Standard Deviation: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

How can we compare sales at two franchises in the Wahoo's taco restaurant chain? Standard deviation helps quantify the variability in sales.

Inference for Proportions: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

Managers have no clue what conditions actually motivate their workers best, as shown by research conducted by Teresa Amabile, host of the original Against All Odds.

Normal Calculations: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

Visit the Boston Beanstalks club for tall people. Height is normally distributed and we can use membership cutoffs and population data to calculate z-scores.

Checking Assumptions of Normality: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

Production at Pete and Gerry's Organic Eggs provides a number of distributions that look normal — but are they?

Two-Way Tables: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

One city surveyed the happiness of its residents. Two-way tables help organize the data and tease out relationships between happiness levels and opinions about aspects of the city itself.

Introduction to Probability: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

Probability is the mathematics of chance behavior — and can help predict events such as the daily weather, or whether an asteroid will collide with Earth.

Stemplots: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

As a first step in visualizing data,this film focuses on theuse of stem plots to understand raw data. The U.S. Army experienced an equipment shortage and as a result used statistics to ensure soldiers are properly outfitted for war. Data from soldiers' foot measurements and Toyota’s fuel efficient vehicles aretransformed in stem plots.

Histograms and Distributions: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

Meteorologists use histograms to map when lightning strikes. This visualization technique helps them understand the data in new ways.

Boxplots: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

Using the example of hot dog calorie counts, boxplots help us to visualize the five-number summary and make comparisons between different types of frankfurters.

Fitting Lines to Data: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

Plotting annual measurements of winter snowpack in the Colorado Rockies in a scatterplot lets resource managers draw a regression line that helps them forecast water availability.

The Question of Causation: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

This historical story describes how researchers untangled the relationship between smoking and lung cancer.

Samples and Surveys: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

A visit to the University of New Hampshire Survey Center illustrates how pollsters create accurate surveys. They can then use details from their sample to make inferences about a whole population.

Random Variables: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

The Challenger space shuttle disaster was blamed on faulty O-rings. How can probability calculations on random variables help predict the chances of this kind of failure?

Small Sample Inference for One Mean: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

A brewer uses small sample inference for one mean to monitor quality differences in multiple batches of the same beer.

Comparing Two Means: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

Comparing the activity and calorie expenditure levels of Western office workers and African hunter gatherers adds some surprising new data to the science of obesity.

One-Way ANOVA: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

Does holding a heavier clipboard make you estimate that a jar of coins has more money in it than if you're holding a lighter clipboard? Psychologists use One-Way ANOVA to analyze the data from this experiment.

What Is Statistics? Against All Odds: Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

Statistics is the art and science of gathering, organizing, analyzing and drawing conclusions from data. Without rudimentary knowledge of how it works, people are ill-equipped to make informed judgments and evaluations of a wide variety of things encountered in daily life.

Census and Sampling: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

The U.S. attempts to count every resident every ten years. Statisticians use sampling from a population as an alternative to a complete count, as seen at a potato chip factory.

Binomial Distribution: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

Sickle cell disease is an example of binomial distribution in families with two parents who are carriers for this genetic trait.

Sampling Distributions: Against All Odds—Inside Statistics

Annenberg Learner

Heights of third graders in one class. Quality scores for circuit boards at a factory. Taking multiple samples allows us to visualize the sampling distribution of the sample mean.