Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: a (yawn) mechanical approach to mathematics

I studied the first 8 chapters of this book instead of attending the undergraduate lecture. This was a mistake. Tanis & Hoggs present probability and statistics, an otherwise interesting topic, in the most mechanical way imaginable. There is no reference (that I can recall) to any underlying mathematical ideas or questions, nor to the problems which originially prompted Poisson, Bernoulli, Gauss, etc. to inquire about the nature of "randomness" in physical events. The authors seem to suppose that their examples demonstrate such things by proxy. This book may make a decent reference for advanced students, but should not be used to teach those seeing prob & stat for the first time... that is, unless, you want it to also be their last.