Hola amigos! Hello friends!
We’re going to take a look at stats. Stats are nice and
there are far scarier branches of math. Like all that algebra nonsense. We all
know about statistics, but here is a little refresher course, just to clean off
that rust.
Which do you think has more speakers- English or Spanish?
Well English speaking countries outnumber Spanish ones by 101 to 31 but there
are some 60 million more Spanish speakers in the world. That was a taste of
statistics that I found here.
When you watch the Superbowl you will undoubtedly see all of
kinds of stats. Peyton Manning is likely to be pressured on about 30 per cent
of his throws at last. How they do that is very simple. If he throws 100 throws
and 30 of them he is pressured, that makes 30 per cent. It’s that simple!
But stats can also be found out from surveys. In 2014,
surveys showed seventy-seven percent of this country believe in angels. Just 40
percent admit climate change exists. If you want to explore some similar
frivolous, yet terrifying, stats click here.
Of course they do age and even that 2014 statistic could
have changed by today. And sometimes statistics can go a bit wrong….
And of course people sometimes make up whatever numbers they
feel like.
But generally they are accurate.
Right, are we ready to explore something called
post-positivism? I think we are. It sounds scary but it isn’t as scary as other
bits of math we could be looking at like Algebra. Plus, of the two of us I am
far more scared of wandering deeper into stats…
To get yourself acquainted with post-positivism click here
and have a look. Essentially positivism is that there is one truth and it can
be seen. The Panthers won the 2015 NFC Championship game. That is the one truth
and everybody can see this. Now the opposite, post-positivism, is harder to
define but it means there are is one truth but it cannot be observed. A good
example of this is what lies at the bottom of certain parts of our ocean-post-positivist
believes there is something but we will never know what it is.
People have been debating these two beliefs for many
centuries but the difference is, really, that the second is unobservable while
the first is not. The difference is minimal, except that the first is more
easily provable.
If a researcher is a positivist then they believe in
presenting reality and predicting variables. They specialise in the tangibles.
They know that information stands separate from humans. The blue whale is blue.
Fact. Whereas if they believed in the other, they have to go on educated
guesswork and seeing what cannot be disproved. They believe outcomes are never
able to be proven fully. They might say there is a cure for cancer we just
haven’t found it and may never do so.
Researchers believing one or the other changes drastically
how they research. If something cannot be proven, one sees what can be
disproved. And if something can be proved, one need only go and find out what
it is. It really is that simple. It also means that positives are better
predicting and controlling events whilst post-positivists are better at
guessing not definitively predicting.
Now have a break from all that heavy, deeply philosophical
stuff. This is a longer post and we've one more thing to explore.
So qualitative and quantitative research. Scientists and
researchers favourite hobby is to make impractically long names for things
which are relatively simple. They complain when ‘ordinary people’ don’t
understand their convoluted terms but, really, they made their bed. Quantitative
is to do with numbers- ten per cent of Denver’s drives ended in a score. The other
is the opposite. It measures things where numbers have no place. It might
measure something like happiness or how content a company’s staff is for
example.
Now as you can imagine, both of these have times when they
are useful and times when they are not. If one is doing sports stats, you would
want quantitative. Roger Federer hits an ace on 30 per cent of his service
points. Asking a question about sports stats like that will always be requiring
quantitative data. Asking about population increases, too, will also need a quantitative
question such as “has the population of Connecticut increased or decreased since
1996, and will the trend continue?”
Now qualitative is vaguer. The Connecticut primary is coming
up. Perfectly valid research to find out how New Britain will vote could be asking
200 local residents how they feel about each candidate and getting a feel’ of
it from that. These questions are generally a little less specific and come up
with a wider spectrum.
Right, I have bored you long enough. I'm going to go and
watch the Super-bowl.
Thanks, All
P.S- Carolina 42-14 is going to be the score. It will be a
blow-out.
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