McGraw-Hill Professional, 2000. - 288 pages.
From the Tower of Babel onward, humanity has had communication problems. Still, until now, we have gotten on tolerably well. Recently, this has not been enough. Over a century ago, L. L. Zamenhof recognized the need for a universal language and devised Esperanto for it. His language never did take off, but English did. And still this has not been enough.
Much of mode-day discourse demands greater precision than conventional language affords. From biology to baseball and from marketing to medicine to psychology, we collect numbers and communicate with them. Increasingly, we require means to organize these numbers and extract their information. Statistics is one such means.
Numerous professions and disciplines converse in statistics. Whether we realize it or not, so do most of us daily. Indeed, statistics has become a sufficiently prevalent form of communication to be considered a universal language.
Today we take our ability to manipulate numbers for granted. It has not always been so. Some of the simple arithmetic that we do quickly took hours for the medieval mathematician. Moreover, we compute interest, fill out tax forms, and inspect complicated bills as a matter of course. Apparently, we live on a level of abstraction that is ‘‘altogether beyond that of even our recent ancestors.1 But we are not always comfortable with it.
From the Tower of Babel onward, humanity has had communication problems. Still, until now, we have gotten on tolerably well. Recently, this has not been enough. Over a century ago, L. L. Zamenhof recognized the need for a universal language and devised Esperanto for it. His language never did take off, but English did. And still this has not been enough.
Much of mode-day discourse demands greater precision than conventional language affords. From biology to baseball and from marketing to medicine to psychology, we collect numbers and communicate with them. Increasingly, we require means to organize these numbers and extract their information. Statistics is one such means.
Numerous professions and disciplines converse in statistics. Whether we realize it or not, so do most of us daily. Indeed, statistics has become a sufficiently prevalent form of communication to be considered a universal language.
Today we take our ability to manipulate numbers for granted. It has not always been so. Some of the simple arithmetic that we do quickly took hours for the medieval mathematician. Moreover, we compute interest, fill out tax forms, and inspect complicated bills as a matter of course. Apparently, we live on a level of abstraction that is ‘‘altogether beyond that of even our recent ancestors.1 But we are not always comfortable with it.