Truth or Truthiness: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think Like a Data Scientist

Part I. Thinking Like a Data Scientist: 1. How the rule of 72 can provide guidance to advance your wealth, your career and your gas mileage; 2. Piano virtuosos and the four-minute mile; 3. Happiness and causal inference; 4. Causal inference and death; 5. Using experiments to answer four vexing questions; 6. Causal inferences from observational studies: fracking, injection wells, earthquakes, and Oklahoma; 7. Life follows art: gaming the missing data algorithm; Part II. Communicating Like a Data Scientist: 8. On the crucial role of empathy in the design of communications: genetic testing as an example; 9. Improving data displays: the media's, and ours; 10. Inside-out plots; 11. A century and a half of moral statistics: plotting evidence to affect social policy; Part III. Applying the Tools of Data Science to Education: 12. Waiting for Achilles; 13. How much is tenure worth?; 14. Detecting cheating badly: if it could have been, it must have been; 15. When nothing is not zero: a true saga of missing data, adequate yearly progress, and a Memphis charter school; 16. Musing about changes in the SAT: is the college board getting rid of the bulldog?; 17. For want of a nail: why worthless subscores may be seriously impeding the progress of western civilization.

Howard Wainer is a Distinguished Research Scientist at the National Board of Medical Examiners. He has published more than four hundred articles and chapters in scholarly journals and books.