Association of Statistics Students of Nigeria

Question:

Why do you think people often feel that "statistics don't apply to me?" What are some ways that statistics can be applied in everyday life?

Key Statistics

Some statistical measures are the mean or average, the standard deviation or volatility, the range of possible outcomes, percentiles of possible outcomes, the median or 50th percentile, and the mode or the most common result.

Answer and Explanation:

People are thinking in terms of formal statistical thinking, which can be convoluted (rejecting at this significance level, for instance).

People use statistics all the time in everyday life, but without the formal process. People weigh the odds of success in their life choosing jobs, partners, whether to smoke, what to eat, and how to keep their kids safe.

In recent times, compared to 20 or 30 years ago, the proliferation of data has made the use of more formal statistics increase substantially. Now people have the data to start making use of formal thinking a bit more. People want upvotes on Facebook, they want to evaluate players for their favorite sports teams, and they want to track traffic to their websites. As the data to do these things increases, people are thinking more formally and see statistics as more practical.

The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.

-- John Tukey

Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models.

-- George Box

"An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem." -- John Tukey

interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns- the ones we don't know we don't know.

Donald Rumsfeld

The manipulation of statistical formulas is no substitute for knowing what one is doing. ~ Hubert M Blalock Jr

It is commonly believed that anyone who tabulates numbers is a statistician. This is like believing that anyone who owns a scalpel is a surgeon. ~ Hooke R.

How does one know when one knows?... How does one know when to continue to push an experiment? And how does one know when to abandon a clue as a false trail? No one interested in truth will torture the data itself. But a scientist can--and should--seek any way to answer a question.... And if one experiment shows a hint of a result ... a bump ..., then a scientist designs the next experiment ... to create conditions more likely to get more bumps until they become either consistent and meaningful or demonstrate that the initial bump was mere random variation without meaning.... One key to science is that work bereproducible. Someone in another laboratory doing the same experiment will get the same result. The result then is reliable enough that someone can build upon it. The most damning condemnation is to dismiss a finding as `not reproducible.' That can call into question not only ability but on occasion ethics. If a reproducible finding comes from torturing nature, however, it is not useful. To be useful a result must ... be ... expandable. One must be able to enlarge it, explore it, learn from it, use it as a foundation to build structures upon. These things become easy to discern in hindsight. But how does one know when to persist, when to continue to try to make an experiment work, when to make adjustments--and when finally to abandon a line of thought as mistaken or incapable of solution with present techniques?... The question is one of judgment. For the distinguishing element of science is not intelligence but judgment. Or perhaps it is simply luck.John M. Barry (2004, pp. 262-263) The Great Influenza: The epic story of the deadliest plague in history. Viking Press.

The statistician who supposes that his main contribution to the planning of an experiment will involve statistical theory, finds repeatedly that he makes his most valuable contribution simply by persuading the investigator to explain why he wishes to do the experiment.Gertrude M Cox

"Statistics is, or should be, about scientific investigation and how to do it better, but many statisticians believe it is a branch of mathematics. Now I agree that the physicist, the chemist, the engineer, and the statistician can never know too much mathematics, but their objectives should be better physics, better chemistry, better engineering, and in the case of statistics, better scientific investigation. Whether in any given study this implies more or less mathematics is incidental." George E. P. B

ANOUNCEMENT;
Statistical software packages and pdf are available free for all udusok statistics student, so contact the Asson Academic Director/Advicer for more updates on 08061505304..