During our first meeting in Biostat course, each one of us was required to answer the following questions given by our professor in order to assess our understanding and knowledge regarding statistics on a 1/2 sheet of pad paper. Some of the questions were about our understanding of what statistics is, whether we have taken it during our college, or have we feared statistics every time we encounter this subject, and what are some of our expectations in this subject. Based on what I have remembered, I was able to answer some questions and honestly, I answered that I have feared statistics since then. Way back in undergraduate years, I am not particularly good in math, however, among all my math subjects, I got the highest grade in statistics. After I finished answering the questions, I was able to evaluate myself regarding my knowledge in statistics and realized that I enrolled in this class in order to further learn different statistical tools that will greatly help me in my post graduate path and future career as a researcher. Since I have already associated statistics into one of the branches of mathematics, I think I have feared it because I have instilled in my mind that I will have to deal with numbers. I was also able to realize that maybe statistics is not that scary, instead, it might be fun to deal with.
This short video documentary by Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician, academic, and public speaker, was presented to the class. To give a better understanding of the video documentary, I will discuss in this section the coverage of the video, and how Hans Rosling was able to attract our interest to love statistics.
According to Rosling, statistics is the sexiest subject because this gives us better understanding of what is going on in the world we live in, whether the things we currently believe is true or not. He also emphasized that statistics is very useful in our everyday life, especially, through it we can put things into perspective. Some of the examples of the importance and use of statistics in our everyday life is the statistics involved in the crime rate. By knowing the statistics of high and low crime rate within a certain area, this provides awareness to the public securing their safety, and gives the authorities the insight to address problems to further improve the peace and order in the community. Through statistics, citizens were empowered, and make the rulers accountable. This has been a tool for both citizens and rulers to monitor the things happening within their society. Rulers first establish statistics to monitor and control their citizens, especially, the number of death (causes can be childbirth, die young, or sickness), marriage, birth, etc. to know in what aspect needs improvement and should have an immediate action.
However, number alone cannot tell us anything. Analysis should be involved in order to interpret those numbers and to arrive at a certain conclusion. One of the most common analysis used in statistics is the average. Average is a single value (such as mean, mode, or median) that summarizes or represents the general significance of a set of unequal values (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/average). It is a mass of data that is reduced to single number that can characterize the whole population. Another statistical analysis is the variation in which it is a way to show how data is dispersed or spread out(https://www.statisticshowto.datasciencecentral.com/measures-variation/). Normal distribution is also one of the common statistical analysis used in analyzing data. The normal distribution is a probability function that describes how the values of a variable are distributed. Normal (or Gaussian or Gauss or Laplace–Gauss) distribution is a very common continuous probability distribution that are important in statistics especially in natural and social sciences studies to represent real-valued random variables whose distributions are not known (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution#History). Statistical analysis has been one of the important components of the society since the early days, and with the development of images, and graphs in analysis, it has been a huge help to clearly relay and make the public understand what is happening in the world. A nine years old girl named Florence Nightingale was the first to develop statistics using visualized methods in interpreting the data and creating a story out of it.
Hans Rosling also presented in the video about the changes happened in the life expectancy of various countries from 1810 up to 2009. He had presented data from various countries and observed the changes happened after European colonies gained independence after the World War II. After data has been keenly observed, a clear description of the world emerges, not only discovering what is really happening but why things are happening through a powerful analytical method called correlation. Correlation is used to test relationships between quantitative variables or categorical variables measuring how things are related (https://www.statisticshowto.datasciencecentral.com/probability-and-statistics/correlation-analysis/). It is a statistical analysis that sees relationship of things, how they change, and how they vary. Take for example the correlation of crime to poverty, infection to poor hygiene, smoking to lung cancer, and many more. However, correlating things should take great considerations on various factors that can affect the result. Correlation has been linked to the creation of theories and somehow conclusions of why things happen.
At the later part of the documentary, they have associated the improvement of modern statistics to the current world we are living today. On how statistics can open eyes and lead us to our own destiny. Reflection
The video documentary was a great help especially to students who have bad impression on statistics since it may involve math and numbers. Honestly, I am one of those students who have feared statistics and have little interest in it. But after I watched the video, I was able to realize that I’m in the right track. Not because I need statistics for my thesis, but because I need statistics in my everyday life. I have realized that I’m using statistics day by day from budgeting my monthly allowance, monitoring my lifestyle, evaluating my academic progress, and many more. I cannot live without dealing with statistics. I greatly agree with Rosling as he said that through statistics, we can be authors of our own destiny.
Statistics is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, displaying, analysis, interpretation and presentation of data (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics), and first applied to the political science concerned with the facts of a state or community (https://folk.uib.no/ngbnk/kurs/notes/node4.html). Originated from the Latin word status, Italian statista, German statistik equivalent to political state. It was basically important in early times to know wealth and property, to know the population within the community, and other societal aspects. Statistics was used in Domesday Book,a manuscript record of of land survey of Ethe “Great Survey” of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William the Conqueror, which presented the very first complete picture of the distribution of landed property in United Kingdom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book). It was also used in insurance as well as in theory of probability, a branch of mathematics that evolved from the investigation of social, behavioral, and physical phenomena that are influenced by randomness and uncertainty (Steele, 2015). Statistics was also used in gambling, equation of the normal curve (Normal distribution), and in Mendel-biometrical or statistical problem started by Gregor Mendel investigating genetics segregation patterns in families of peas and used statistics to explain the collected data (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biostatistics). William Sealy Gosset (13 June 1876 – 16 October 1937) was an English statistician, chemist and brewer who served as Head Brewer of Guinness and Head Experimental Brewer of Guinness and was a pioneer of modern statistics. He pioneered small sample experimental design and analysis with an economic approach to the logic of uncertainty. Gosset published under the pen name Student and developed most famously Student’s t-distribution – originally called Student’s “z” – and “Student’s test of statistical significance” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sealy_Gosset). Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS[3] (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British statistician and geneticist. For his work in statistics, he has been described as “a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science”[4] and “the single most important figure in 20th century statistics”. His contributions to statistics include the maximum likelihood, fiducial inference, the derivation of various sampling distributions, founding principles of the design of experiments, and much more (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher). Statistics in holy book used to conquer other nations through population data. Biostatistics (a portmanteau of biology and statistics; sometimes referred to as biometry or biometrics) is the application of statistics to a wide range of topics in biology. The science of biostatistics encompasses the design of biological experiments, especially in medicine, agriculture and fishery; the collection, summarization, and analysis of data from those experiments; and the interpretation of, and inference from, the results. A major branch of this is medical biostatistics, which is exclusively concerned with medicine and health (https://www.omicsonline.org/biomechanics-and-biostatistics-peer-reviewed-open-access-journals.php).
Source: Steele J.M, 2015. Probability Theory: Formal. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition). Pages 33-36. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.42067-2