Elementary Statistics

Elementary Statistics (11th Edition)
$141.33
Our department has used Triola's statistics book for our large,
multi-section baby stats course for at least the past six years, and
it was through simple inertia that we adopted the 11th edition. Using
the earlier editions, I had almost begun to like Triola's
follow-the-recipe approach, and was able to make the course useful to
some of our students.

The 11th edition, however, is far worse than anything that came
before. The publishers have made numerous changes to format, style,
and content, and not one of them is for the better.

Format: The new edition has more clutter than ever in the margins.
Just about every page contains a distracting and usually irrelevant
sidebar, and color photographs (likewise irrelevant) push their way
into the text everywhere, as if the deisgners were trying to show off
their collection of pictures and their ability to flow text around
them. The actual text, when you can find it amid this clamoring
circus of marginal distractions, is marred by too-frequent changes in
background color and font size. It's difficult to read, and it's
difficult to orient oneself in the text, because the designers, while
splashing color and font changes all over the place, somehow managed
to make the chapter and section headings disappear. Just try to find
the beginning of Section 4-4. The decision to use a
proportional-space font in the tables of numbers on the Formulas and
Tables card suggests that the designer has never done any work with
tables of numbers.

Style: It's clear from the writing style that Dr. Triola is no longer
involved in the manufacture of the product that bears his name. (Or
else he had a very good copy editor in the earlier editions, who is
gone now.) A few paragraphs survive from the earlier editions, but
those that have been altered or inserted were written by someone
without the original author's grasp of English grammar. The new
author is also less careful about precise mathematical phrasing, and
is rather careless about things like referring to the probability of
an event that has already happened or the probability that a parameter
has a certain value. Many of the exercises now include a "tag-line"
question that is probably meant to help the students interpret the
results. A few of these questions are useful, but far more of them
require the student to speculate on or make judgments about subjects
with which he is almost certainly unfamiliar. In any case, they are
annoying, both to the student and to the instructor who must keep
repeating "Don't worry about that last part."

Content: How is it that later editions of the same book contain more
errors than earlier ones? Here are a few particularly nasty mistakes
that have been allowed into (or created for) the 11th edition:

Page 148, Exercise 9. "When rolling a single die at the Venetian
Casino in Las Vegas, there are 6 chances in 36 that the outcome is a
7." Does no one proofread these exercises? (Or does the Venetian
Casino really use 36-sided dice?)

Page 168, Exercise 17. The table supplied with the exercise is
missing its column headers. Again, this should have been caught by a
proofreader.

Page 433. There is an error in the presentation of the main formula
to be used in this section. And it's not just a slip-up in the
narrative text: The formula presented in the highlighted box is
incorrect. This is inexcusable. How could the proofreader have
missed it?

Page 484, Exercise 25. The exercise describes an observational study,
and concludes with the question "Should marijuana use be of concern to
college students?" The answer provided in the back of the book
suggests that the study shows a causal relationship between marijuana
use and impaired mental ability. This is in direct contradiction to
the rule that is so emphatically stated on pages 19 and 20: causality
may not be inferred from an observational study. The original author
would not have allowed such a blatant error to find its way into the
"officially correct" answers.

On the Formulas and Tables card -- the one that students use as a
reference when they're doing problems and taking exams -- the formula
for the chi-square test statistic is incorrect. How, then, are we to
trust anything else on this card? Where was the proofreader?

It does appear that Addison-Wesley, in the custom of the modern
producer of textbooks, rushed this edition through the mill, in order
to have all those overpriced copies on college bookstore shelves by
the beginning of the fall semester. In doing so, they apparently
omitted to have the book proofread or to give much thought to how
thoroughly the new design would discourage anyone from actually
reading it. Of course, it's possible that there's something even more
meretricious going on, and the publisher inserted the errors (all new
to the 11th edition) on purpose, so that the 11th edition could more
quickly be made obsolete, and replaced by an even more overpriced 12th
edition. I wouldn't put it past them.

Elementary Statistics: Picturing the World (4th Edition)
$141.33
I was assigned this book for teaching my 100-level college intro-stats course. It is much better organized than the previous book I used, but it isn't as thorough. Some topics, such as calculating a median and other percentiles using depth on an ordered list, are simply omitted in this book.

It seems that some topics are omitted or glossed over because they might be too complex for "Elementary" statistics. On the other hand, the more complex topics in the book, such as hypothesis testing -- a topic that students consistently have a hard time understanding -- are not covered in enough depth.

Our students are sold this book in a package with videos on CD, a study guide, and a couple other things. This package is, in my opinion, worthless to a student in a class. They may be valuable to someone teaching themselves, or to a student in an online class, but for a live class, I think they are a waste of money.

The CD videos show a teacher working through the topics and some of the problems in the book. However, the teacher seems to have, (hands flail) y'know, a highly repetitive, (hands flail) y'know, (hands flail) vocabulary (hands flail), and it's (hands flail) y'know (hands flail) really hard to (hands flail) y'know, watch him (hands flail) y'know, teach. Like his hands have a nervous tic or something. I'm sure I have my own quirks in class, but this guy... his hands are something else.

All in all, I think the book is pretty good, with solid examples, well-highlighted definitions and key points. The chapter exercises are good in that they start VERY easy and progress through up to reasonably difficult, while staying within the limits of the text.

I told my department head: I like the book, but I recommend it without the bonus materials (and associated costs!).

Elementary Statistics: A Step By Step Approach
$95.97
The book was brand new and came shrink wrapped with the cd and formula chart. It was a surprise to me though that it is the annotated instructor's edition, which has come to help me.

Elementary Statistics
$48.75
This book was in good condition and promptly sent. I would purchase from this buyer again.