The Statistician

Categories: Advanced Higher

If you are looking for someone to thank (blame) for the statistical emphasis of the Advanced Higher course, then look no further than Karl Pearson, creator of our next test, Pearson's Product Correlation Co-efficient. Apparently, he is the father of Mathematical Statistics. After further research, I discovered that he also wrote about TB, the rights of unborn children, Mary Queen of Scots, the height of fathers in relation to their sons, and extreme alcoholism in adults, although I am assured that the latter will not be the outcome of attempting his correlation.

While searching for some more information on Pearson's test, I found a powerpoint, which, while of little use for the test for us, has a great example of why correlation tests often don't provide meaningful results-look for the bit about pirates! There is some good material here in the lecture notes with a comprehensive guide as to its limitations, and there's also a practical.

Higher will be looking at World Population Growth, while s4 are back to study Development. I think we'll do some random indicators and see how we group them together. Again, as I seem to have been doing constantly of late, I want to have a look at how trustworthy figures can be. All figured, counted and tested out, off to read about buy nothing day - every scotsman's right ;-) and every husband's wish :-0