The book contains hundreds of engaging, class-tested statistics exercises (and detailed solutions) that test students' understanding of the material. Many are educational in their own right-for example, baseball managers who played professional ball were often catchers; stocks that are deleted from the Dow Jones Industrial Average have generally done better than the stocks that replaced them; athletes may not get hot hands but they often get warm hands with modest improvements in their success probabilities.

Gary Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College. He has won two teaching awards and written (or co-authored) more than 100 academic papers and 20 books. His statistical and financial research has been featured in various media, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Wired, NPR Tech Nation, NBC Bay Area, CNBC, WYNC, WBBR Bloomberg Radio, NBC Think, Silicon Valley Insider, Motley Fool, Scientific American, Forbes, MarketWatch, MoneyCentral.msn, NewsWeek, Fast Company, The Economist, MindMatters, OZY, Slate, and BusinessWeek.