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Hi, I’m Adriene Hill, and this is Crash Course Statistics. Welcome to a world of probabilities, paradoxes and p-values. There will be games. And thought experiments. And coin flipping. A lot of coin flipping. Statisticians love to talk about coin flipping. By the time we finish the course, you’ll know why we use statistics. And how. And what questions you ought to be asking when you run across statistics in the world. Which is ALL THE TIME. Statistics can help you make a guess whether or not you’re going to be accepted to Harvard. Marketers use them to sell us gold-lame pants. Netflix uses stats to predict what show we might want to watch next. You use statistics when you look at the weather forecast and decide what to wear--dress or jeans. Policy makers use them to decide whether or not to invest in more early childhood education, whether or not to spend more on mental health services. Statistics is all about making sense of data--and figuring out how to put that information to use. Today, we’re going to answer the question “What IS Statistics?” INTRO The legend says that during a late 1920’s English tea at Cambridge, a woman claimed that a cup of tea with milk added last tasted different than tea where the milk was added first. The brilliant minds of the day immediately began to think of ways to test her claim. They organized eight cups of tea in all sorts of patterns to see if she really could tell the difference between the milk first and tea first cups. But even after they had seen her guesses, how could they really decide? Because, she’d get about half the cups right just by randomly guessing either milk or tea. And even if she really could tell the difference, it’s completely possible that she would miss a cup or two. So how could you tell if this woman was actually a tea-savant? What is the line between lucky tea guesser and tea supertaster? As fate would have it, future super-statistician and part time potato scientist Ronald A. Fisher was in attendance. During his lifetime, Fisher began work that set the stage for a large portion of Statistics which is the focus of this series. These statistics can help us make decisions in uncertain situations, tea-taste-tests and beyond. Fisher’s insights into experimental design helped turn statistics into its own scientific discipline. And, although Fisher didn’t publish results of this tea-test...the story has it...the woman sorted all the tea cups correctly. Just in case you were curious. At this point, it’s worth mentioning that there are two related--but separate--meanings of the word statistics. We can refer to the field of statistics... which is the study and practice of collecting and analyzing data. And we can talk about statistics as in facts about... or summaries... of data. To answer the question “What is statistics?”, we should first... ...ask the question “What can statistics do?” Let's say you wake up at your desk after a long evening studying for finals with a cheeseburger wrapper...