Page 408 Example 3: See www.cdc.gov/nchs/deaths.htm for mortality statistics.

Page 408 More historical detail can be found in the opening chapters of F. N. David, Games, Gods and Gambling, Courier Dover Publications, 1998. The historical information given here comes from this excellent and entertaining book.

Page 410 Example 5: T. Gilovich, R. Vallone, and A. Tversky, “The hot hand in basketball: on the misperception of random sequences,” Cognitive Psychology, 17 (1985), pp. 295–314.

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Page 412 Example 7: Information about the Clyde cancer cluster was found online at www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/05/clyde-cancer-cluster-ohio-pay-for-testing_n_2807723.html and at www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2010/12/clyde_ohio_child-cancer_cluste.html For more on Fallon, see the website www.cdc.gov/nceh/clusters/Fallon/default.htm. For Randolph, see R. Day, J. H. Ware, D. Wartenberg, and M. Zelen, “An investigation of a reported cancer cluster in Randolph, Ma.,” Harvard School of Public Health Technical Report, June 27, 1988. For Woburn, see S. W. Lagakos, B. J. Wessen, and M. Zelen, “An analysis of contaminated well water and health effects in Woburn, Massachusetts,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, 81 (1986), pp. 583–596.

Page 413 For a discussion and amusing examples, see A. E. Watkins, “The law of averages,” Chance, 8, No. 2 (1995), pp. 28–32.

Page 414 The quotation is from Chapter 3 of C. S. Lewis, Miracles, Macmillan Co., 1947.

Page 415 The presentation of personal probability and long-term proportion as distinct ideas is influenced by psychological research that appears to show that people judge single-case questions differently from distributional or relative frequency questions. At least some of the biases found in the classic work of Tversky and Kahneman on our perception of chance seem to disappear when it is made clear to subjects which interpretation is intended. This is a complex area and SCC is a simple book, but we judged it somewhat behind the times to put too much emphasis on the Tversky-Kahneman findings. See Gerd Gigerenzer, “How to make cognitive illusions disappear: beyond heuristics and biases,” in Wolfgang Stroebe and Miles Hewstone (eds.), European Review of Social Psychology, Vol. 2, Wiley, 1991, pp. 83–115. Two additional references are G. Gigerenzer and R. Selten, Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox, MIT Press, 2001; and G. Gigerenzer, P. M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Page 417 The 1764 essay by Thomas Bayes, “An essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances,” was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 53(1764), pp. 370–418. A fascimile is available online at www.stat.ucla.edu/history/essay.pdf.

Page 417 Example 9: Estimated probabilities are from R. D’Agostino Jr. and R. Wilson, “Asbestos: The hazard, the risk, and public policy,” in K. R. Foster, D. E. Bernstein, and P. W. Huber (eds.), Phantom Risk: Scientific Inference and the Law, MIT Press, 1994, pp. 183–210. See also the similar conclusions in B. T. Mossman et al., “Asbestos: scientific developments and implications for public policy,” Science, 247 (1990), pp. 294–301.

Page 418 The quotation is from R. J. Zeckhauser and W. K. Viscusi, “Risk within reason,” Science, 248 (1990), pp. 559–564.

Page 423 Exercise 17.21: See T. Hill, “Random-number guessing and the first digit phenomenon,” Psychological Reports, 62 (1988), pp. 967–971.