Statistics on the table : the history of statistical concepts and methods
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Statistics on the table : the history of statistical concepts and methods
Harvard University Press, 2002
- : pbk
Available at 22 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 433-475) and index
First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2002
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Statistics and Social Science Karl Pearson and the Cambridge Economists The Average Man is 167 Years Old Jevons as Statistician Jevons on the King-Davenant Law of Demand Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Statistician 2. Galtonian Ideas Galton and Identification by Fingerprints Stochastic Simulation in the Nineteenth Century The History of Statistics in 1933 Regression toward the Mean Statistical Concepts in Psychology 3. Some Seventeenth-Century Explorers Apollo Mathematicus The Dark Ages of Probability John Craig and the Probability of History 4. Questions of Discovery Stigler's Law of Eponymy Who Discovered Bayee's Theorem? Daniel Bernoulli, Leonhard Euler, and Maximum Likelihood Gauss and the Invention of Least Squares Cauchy and the Witch of Agnesi Karl Pearson and Degrees of Freedom 5. Questions of Standards Statistics and Standards The Trial of the Pyx Normative terminology with W. H. Kruskal References Credits Index
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