QUESTIONS

1- Explain how the descriptive statistical procedure(s) could be used at work or in personal life.

2- Statistical techniques are used extensively by marketing, accounting, quality control, consumers, professional sportspeople, hospital administrators, educators, politicians, physicians, etc... As such a vital tool, statistics are often misused. Everyone has heard the joke (?) about the statistician who drowned in a river with an average depth of 3 feet or the person who boarded a plane with a bomb because "the odds of two bombs on the same plane are lower than one in one millionth". Find examples in the popular press of misuse of statistics.

3- Give an example of link of the worst data display in the media. Howard Wainer gives rules for how to make bad charts & graphs. Whichof Howard Wainer rules describes what's so bad about the example?

4- The below chart summarizes three categories of patients (those entering in fair, serious and critical condition) and the survival rate from surgery (in percent) for the two local hospitals.

Patient Entering Condition	Hospital A	Hospital B	Survivors from A (# and percent)	Survivors from B (# and percent)
Fair	700	100	600 or 86%	90 or 90%
Serious	200	200	100 or 50%	150 or 75%
Critical	100	700	10 or 10%	300 or 43%
Total	1000	1000	710 or 71%	540 or 54%

Looking at the data broken down in this way, we see that Hospital B has a higher success rate in all three categories of patients but when averaged all together, Hospital A has the higher overall survival rate.

Based on the numbers presented, which hospital do you think is superior in cardiac surgery?