"We are exposed daily to information from surveys and scientific studies concerning our health, behavior, attitudes, and beliefs, or revealing scientific and technological breakthroughs. This book's first objective is to help you understand this information and to sift the useful and the accurate from the useless and the misleading. My aims are to allow you to rely on your own interpretation of results emerging from surveys and studies and to help you read them with a critical eye so that you can make your own judgments. A second purpose of this book is to demystify statistical methods. Traditional statistics courses often place emphasis on how to compute rather than how to understand. This book focuses on statistical ideas and their use in real life. Finally, the book contains information that can help you make better decisions when faced with uncertainty. You will learn how psychological influences can keep you from making the best decisions (and what to do about it); new ways to think about coincidences, gambling, and other circumstances that involve chance events; how to interpret economic news; and more." --