Readings

Textbook

This textbook is NOT required. It is for students who feel they need an additional resource. It is also an excellent tool for brushing up on statistics.Schaum's Outline of Business Statistics helps you understand basic concepts and offers extra practice on topics you'll encounter in your introductory- and intermediate-level courses. With this book, you'll understand and master the basic methods of statistical description, statistical inference, decision analysis, and process control. You will also learn about frequency distributions, histograms and frequency polygons, frequency curves, sampling distribution of the mean, and more.

Citation: Kazmier, L. J. (2011). Business statistics : Schaum's Outlines. New York : McGraw-Hill.

Innumeracy: Mathematical illiteracy and its consequences. Sprinkling his discussion of numbers and probabilities with quirky stories and anecdotes, Paulos ranges freely over many aspects of modern life, from contested elections to sports stats, from stock scams and newspaper psychics to diet and medical claims, sex discrimination, insurance, lotteries, and drug testing. Readers of Innumeracy will be rewarded with scores of astonishing facts, a fistful of powerful ideas, and, most important, a clearer, more quantitative way of looking at their world.

Citation: Paulos, J. A. (2008). Innumeracy: Mathematical illiteracy and its consequences. New York: Hill and Wang. Available at numerous CUNY Libraries. Call number: QA93 .P38 1988

Freakonomics : A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everythingWhich is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask--but Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life--from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing--and his conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head.

Citation: Levitt, S., & Dubner, Stephen J. (2005). Freakonomics : A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (1st ed.). New York: William Morrow. Available at numerous CUNY Libraries. Call number: HB74 .P8 L479 2005

Superfreakonomics: Global cooling, patriotic prostitutes, and why suicide bombers should buy life insurance.Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with more iconoclastic insight and observations in this follow-up to Freakonomics.

Citation: Levitt, S. D., & Dubner, S. J. (2009). Superfreakonomics: Global cooling, patriotic prostitutes, and why suicide bombers should buy life insurance. New York, NY: Morrow. Available at the New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, Queens Public Library

Thinking, Fast and Slow. by Daniel Kahneman. We learn why we mistake statistical noise for coherent patterns; why the stock-picking of well-paid investment advisers and the prognostications of pundits are worthless; why businessmen tend to be both absurdly overconfident and unwisely risk-averse; and why memory affects decision making in counterintuitive ways. Kahneman's primer adds to recent challenges to economic orthodoxies about rational actors and efficient markets; more than that, it's a lucid, marvelously readable guide to spotting—and correcting—our biased misunderstandings of the world. -Publisher's Weekly

Citation: Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The Research Methods Knowledge Base This has some very good explanations of statistical concepts. Through its conversational, informal style it makes material that is often challenging for students both accessible and understandable.

Trochim, W.M.K. (2001). The Research Methods Knowledge Base Cincinnati, OH: Atomic Dog Publishing. There are newer editions.