title: Hood of the truck statistics for food animal practitioners.
abstract: This article offers some tips on working with statistics and develops four relatively simple procedures to deal with most kinds of data with which veterinarians work. The criterion for a procedure to be a "Hood of the Truck Statistics" (HOT Stats) technique is that it must be simple enough to be done with pencil, paper, and a calculator. The goal of HOT Stats is to have the tools available to run quick analyses in only a few minutes so that decisions can be made in a timely fashion. The discipline allows us to move away from the all-too-common guess work about effects and differences we perceive following a change in treatment or management. The techniques allow us to move toward making more defensible, credible, and more quantifiably "risk-aware" real-time recommendations to our clients.
authors.affiliation: Animal Biosecurity Risk Management Group, Agriculture Disaster Research Institute, Department of Population Health and Pathobiology, College of Veterinary Medicine, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, 27606, USA. barrett_slenning@ncsu.edu
authors.forename: Barrett D
authors.initials: BD
authors.lastname: Slenning
mesh_terms: D000820:Animal Diseases / Q000453:epidemiology*; D000818:Animals; D003657:Decision Making; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012308:Risk Management / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D013223:Statistics as Topic / Q000379:methods*; D014730:Veterinary Medicine / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*