Statistical Data Analysis
Books for Inquiring Minds

eLEments of Statistics
Structure of Statistics
by David J. Krus

Throughout my years in academe I have seen many texts about statistics and have used various texts for learning, teaching, and research. In most of these texts, however, there seems to be a fundamentally illogical way of presenting the material to be learned.  Typically, statistical techniques are presented as discrete units with little or no relationship to other techniques. This seems particularly true of inferential statistics. I remember taking classes where satisfactory completion of the course was possible by progressing from one technique to another with little reference to previous methods once they were mastered. Moreover, there is often no explanation for the computational algorithms that underlie a statistical function. Students typically follow a 'cookbook' approach and obtain a number which is supposed to explain something that has been measured but is, in most cases, relatively meaningless. Nevertheless, proficiency in such a process does satisfy a requirement of mastery. Another commonality in standard statistical texts is that few contain explanations of the rationale for statistics as a legitimate field for scientific inquiry which would satisfy the inquiring and skeptical minds of the liberal arts students. Statistical methods are often presented with little or no justification as to why statistics is required knowledge for the  scientific enterprise. When such information is omitted statistics appear, quite understandably, as necessary evil that is cold and vacuous. This is not this type of a book.

This book presents statistics as the modern successor to the study of epistemology. It places the learning of its major concepts within the context of the basic tenets of scientific investigation. Professor Krus has meticulously created a refreshingly and brilliantly creative treatise on statistical theory and application. The story is made one with great skill: there is the knowledge we seek; here are the principles we use; the concepts, computations, and logic behind what we do; our results and what they mean; how these results fit in; and what these results mean. Essentially, this is the philosopher-scientist model of inquiry which has served our search for knowledge since Aristotle. It is an implicit assumption throughout this book that the search for knowledge is a basic drive of human existence.

This text presents statistics in such a way as to minimize anxiety and to maximize interest and learning. Those of you who are novices will learn systematic and objective methods of measuring and analyzing things you experience or wish to know about. Those of you who have had statistics before may become enlightened to the unique and creative way statistical data analysis can be expressed as information and realize that your knowledge about statistics has now been made whole. I truly hope that this book becomes a part of your knowledge-seeking armamentarium as it has mine.

Professor James M. Webb
Kent State University

If you want to evaluate the relationship between variables, you can perform correlation and regression analyses. Visual Statistics with Multimedia  is an excellent resource for the details of these analyses.

Professor Cale Jacobs
University of Kentucky

Elements of Epistemology
by David J. Krus

A proposition is meaningful only if it is verifiable. A proposition is verifiable only if it can be proved or disproved or can be deduced from other propositions which are verifiable. Statements that are not verifiable are cognitively meaningless although they may possess emotive meaning. - Krus’ summary of Mach’s logical positivism. That’s kind of a neat site if you want to know the ground-level basics of epistemology.

In Logical Positivism 101 by Rev. B.

Ages of Enlightenment
by David J. Krus

The dialectical process consists of three stages:

(1) The thesis (any phenomenon at any stage of its development)
(2) The antithesis (its logical opposite or pragmatic contradiction)
(3) The synthesis (the new phenomenon which has emerged from the previous period of disorganization)

A given society may function in apparent calm and tranquility for generations, only to suffer a sudden and apparently inexplicable collapse. Certain forces were present in the society beneath the surface which eventually led to its disorganization and the establishment of a new order. This new order will be drastically different from the society which it superseded, but it too will be a transitory phase. Eventually a third organization of society will appear which may continue for generations.

Of those things which are "drastically different" and which established the "new order", we would have to place the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism at the top of the list. If the "establishment of a new order" were the synthesis as most of us have previously thought, then what are we going to call the "third organization of society"?  This has puzzled me for a long time, but I may have found a more satisfactory analysis of the dialectic process. My recent research took me to a web page about "The Hegelians", which turns out to be a chapter of an online book. There I found "The Dialectical Spiral", which shows that "theses vs. antitheses" are not two distinct stages, but a process of conflict, followed by a period of conflict resolution, or problem solving, as the synthesis. It defines transcendence  as the final outcome which we can clearly identify with the "third organization of society":

The dialectic discourse can be visualized as an ascending spiral, where its first convolution reflects the conflict (theses vs. antitheses), the second convolution the conflict resolution (synthesis), and the third convolution its transcendence. This model assumes that by liberating ourselves from the irrational modes of thinking and reasoning encapsulated in the paleocortex, we will be able to learn how to ascend the dialectical staircase and build a better society with the liberty, justice, and prosperity for all. However, Hegel's principal contribution to philosophy is his concept of alienation that was elaborated by Karl Marx.

After dealing with the Theory of Alienation, it presents The Dialectic Tetrad which a Yahoo search doesn't find anywhere else:

The method of critical reasoning Marx preferred was the dialectic (from the Greek dialektike techne, the art of discussion). Dialectics is a philosophic form of debate. As described by Greek philosophers of antiquity and ubiquitous in writings of secular philosophers afterwards, the rational discourse aimed at conflict resolution subsumes theses, antitheses, synthesis, and transcendence. While most of the writings on the topics of preceding paragraphs is strong on the theses - antitheses phases of this ongoing controversy, it lacks on the synthesis and transcendence phases of the dialectic tetrad. The tertiary and quadrennial phases of this conundrum were formulated by the philosophers of the French Enlightenment and incorporated into the Constitution of the United States by our founding fathers, unequivocally affirming the freedom of expression and separation of secular and ecclesiastic powers, a sine qua non of rational discussion and rational conflict resolutions.

Of course, this is dealing with philosophical debate as we see going on in academia, but Marx made the dialectic relevant to the social agenda and academia appears to control that as well.

The book is Ages of Enlightenment by David J. Krus, Ph.D. This book deals with several of our favorite topics from a perspective which I have not seen otherwise. I think you will find it very interesting and well worth the time.

Reviewed by B. Garner in The Dialectic Tetrad and the Third Organization of Society
 

War-related deflections of economic trends 
in Visual Statistics Illustrated
 

I make a habit of periodically reviewing my earlier forecasts for accuracy in content and timing, and a determination of which underlying assumptions remain valid and for those that are not, why not. While this can be a bracing exercise, humbling in various respects, it is an invaluable learning experience for content and process, and for restraining ex cathedra pronouncements that imply more solemnity than they deserve. If you fancy yourself a systems thinker or are interested in flagging secondary and tertiary effects, I recommend the process highly. At a minimum, it will drive you from single-loop learning, e.g., asking what could we do better, to double-loop learning, e.g., asking if we are asking the right questions and then asking about better or worse. (If you get that far, you will have exceeded what almost every US corporation does in applied knowledge.)

Still worth reading today is Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000, published in 1987. Kennedy has been criticized for making predictions that "have not fared well over the past decade and more," as things look rather different in 2005. The EU is in disarray while China has surged as has India. A forecast that is not fairing quite as well in my estimation is D'Souza's (2000) The Virtue of Prosperity,  which is far more coarse in its criticism of Kennedy ("Never was a book so spectacularly discredited by events.") and is virtually hagiographic in depicting the US as enjoying "unprecedented domination over the political, economic, cultural, and technological life of the world." I think not.

I'll close this note with a highly recommended (and short) War-related deflections of economic trends in which Krus, Nelsen and Webb put at once to shame the fallacy of making linear growth assumptions as it compares and extrapolates three centuries of economic trends of Eastern and Western civilization. Their work is also a good example of mitigation - good for the West and bad for the East - in that the trend convergence following World War I was deflected by World War II, without which the "combined economies of the Far East countries appeared likely to surpass the industrial output of Western countries" by 2010-2020. The mitigation of World War II "delayed the projected intersection of these trends" to the 2040-2050 period, a figure that fits well with other economic forecasts.

Reviewed by Gordon Housworth in Trends and Timing of the Pax Americana. ICG Capital Group, 2005.
 

Schola Latina Universalis
by David J. Krus

Very unique.

Nicely done Latin textbook with some wonderful illustrations.

Other Comments

I found a visual statistics site that offers a great articulation of the value of visual data analysis:

Visual statistics, conceptualized as modern successor of epistemology in search for meaning, can help us to separate facts from fiction, has potential to transcend the schism between the quantitative and qualitative approaches to data analysis, and, in general, can contribute to the better understanding of our world. It can offer new algorithms for visualization of data structures rotated in the three-dimensional space, provide us with insights into the hyperspace, and much more.

This is a magnificent website. I'm just beginning to realize how many tools are included.

Je downloaded votre software et l' installe chez mon computer. Par la première vue il fait une impressions plaisante de une combinassions de mathématiques aride et des effets de chaude design qui approche de la expression artistique.