Customer Reviews

Introduction to Statistics for Forensic Scientists

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I was required to purchase this text for my class, Statistics for Forensic Science, and my professor is very upset with it because it is full of typos and errors which only manages to confuse us even more, as it is a difficult course for a sophomore. My professor compiled a list of all of the errors so we can remember where they are. He even sent a letter to the publisher, but they haven't responded.

Other than that, what I do find helpful about the book is the review questions at the end and the detailed answers at the back of the book on how to solve said review questions. It would be easier, though, if all the example questions were written in a format that is separate from the paragraph. What I mean is that all the sample questions are melted together into a paragraph, which makes it difficult to follow, as opposed to a format that better reflects the algebraic method.

As an assigned textbook for a forensic course, it provided a perfect compliment to the course work by providing real-world scenarios, intuitive organization, and speaking in useful specifics instead of hypothetical generalities. However, anyone attempting a liesurely read of this book should be warned: it is all substance with little to no fluff. Which can tend to make it a bit of a boring read.

That being said, in sheer content, I find it to be one of the definative works in the field of Forensic Statistics.

After so many courses and operational practice of statistics applied to forensic sciences, I finally found the relevant book to not only summarize all my data around, give some intelligibility to my process, but even have an "all of a sudden" revelation about this field. The structure adopted in this book by Dr LUCY, a well recognized forensic statistician, allows the reader to learn, check and understand back to basics statistics and jumped into the relevant subjective ones for forensic science.
Unfortunately, my plain satisfaction is largely overshadowed by too many written mistakes (even detectable by the French reader I am...), some typewriter errors (which could be largely misleading for reader having no statistician skill to be able to correct) and visibly an absence of referee lecture. Else how to explain references to previous pages with only ... (three dots) or permanent mistakes when referring to appendices ?
The critic is not only addressed to Dr Lucy, but also to the editor (Wiley), who didn't accustomize myself to such a poor formalist scientific book, which cost is irrelevant with the imperfections.
Would any of the responsible have a look to this comment, I am ready to send him page per page the detected errors, and would be glad to get a new edition, which would replace my all over the text corrected one.

Dr CRISPINO, Forensic Scientist

Terrible terrible book. Each chapter only gives one example to explain a topic and it incorporates the formulae, etc. into the text of the example so it's more difficult to later refer to the example when doing your own questions. The review section only gives 3 or 4 questions, and there is no additional book of questions to get enough practice with the concepts. AND the answers to the very few questions in the answer key are more likely incorrect than correct. DO NOT get this stats book. There are many better choices out there!!!

Use this book only if you must.
It is not well written on several different levels. There are multiple grammatical and numerical errors in the text, tables and the included answers which can make it very confusing for a reader.
This book is not geared toward first time statistics students. I have never taken statistics before but consider myself good at math and logic. However, because of the structure and grammatical errors, this book is confusing. It does not define its terms (in the text or in the non-existent glossary) so seeing them referenced later has no context.

It is a very useful an helpful book... everyone involved in teaching may find it an excellent guide to help and involve students of forensics into the effective use of statistics.