Where we go from here

• Statistics in Sports
• Statistics in Court
• Assessing risk
• Health studies
• Employment equity
• Polling and market research
• Statistics and genetics
• Probability and you

For the next several weeks, I will organize readings around this list, with the most preferred topics given emphasis. Omitted from the ranking were two important, and I think interesting, topics: where to find data, and the news behind the news. I will try to make sure that these topics get covered as part of the discussion. Each week, I'll assign reading for the following week. The reading will form the basis for class discussion, and the discussion will be lead by two students. I'll also bring one or two newspaper articles, to be read and discussed in class.

Required for next week

Reading

"DNA, Statistics, and the Simpson Case", D.A. Berry, and "Improving the Odds on Justice?, R.Matthews, {\it Chance} {\bf 7}(4), 9--15.

Your task

Come prepared to discuss these articles, and to ask questions about the parts you didn't understand.

Technical Notes to follow

On conditional probability and Bayes theorem. (Conditional probability is the probability of an event, given that another, possibly related event, has occurred. Bayes theorem provides a mechanism for computing and comparing conditional probabilities.)

Further reading

I get most of the news articles from the Globe and Mail (as if you hadn't guessed), and from the WWW, on a page called Chance News. The bulk of the background articles come from the magazine Chance.

Some elementary statistics texts that could be helpful are

• Statistics: Concepts and Controversies. D.S. Moore (W.H. Freeman): 2nd ed.~1985; 3rd ed.~1991.
• Statistics. Freedman, Pisani, Purves, Adhikiri (W.W. Norton): 2nd ed.~1991.
• Statistics: a guide to the unknown. J.S. Tanur et al. (2nd ed.~1985).

If you have access to any of these books, you may find them helpful for expanded discussion of the short technical notes that I write. But they are not required reading. There are a few popular paperbacks that specifically address statistical issues in a non-technical way:

• Innumeracy. J.A. Paulos. Vintage Paperback, 1990.
• A mathematician reads the newspaper. J.A. Paulos. Vintage Paperback, 1995. John Allen Paulos is a talented popularizer of mathematical and statistical ideas. Although he's a bit pompous at times, these books are easy to read and quite informative. His 1991 book Beyond Innumeracy gave me the idea for the technical notes that I put at the end of lecture notes.
• Tainted truth: the manipulation of fact in America. C. Crossen. 1994 The author argues that quite a bit of misinformation hides behind statistics, and a bit of education in the basic ideas of statistics and probability, would go a long way to exposing the perpetrators.

If you're interested in aspects of polling, there is a nice collection of articles in the book

• Questions about Questions. J.M. Tanur, ed. Russell Sage Foundation, 1992.

What is the bell curve anyway(reprinted from last week)

One way to describe a measurement that varies in a population is to quote the frequency of each possible measurement in that population. (Think of the students lined up on the lawn of Penn. State, according to their height.) With many types of measurements, as you get a larger and larger population, with frequencies measured on a finer and finer grid, the plot of the frequencies will start to look like a curve of a very predictable form. (Think of getting 50 times as many students lined up by height classes, and taking a photo from an airplane. Then 5000 times as many students, seen from the space shuttle...)

The frequency curve has a particular mathematical expression, given on the handout in class. (If you have a postscript viewer you can look at it on the