Literature Index

Many commissions on education have warned that over the next decade, the U. S. will face a critical shortage of skilled workers thereby reducing the ability to compete globally. Numeracy (quantitative literacy) and the ability to put into effect quality improvement principles are among the critical skills workers need in preparing for the future. Businesses and educational institutions have targeted middle school students as the primary pools for these skilled workers and toward this goal have developed joint ventures to give these students an awareness of numeracy and quality improvement. This author has engaged in such a joint venture designed to interest Baltimore city middle-school students in pursuing careers in the Statistical and Quality Sciences.

Perhaps the simplest and the most basic qualitative law of probability is the conjunction rule: The probability of a conjunction, P(A&B), cannot exceed the probabilities of its constituents, P(A) and P(B), because the extension (or the possibility set) of the conjunction is included in the extension of its constituents. Judgments under uncertainty, however, are often mediated by intuitive heuristics that are not bound by the conjunction rule. A conjunction can be more representative than one of its constituents, and instances of a specific category can be easier to imagine or to retrieve than instances of a more inclusive category. The representativeness and availability heuristics therefore can make a conjunction appear more probable than one of its constituents. This phenomena is demonstrated in a variety of contexts including estimation of word frequency, personality judgment, medical prognosis, decision under risk, suspicion of criminal acts, and political forecasting. Systematic violations of the conjunction rule are observed in judgments of lay people and of experts in both between-subjects and within- subjects comparisons. Alternative interpretations of the conjunction fallacy are discussed and attempts to combat it are explored.

This article shows how to use Microsoft Excel to get data from the Internet into a statistically usable form.

About 800 students each year enroll in a subject Introduction to Biostatistics at the University of Otago. It is a compulsory subject for students applying to enter the health sciences professional courses. At school there are two subjects, mathematics with calculus and mathematics with statistics, with many students studying only one of these the year before university. There is debate about which one best prepares students for gaining the high marks in biostatistics necessary for entry to the competitive professional health sciences programmes. The school syllabus in mathematics with statistics is first compared with that in Introduction to Biostatistics. Results from the analysis of marks achieved in biostatistics are reported. The fitted regression models show prior knowledge of statistics from the school subject has no effect on performance in biostatistics, that there is no gender effect and that prior knowledge of calculus may be beneficial. Reasons for these results are discussed and proposals made to improve the presentation of statistics to students of the health and biological sciences.