Indeed popular science writer Stephen Jay Gould has devoted a considerable portion of his writing career to exploring the abuses of statistics, particularly in regard to their role in scientific racism and intelligence testing. But the fact remains that properly used, statistics are a vital tool for engineers and scientists. This week we bring you a collection of sites that should help you sort out you guassian distribution from your standard deviation. It covers a broad range of well-organized topics in considerable depth. Definitely the first port of call for anyone struggling with a serious engineering statistics problem.
Topics covered include hypothesis testing, correlation, regression and more.
Statistics are often used to deal with real world problems where precise analytical solutions are not possible even in theory. Mike McLaughlin has put together a handy compendium of 56 distributions in pdf format. Compendium.html Helping Hand Statistics and computers are a natural match, and it's not by chance that the ancestor of IBM got its start producing tabulating machines for the US Census Bureau. There is a bewildering array of software available. Fortunately, NIST again comes to the rescue with an online guide to mathematical software.