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Stats Intro - Coggle Diagram
Stats Intro
Introduction
how numbers and language revolutionised history
- stats is a brand of mathematics with its own precise language.
- the cuneiform writing system (around 3000BC) was invented by ancient sumerians of mesopotamia to keep track of economic transactions, laws, maps, medical manuals, and religious stories and beliefs.
- involved making lines in wet clay > the clay would dry, and become a permanent record system of transaction.
- abstract numbers were created out of the idea that 'fourness' was a concept, like 'eightness', and so on.
- according to some scholars, roman numerals limited the development of mathematics and technology.
- the use of the arabic number system was the true drive of technological advances.
- life as we know it depends very heavily on statistics. we need to have some passing knowledge of modern statistical methods if we want to make sense of the information we need to evaluate.
stats in behavioural sciences
- began in the 17th century > the first set of data about population was collected.
- connected to the development of sovereign states and probability theory.
- scientists needed tools to answer their research questions.
- 1920s > intelligence testing > eugenics
- basic stats techniques first developed and used in agriculture, physics, and politics.
- the test of examining the differences between the averages of two groups was advanced during the 20th century.
- the introduction of personal computers and sophisticated software allows anyone who is interested to explore statistical topics.
- both good and bad
- good: statistical analysis no longer requires the use of big computers
- bad: anyone can run any data they have into software, and have what they believe to be meaningful, reliable, and trustworthy results.
- francis galton (1822-1911) used the correlation coefficient to investigate the hereditary aspects of intelligence
- end of the 19th century, first half of 20th century, scientists began trying to quantify the differences between races and classes of people to determine if some objective criteria made one race better than another.
- charles darwin (1809-1882) published "the origin of species" (1859) about his theory of evolution, and "the descent of man" (1870) about human evolution.
what are descriptive and inferential stats?
- stats: a set of mathematical procedures for summarising and interpreting observations.
- observations: numerical or categorical data.
- descriptive stats: used to summarise or describe a set of observations
- methods for organising and summarising data
- using tables or graphs to organise data.
- descriptive values such as the average are used to summarise data.
- a descriptive value for a sample is called a statistic.
- inferential stats: used to make inferences from a smaller group of data (sample) to the population from which the sample was drawn
- methods for using sample data to make general conclusions (inferences) about populations
- population and sample:
- the entire group of individuals is called the population
- usually, the populations are so large that a researcher cannot examine the entire group. a sample is selected to represent the population in a research study. the goal is to use the results obtained from the sample to help answer questions about the population.
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