Stats-a-gogo

Last night was the first full, regular night of Stats 1. The pace was very slow, even, and steady. It was comforting. Dr. K is very soothing. He makes you feel like everything is comprehensible. And so far, nothing has been too surprising. In fact, most of what we've covered so far, I taught in fourth grade math in the not-too-distant past. People had difficulty grasping a stem-and-leaf plot last night, and I wanted to say that it is in the fourth grade curriculum, but thought better of it. Besides, it's not that it's difficult. Stem-and-leaf plots look like some kind of game when you first see them... something closer to sodoku than to statistics. It's difficult to see why they would be useful.

We were constructing each of the graphs from the data by hand last night. Of course, most of the time, we'll be using computers to build graphs, but I think it's important to build them by hand to begin with in order to get a strong conceptual understanding. 

So, there was a lot of refresher for me last night. The one thing that I learned - and it's a little embarrassing to acknowledge that I didn't realize this before - is the hierarchical nature of the levels of measurement. I knew the attributes of each level, but I didn't get that each successive level has all of the attributes of the previous levels. Nominal only tells you difference. Ordinal tells you difference and sequence. Interval tells you difference, sequence, and distance between points. Ratio tells you difference, sequence, distance between points, and distance from an observable zero point.

Although necessarily slow paced, the class went until after 9 PM. I wonder if the pace will increase throughout the semester. I hope that, as things get more complex, the pace continues to be slow. Lots of homework for next week... and I have to figure out why SAS dumped my data.