Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, oh, man.

Oh, my.

And so, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast, episode 79,

key concepts in statistics.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So in this episode, we're going to look at some of the key conceptual ideas in the discipline of statistics.

Needless to say, since this is an audio-only podcast, there's not going to be any explicit mathematical formula here. I mean, it is essentially mathematics, but a lot of mathematics can be described

conceptually, even if the calculations can't be performed. But what I'm interested in for this

show is to explain the concepts of statistics in a way that's hopefully fairly clear and

straightforward. So statistics is the concept or the study relating to the collection

analysis and interpretation of data. There are many different types of data and we'll

talk a little bit about some of those differences shortly.

But the basic purpose of statistics is to take numbers, so data, information of some form that we've gathered in some way,

and use that to produce useful information that we can utilize for some particular purpose, to make a decision to increase our knowledge about something.

Because data is not the same as knowledge. Data is just numbers, we have to put, or categories, we have to put it into a form that is useful and allows to extract knowledge from the data.

That's essentially what statistics is about,

loosely speaking. Now, statistics is in use everywhere. Wherever you look, there's statistics.

Science, natural and social sciences in business, government, medicine, engineering, advertising,

and the military, wherever you go there is statistics, whether you're aware of it or not.

So it's useful to have at least some understanding of the key concepts in statistics.

Statistics are increasingly finding application even in things like law,

law, elections, campaign promises and things like that.

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