Statistics Today

Prof. Dr. Claus Weihs worked as a statistical consultant at Ciba-Geigy in Switzerland for more than 9 years before joining the Statistics Department of Dortmund University as a professor of Computational Statistics. After holding the chair for 25 years, he is now Professor Emeritus. His areas of expertise are statistical classification, statistics in engineering, and the statistical analysis of music data and linguistic data.

Prof. Dr. Walter Krämer has held the chair for Business and Economic Statistics at the Statistics Department of Dortmund University for 30 years. He is the author of numerous popular texts on the use and abuse of statistics and is currently engaged in the initiative "Unstatistik des Monats" (Bad Statistic of the Month) to check media coverage of statistical results.

Prof. Dr. Sarah Buschfeld is a full professor of English Linguistics (Multilingualism) at Dortmund University, after previous appointments at the universities of Regensburg and Cologne. She has worked and published on a number of linguistic topics and disciplines, including postcolonial and non-postcolonial varieties of English and the field of language acquisition and multilingualism.

Preface.- Part I Human Life, Medicine, and Genetics.- Season of birth and human longevity: A new theory why children born in November live longer.- Where do drugs work in the body? A systematic statistical data analysis.- Drug studies: Using statistics to achieve the optimal dose.- Statistical alarm systems in intensive care medicine.- Personalized medicine: How statistics helps not to drown in the flood of data.- Modulating genetic effects on bladder cancer risk in an area of coal, iron, and steel industries.- Statistics and the maximum human lifespan.- Part II Sports and Entertainment.- Statistics and soccer.- The players' anxiety at the penalty kick: Who is the best penalty taker, who the best goalkeeper?.- Music data analysis.- Statistics and horse race betting - favorites vs. longshots.- The statistics of the German 6/49 lotto.- Part III Money and Business.- Statistics at the stock exchange.- Statistics in the risk assessment of bank portfolios.- On rating the raters: Statistics in the rating industry.- Gross domestic product, greenhouse gas emissions, and global warming.- Part IV Nature and Technology.- Flood statistics: Still on the river bank or already in the water?.- How statistics helps to reduce rejects.- Statistics and reliability of technical products.- Durable machine components: How statistical design of experiments optimizes wear protection.- Part V Intricacies of Measurement.- Measuring the immeasurable: Statistics, intelligence, and education.- Uncovering embarrassing truths through statistics.- Samples and missing data.- Part VI Language Data.- Who is supposed to read all this? Automatic analysis of text data.- Statistical modeling of current linguistic realities around the world: The case of Singapore.- Linguistic manifestations of cultural differences across national varieties of English - a methodological survey.- Part VII From Here to Where?.- Isdata science more than statistics? The bigger picture.