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.

This book offers a broad selection of statistical applications to everyday situations, illustrating how exciting and diverse statistical analysis can be. It covers a wide variety of topics, including offering hearing-impaired people the option to enjoy music, extracting meaningful quantitative data from texts, and modeling flood disasters to help get a better grip on them. Most of the examples are not typically found in textbooks but directly relate to real-life problems encountered by the “average person”, including topics relevant for sustainable development. Technical jargon and formalism have been avoided as much as possible, and a detailed statistical background is not assumed of the reader, making the book accessible to anyone interested in current research in statistical applications. Providing an unobscured look at a thoroughly fascinating science, it will help students to develop enthusiasm for statistical issues and methods, and may even inspire ideas for their ownprojects.