Author: Richard Parsons
By Coordination Group Publications Ltd

GCSE Maths - revision guide, 2010-01-06
useful - helped my son revise
arrived before 08.00 on next day delivery - v pleased!

Author: Richard Parsons
By Coordination Group Publications Ltd

Perfect, 2010-01-19
This set of SAT papers is perfect for my needs. My son is just turned seven, about to take end of key stage 1 SATs in May. I wanted some example papers so that I could see how he would fare in the real tests. He didn't get everything right but then that is the idea..it enables you to see where your child needs extra help - how you can help him to earn extra marks..and actually he found the English papers quite good fun. The maths papers are not quite so popular with him, but none the less, helps me know where to give him extra guidance. In classes with 30 children, it's beneficial if you can do a little extra work at home to boost their confidence, and fill the gaps that the teacher may have missed. You can do the tests again in a month or two and show them how well they have progressed.

Author: Richard Parsons
By Coordination Group Publications Ltd

fantastic addition to your book shelf!, 2008-08-22
I purchased this book roughly 6-7 weeks before the actual mathematics exam, thinking that it was too late to revise the majority of the year 9 curriculm. But I found it simple, fun and easy to understand because of its unique teaching methods. For instance it had useful pictures, strange jokes and questions at the end of each chapter to test your knowledge. All of which proved to be extremely helpful, due to the amount of time I had to revise.

This book is a life- saver that fills you with confidence,

Thanks CGP

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By Penguin

Intellectual earthquake, 2010-01-30
+
This is an important book. All intellectual people should read it. It should be a set text - certainly for all business school students. The trouble is that business schools would have trouble accepting much of what he has to say. Furthermore, Mr Taleb is unrestrainedly outspoken, so that he almost seems offensive. In the first half of the book, I wondered what kind of egomaniac was keeping me company. BUT his erudition and his arguments (and his rough charm) gradually and firmly win through. By the end of the book, I simply have to admit that he is correct.

To admit that he is correct is intellectually like an earthquake, since it shakes down the towers of many things taught in our conventional education, not least business school itself. If you accept he is correct and then go on with your life as normal, then you have not fully accepted that he is correct. I personally realise that I have not internalised his messages and changed my way of thinking and my way of life. I am somewhat confused about the far-reaching implications of his arguments. I will have to read it again and contemplate, and then implement some changes. This almost sounds like a religious book!

So what is it about? A `Black Swan' is his label for a highly improbable, but high impact event. It is an outlier; something beyond our regular expectations. So we do not think about a `black swan' event much. We may not even know it exists. Our experience gives us no clue that it exists. We take a thousand balls out of a bag and find they are all white. Why would we expect a black ball? Our statistics, whether Pascalian or Bayesian, will not alert us to the possibility of a black ball. Then one day we draw out a black ball. All our previous experience is vitiated. Mr Taleb's metaphor comes from Europeans seeing only white swans, and being astonished to discover black swans in Australia.

The metaphors of swans or balls in a bag do not capture well his other key point here. The `black swans' have a high impact. Think of history. 9/11 was unexpected and had high impact. The First World War has unexpected and had high impact - to put it mildly.

Or think of your own life, and the unforeseen key events that changed your life for ever. They were not planned, but once they happened, everything changed. The person you met and married. The job you applied for and got, and the job you suddenly lost. Specifically I think of going to work in Japan, something not remotely contemplated 12 months before I arrived there. I also think of the thunderbolt of being diagnosed with Polycythaemia in 1994; or the stroke that might suddenly floor me as a result.

If you think in personal terms, the significance of `black swans' comes home. Mr Taleb says forecasting is impossible in many circumstances. Planning often turns out to be futile. I would have been astounded to be told in 1978, as an English student at Oxford, that I would turn out to be a financial markets trainer in 2008 (having the effrontery to teach physics graduates financial maths!).

Mr Taleb seems to wander over all kinds of ground in this book, and you wonder sometimes what the relevance and point is. But it all comes together by the end of the book. For instance, he discusses fame at several stages of the book. We tend to idolise the famous. But how did they become famous? Are they really worthy of our adulation? Maybe they were just lucky. Maybe they just happened to be a touch ahead in talent, but then were swept up in the many `winner takes all' processes of modern life. Are the footballers earning £10 million really 500 times better than a lowly footballer earning £20,000? Is the man on TV being heard by millions of people more worthy to be listened to than a mere teacher in a classroom? Was Admiral Nelson truly the greatest leader in the Royal Navy? And what about those who achieved great things, and have never been heard of? A stunning poem written in a book that is lost forever. A talented composer who never gets published? A man who prevents a terrorist outrage, whose name is never known to the public.

What has this to do with infrequent, high impact events? Everything. Many of the fortunate are the products of positive black swan events. Furthermore the luck element, or some self-reinforcing effect like academic peer review, leads to the domination of ideas which are simply weak or misleading - or should be more critically challenged, were they not coming from the mouths of such `famous' people. When he is scathing of Nobel prize winners - especially those who won the Economics Prize - you at first think that Mr Taleb is being very disrespectful. Well he is. And when the scales fall from your eyes, and you see the unfair process by which Nobel prize winners are selected, you realise that Nobel prize are possibly not so worthy of our exaggerated respect. This is well explained by his description of social contagion.

Contagion and feedback loops are a large part of social phenomena that set them apart from pure science. He discusses the financial markets in several chapters, and firmly regards them as social phenomena, affected by human emotions and crazes. He rips apart the ideas of efficient markets and portfolio diversification and risk management techniques (all Nobel prize winning topics).

He talks a lot about `Mediocristan' and `Extremistan'. He says we have to know which country we are in, and it is fatal to the search for truth and assessing risk to mix them up. He stores up positive venom for those who misuse the Gaussian normal distribution curve. It is a tool of Mediocristan. It can be rightly applied in the physical sciences and mechanical / chemical engineering fields. But he rages against it being used in the social `sciences'. Banks who assess their `Value at Risk' with the normal distribution curve are telling us about the 99.9% confidence interval, which is actually unimportant. By their methods and actions they ignore the 0.1%, which is the Black Swan that changes everything. So they are not truly measuring risk, let alone thinking about it.

Finance is rich with black swans that come out of the 0.1% zone: the 1929 and 1987 stock market crashes; the Latin American Debt crisis of 1981; the collapse of LTCM in 1998; the collapse of Bear Stearns and then Lehman Brothers in 2008. Oh, they are all explained after the event. But we really did not forecast them, and we really did not know the ultimate cause, any more than we really know the cause of the First World War.

So we are urged to get away from the toxicity of Gaussian Curve thinking and to face the fact that many important distributions are highly skewed. Take wealth ownership for instance. Independently of this book, I have found statistics saying that 20% people own 83% of the world's wealth. Furthermore an eye-popping 1% of people own 40% of the world's wealth. The winner takes all - or so near to all that it hardly matters. We are talking about Extremistan here.

Author: Leonard Mlodinow
By Penguin

history of statistics, 2009-12-05
the title is incorrect but is explained in the text comes from math not statistics. brilliant explanation of stats and how they affect lives around the planet. some nice personal anecdotes. assumes some knowledge of stats but enough detail for the lay reader. worth buying!

Author: Rob Eastaway, Mike Askew
By Square Peg

Maths for Mums & Dads, 2010-03-09
Excellent book that will help grandparents to help their grandchildren with homework because it explains current methods of maths teaching with lucidity.

Author: J.M. Bond; Andrew Baines
By Nelson Thornes Ltd

Author: Richard Dawkins
By OUP Oxford

A ground breaking popular Science book, 2010-02-14
This book hardly needs further introduction. It ranks in the central canon of popular Science writing, certainly in the same league as 'A Brief History of Time'. It is unsual in one respect in that it actually describes original thinking. Its central thesis is that the gene is the basic unit of natural selection, almost to the extent that bodies or cells are merely vehicles to perpetuate the continued existence of the genes themselves. A weakness here is that the book does not define a gene well. A single gene for example may encode for more than one protein; a protein may be the product of several individual genes. Dawkins goes onto explain how altruism may have evolved and that, rather than being paradoxical, is fully consistent with natural selection as outlined by Darwin. In this, Dawkins does provide arguments and evidence to support this. Overall, he is reasonably successful. We learn that group selection as such does not exist, but that through cooperation, it is possible for individuals to increase their own chances of survival and reproduction. We also learn that kin selection arises primarily through the sharing of the same genes: since my brother has a relatedness of 1/2, it may be worth sacrificing myself since my brother has half of my genes. There is, in my opinion, a very good description of the Prisoner's Dilemma, developed from game theory and how this can be applied to model the development of cooperation (or non-cooperation) strategies and to assess whether these may become so-called 'evolutionary stable strategies'. Clealy, this must be seen as an over-simplification. The complexities of molecular biology and neurobiology are great. The book ends with an introduction to Dawkins's next work, 'The Extended Phenotype'.

It is worth noting that the title of the book has led people to assume that Dawkins is a pure genetic determinist. Dawkins stresses that this is not the case, and that we may easily overcome the 'rule' of our genes. Indeed this is essential for living in a sustainable and peaceble manner. In the introduction to this anniversary edition, Dawkins even mentions some regret in the title of the work, since it causes many to make assumption about his beliefs and motives.

Overall, this is a ground-breaking and well written work that makes an excellent read.

Author: Andy Field
By SAGE Publications Ltd

Lighthearted Look at Statistics, 2010-02-13
Very much enjoy this book. Bought it for my psychology degree and find the writing style to be quite fresh and light hearted. Exactly what you need when you're looking at graphs. The author seems like a nice fellow and catches you off-guard with jokes sometimes.

Guides for SPSS, as suggested by others, are brilliant and don't just throw formulae at you, but teach you how to use it first.

Anybody looking for a good guide to statistics, get this.

Author: Ian Stewart
By Profile Books

A magical mathematical cabinet, 2009-12-09
This book is a worthy successor to Professor Stewart's previous best seller. Full of entertainments for anybody with a fascination for mathematics, that under appreciated foundation to our science and technology, and for some of us one of the deepest of interests and a continuing delight.

The book is stimulating, entertaining, amusing and informative. If you have the slightest interest, buy it and read it.