Ever thought: ‘I’m pretty sure I would fully understand Statistics, if only a modern dance company would illustrate the techniques for me’?
I hope you get the idea of what I’m trying to do with this blog by now. Fundamentally, Statistics is a very intuitive subject, but that intuition is often masked by technicalities, so that from the outside the subject can seem both boring and impenetrable. The aim of all of my posts is to try to show that neither of those things is true: Statistics is both fascinating and easily understandable. And in this way, whatever your connection to Smartodds, you’ll be better equipped to understand the statistical side of the company’s operations.
Of course, I’m not the only person to try to de-mystify Statistics, and there are many books, blogs and other learning aids with similar aims.
With this in mind, I recently came across a rather unusual set of resources for learning Statistics: a series of dance videos whose aim is to explain statistical concepts through movement. Probably my ‘favourite’ is this one, which deals with the notions of sampling and standard error. You might like to take a look…
I think it fair to say that the comments on these videos on YouTube are mixed. One person wrote:
This way it makes complicated things look simpler. Very informative and useful. Loved it. 🙂
While another said:
this makes simple things look complicated but thanks anyway
So, I guess it depends on your perspective. I think I’m on the side of the latter commenter though: I’m pretty sure that in 5 minutes I could give a much clearer and more entertaining explanation of the issues this film is trying to address than the film does itself. But maybe that’s not the point. Perhaps the point is that different things hook different people in, and while personally I can’t think of a much more complicated way of thinking about issues of sampling and measuring accuracy, the dance perspective seems to work for some people.
Anyway, if you think this might be the key to help you unlock some of the mysteries of Statistics, you can find the full series of four videos here, covering topics like correlation and standard deviation. Enjoy.
