Remarkable selection of puzzlers, graded in difficulty, that illustrate both elementary and advanced aspects of probability. Selected for originality, general interest or because they demonstrate valuable techniques, the problems are ideal as a supplement to courses in probability or statistics, or as stimulating recreation for the mathematically minded. Detailed solutions. Illustrated.

This work explains the purpose of statistical methods in medical studies and analyzes the statistical techniques used by clinical investigators, with special emphasis on studies published in "The New England Journal of Medicine". It clarifies fundamental concepts of statistical design and analysis, and facilitates the understanding of research results.

From his unique perspective, renowned statistician and educator Frederick Mosteller describes many of the projects and events in his long career. From humble beginnings in western Pennsylvania to becoming the founding chairman of Harvard University's Department of Statistics and beyond, he inspired many statisticians, scientists, and students with his unabashed pragmatism, creative thinking, and zest for both learning and teaching. This candid account offers fresh insights into the qualities that made Mosteller a superb teacher, a prolific scholar, a respected leader, and a valued advisor.

A special feature of the book is its chapter-length insider accounts of work on the pre-election polls of 1948, statistical aspects of the Kinsey report on sexual behavior in the human male, mathematical learning theory, authorship of the disputed Federalist papers, safety of anesthetics, and a wide-ranging examination of the Coleman report on equality of educational opportunity.

This volume is a companion to Selected Papers of Frederick Mosteller (Springer, 2006) and A Statistical Model: Frederick Mosteller's Contributions to Statistics, Science, and Public Policy (Springer-Verlag, 1990).

Frederick Mosteller (1916-2006) was Roger I. Lee Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Harvard University. His manuscript was unfinished at his death and has been updated.

How is medicine doing at the end of the twentieth century? While there has been no end of studies of our health care system and proposals for changing it, there have been few credible studies of the risks and benefits of widely used medical treatments. We simply do not always know whether one treatment is better than another or whether a particular drug is worth the price. Medical technology assessment is the discipline that studies what does and does not work in medicine. Howard Frazier and Frederick Mosteller are leading figures in this field. In Medicine Worth Paying For they attempt something completely new: to distill the methods and knowledge base of their highly specialized discipline into a text that is accessible-and therefore of great value-to a nontechnical audience. This book calls attention to the importance of technology assessment in medicine-the rigorous evaluation of the effects of medical treatments-with particular reference to medical innovations. Also, making use of a series of carefully selected cases, the authors identify important policy implications that can be drawn from the study of successful medical innovations. These case studies of medical successes are a rich source of examples of the effects, good and bad, of the application of technology to health care and of attempts to influence the diffusion of technologies in health care. Medicine Worth Paying For should be of interest to a variety of readers, particularly those concerned with health policy, investigators studying health services, those in the health professions, nonprofessionals who wish to maintain and improve the performance of the health care system, and others who simply want a system that provides benefits greater than risks at an acceptable financial cost.

2012 Reprint of 1955 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. A stochastic process is one in which the probabilities of a set of events keep changing with time. Bush and Mosteller make use of the mathematical techniques developed for the study of such processes in building a theory of learning and then apply the theory to explain the results of several learning experiments. Contents: Part I: The mathematical system and the general model -- 1. The basic model -- 2. Stimulus sampling and conditioning -- 3. Sequences of events -- 4. Distributions of response probabilities -- 5. The equal alpha condition -- 6. Approximate methods -- 7. Operators with limits zero and unity -- 8. Commuting operators -- Part II: Applications -- 9. Identification and estimation -- 10. Free-recall verbal learning -- 11. Avoidance training -- 12. An experiment on imitation -- 13. Symmetric choice problems -- 14. Runway experiments -- 15. Evaluations.