"An eye-opening and engrossing look at rare moments, why they occur, and how they shape our world In The Improbability Principle, the renowned statistician David J. Hand unveils his groundbreaking argument that extraordinarily rare events are in fact commonplace. Weaving together fascinating new ways to think about chance, Hand highlights his "law of near enough," the "look elsewhere effect," and more, doing for probability what Newton's laws of...

Introduces the concepts of probability to help baseball fans develop a better understanding of the game.

Reveals how practitioners of the new, revolutionary statistical analysis in baseball think about numbers and the game, covering hitting, pitching, fielding, roster construction, scouting, and drafting.

"In the era of big data, it is easy to imagine that we have all the information we need to make good decisions. But in fact the data we have are never complete, and may be only the tip of the iceberg. Just as much of the universe is composed of dark matter, invisible to us but nonetheless present, the universe of information is full of dark data that we overlook at our peril. In Dark Data, data expert David Hand takes us on a fascinating and enlightening...

A Professor of International Health and popular global TED speaker and his son and daughter-in-law who co-founded the Gapminder Foundation, explain how the best guesses, thoughts and concepts we accept as fact are actually tempered and informed by unconscious and predictable biases.

"...in The Cooperstown Casebook, Jay Jaffe shows us how to use his revolutionary ranking system to ensure the right players are recognized. The foundation of Jaffe?s approach is his JAWS system, an acronym for the Jaffe WAR Score, which he developed over a decade ago. Through JAWS, each candidate can be objectively compared on the basis of career and peak value to the players at his position who are already in the Hall of Fame. Because of its utility,...

Author has found clever devices to scale down everything from time lines (the history of Earth compressed into one year), to quantities (all the wealth in the world divided into one hundred coins), to size differences (the planets shown as different types of balls).

"The best-selling author of Policy Paradox, a classic on politics, delivers a pathbreaking work on the simple act of counting. Early in her extraordinary career, Deborah Stone wrote Policy Paradox, a landmark work on politics. Now, in Counting, she revolutionizes how we approach numbers and shows how counting shapes the way we see the world. Most of us think of counting as a skill so basic that we see numbers as objective, indisputable facts. Not...

Did you know that baseball players whose names begin with the letter "D†? are more likely to die young? Or that Asian Americans are most susceptible to heart attacks on the fourth day of the month? Or that drinking a full pot of coffee every morning will add years to your life, but one cup a day increases the risk of pancreatic cancer? All of these "facts†? have been argued with a straight face by credentialed researchers and backed up with reams...