How statistical design of experiments optimizes wear protection. -
Part V Intricacies of Measurement. -
Measuring the immeasurable: Statistics, intelligence, and education. - Uncovering embarrassing truths through statistics. - Samples and missing data. -
Part VI Language Data. -
Who is supposed to read all this? Automatic analysis of text data. - Statistical modeling of current linguistic realities around the world: The case of Singapore. - Linguistic manifestations of cultural differences across national varieties of English a methodological survey. -
Part VII From Here to Where? . -
Isdata science more than statistics? The bigger picture.