Statistics Today: Everyday Applications, Research Questions, Insights, and Challenges

This book offers a broad selection of statistical applications to everyday situations, illustrating how exciting and diverse statistical analysis can be. It covers a wide variety of topics, including offering hearing-impaired people the option to enjoy music, extracting meaningful quantitative data from texts, and modeling flood disasters to help get a better grip on them. Most of the examples are not typically found in textbooks but directly relate to real-life problems encountered by the “average person”, including topics relevant for sustainable development.
Technical jargon and formalism have been avoided as much as possible, and a detailed statistical background is not assumed of the reader, making the book accessible to anyone interested in current research in statistical applications. Providing an unobscured look at a thoroughly fascinating science, it will help students to develop enthusiasm for statistical issues and methods, and may even inspire ideas for their own projects.

Prof. Dr. Claus Weihs worked as a statistical consultant at Ciba-Geigy in Switzerland for more than 9 years before joining the Statistics Department of Dortmund University as a professor of Computational Statistics. After holding the chair for 25 years, he is now Professor Emeritus. His areas of expertise are statistical classification, statistics in engineering, and the statistical analysis of music data and linguistic data.

Prof. Dr. Walter Krämer has held the chair for Business and Economic Statistics at the Statistics Department of Dortmund University for 30 years. He is the author of numerous popular texts on the use and abuse of statistics and is currently engaged in the initiative “Unstatistik des Monats” (Bad Statistic of the Month) to check media coverage of statistical results.

Prof. Dr. Sarah Buschfeld is a full professor of English Linguistics (Multilingualism) at Dortmund University, after previous appointments at the universities of Regensburg and Cologne. She has worked and published on a number of linguistic topics and disciplines, including postcolonial and non-postcolonial varieties of English and the field of language acquisition and multilingualism.