A Guide to the Unknown

People who discuss teaching with me soon learn that I’m a big fan of the late Frederick Mosteller, and that one of my favorite undergraduate texts was Tanur and Mosteller’s Statistics: A Guide to the Unknown (SAGTU). This book is a collection of essays about applications of statistics; all the essays are written for a layman, with minimal mathematical exposition. The book was the result of a joint project in statistical literacy between the ASA and the NCTM, begun in 1969; the first edition appeared in 1971. I originally discovered a raggedy first edition in a UT Austin book sale, and was disappointed to find that the third edition had gone out of print when I tried to order it for a course. Two years ago, a completely revised fourth edition, edited by Roxy Peck, was published by Thomson Learning, and I use it in my statistical literacy course every semester. Other professors would like to use some of the readings, but they’re reluctant to stick their students with another $50 book on top of the basic $100+ textbook needed for most statistics courses.

HOWEVER… my most excellent publisher’s representative, Ms. Kimberly Jones, put me wise to a wonderful resource provided by Thomson Learning: the entire text of the third edition of SAGTU is available online! For anyone teaching undergraduate statistics, this is one fantastic resource–heck, it even has an article by Mosteller on his work indentifying authorship of some of the disputed Federalist Papers.

Check it out.