📊The Art of Statistics

Statistics is not a set of tests. It is a way of getting from a question to an answer you can defend, and most of the work happens before any calculation: what exactly is being asked, what was measured, and what the data cannot say. Every estimate comes with uncertainty, and the honest job is to show that uncertainty in a form the listener can use.

• Started on Tuesday 27 May after the revision session, with a mock final of 70 in my bag and two weeks to go. Finished on Friday 13 June, three days after the exam, because the last chapters were not on the paper and I wanted them anyway.
• The book that made 📌 Statistics I - Final exam passable. It is on the further-reading list of 00. Statistics for Product Decisions I Hub, and I should have started with it. Hale teaches the arithmetic. Spiegelhalter explains what the arithmetic is for.
• Almost no formulas in the main text. Each chapter starts from a real question, and the glossary at the back is the one I now check before the lecture notes.
• Read half of it at Mum's kitchen table in Averley over the first weekend of June, between visiting hours.
• Two literature notes, which for me is a compliment. Book nine for 🎯 Finish 16 books and keep notes on the ones that matter.
• The final came back at 74.
• The statisticians I was reading about in the same weeks have their own notes: 🏛️ Florence Nightingale, 🏛️ Ronald Fisher and 🏛️ John Snow. Nightingale's 💬 It may seem a strange principle is the quote I file here, since the book itself is in copyright: counting as a way of not doing harm.