Preface ix

PART 1 The Basics

1. Statistics: The Life of the Party 3

2. Lions, and Tigers, and . . . Bigfoot? Oh, My: How Questionable Data Can Screw Up an Otherwise Perfectly Good Statistical Analysis 7

3. Asteroid Belts and Spandex Cars: Using Descriptive Statistics to Answer Your Most Weighty Questions 23

4. Baseball, Game Shows, and Sidekicks: Who Cares about Probability Anyway? 43

5. What It’s Like to Be Normal: Probability Distributions and One Rule That Could Make You Wildly Popular 63

PART 2 What a Few Estimates and a Little Probability Can Do for You

6. Men Are Insensitive and Women Are Illogical. Really: Asserting Your Stereotypes with Confidence 89

7. Godzilla versus King Kong: How Hypothesis Tests Can Be Used to Settle the Battle of the Movie Monsters 109

8. Lab Rats and Roommates: Analysis of Variance and How to Channel Your Inner Mad Scientist 129

9. When the Zombie Flu Went Viral: Regressing the Myth Out of Urban Myths 143

Appendix A: Critical Values for the Standard Normal Distribution 161

Appendix B: Critical Values for the T-Distribution 163

Appendix C: Critical Values for the Chi-Squared Distribution 165