>> Hi, I'm Alison.

>> And I'm Jeff.

>> Welcome to the first lecture on
"Statistic Making Sense of Data." ...
>> The purpose of this lecture, is to
introduce you to the course, and to some
of the first data sets that we'll be
examining.
>> This course is an introduction to the
science called statistics.
The goal of statistics is to use imperfect
information, our data, in order to infer
facts, make decisions, and make
predictions about the world.
>> Statistics is the science of
collecting, organizing, describing,
analyzing, and interpreting data.
>> It has applications to virtually every
area of our lives, from business to health
and nutrition, politics and education.
>> Early in the course, we'll look at
descriptive statistics, which is about
summarizing data using numbers or plots.
>> Later on, we'll work towards
statistical inference, using data to make
conclusions or decisions.
>> While statistics is a science, we can
also talk about a statistic.
A statistic is a number or value measured
within some particular context.
In order to carry about sensible and
meaningful statistical procedures, it is
important to understand the context.
>> We need to understand which data were
collected, how and why these data were
collected.
On which individuals or entities the data
were collected.
What questions we hope to answer from the
data.
>> And what group we want to make
conclusions about, One of the data sets
we'll look at in the first few lectures is
the 2012 salaries of the New York Red
Bulls soccer team which is a team in the
MLFs.
The top North American professional
league.
Mls player's salaries are released
multiple times per year by their players
union.
The salaries that teams in the MLS pay
their players are governed by some rules
of which three are of partiucular note.
Firstly, there is a minimum salary.
Secondly, there is the designated player
rule.
Because of this rule teams can attract a
limited number of international stars,
paying them high salaries regardless of
the salary cap.
And for the third rule, there is that
salary cap.
That is, there is a maximum total amount a
team can spend on player salaries,
excluding their designated players.
We'll investigate how these rules are
reflected in some data, which is the
salaries of the 25 New York Red Bulls
players in May 2012.
>> Another source of data for us will be
facts and figures for different countries
and territories around the world.
For example, we will consider the life
expectancy for each country.
The average number of years a newborn
child would live if current mortality
patterns were to stay the same.
These data were assembled by Gapminder.org
using such sources as the United Nations,
the Human Mortality Database, the Human
Life-Table Database and more.
Life expectancy serves as an excellent
measure of a country's overall health and
well being.
We will investigate how a country's life
expectancy is related to various other
factors like which region of the world the
country is in and the country's average
wealth, ie, it's GDP per capita.
And what fraction of adults in the country
are infected with HIV and so on.
Studying these data will allow us to draw
statistical conclusions about how
different factors influence a county's
well being.
>> A third data set will investigate rises
from the problem of estimating the age at
death from skeletal remains.
This is a common problem in forensic
anthropology, and anthropologists have
devised several different methods for
estimating age.
In adults, these methods often rely on
examination of the wear and deterioration
in certain bones.
Developing improvements to these methods
is an active area of research.
Catherine Merritt, a biological
anthropologist at the University of
Toronto, is examining how the accuracy of
several of the existing methods is
associated with physical characteristics,
specifically focusing on body size.
She has used a number of methods to
estimate the age at death of several
hundred skeletons of known age so that she
can assess the accuracy of the estimated
age.
We will look at a randomly chosen subset
of the 400 skeletons Katherine has
investigated for two of these age
estimation methods.
The first, the method of[UNKNOWN] uses
aspects of the first rib to arrive at the
most likely age of death.
The second method we will look at later,
the Suchey-Brooks method, is the most
commonly used method for age estimation,
and uses the pubic bone.
The Suchey-Brooks method classifies the
age at death into one of six age
categories by comparing the pubic bone to
reference bones selected as representative
of various stages of deterioration.
A possibly important distinction between
these two aging methods is that the pubic
bone is part of the pelvis, which is a
weight baring part of the human skeleton,
while the ribs are not weight baring.
For each of these methods we will look at
the error in the age estimation, that is,
the number of years the estimated age
differs from the actual age of death.
We will also investigate whether this area
differs between the two methods, and also
whether the error in age estimation varies
with body mass index or sex.
In the weeks ahead we'll use these and
other data to illustrate the basic
concepts of the science of statistics.
>> We will learn the fundamental
techniques in order to collect, summarize,
interpret, and analyze data of all types.
>> By the time you finish this course,
you'll know how to draw sound statistical
conclusions about the world around you.
>> So let's get learning some statistics
so we can understand these data.