Spending three years submerged in graduate level statistics tends to cloud judgment of the knowledge that the lay man should have on that subject. Since my education in this subject is drawing to a close I am looking to what lay ahead. It is time to answer the question that I have been asked for years: “What do you do with a Master’s in statistics?â€
Trying my hand at writing an eBook is one thing I have settled on. In order to get a smart start I wanted to research what things people wanted to learn about statistics. I used some of the research skills I have developed and the wonderful world wide web to get some surprising information. My searches revealed that a hot topic of interest is one of the most basic ideas of my field, histograms and bar charts. These are the most basic tools in statistics because they are the graphics most commonly used to describe single variable data sets. Almost every business setting in existence has some setting in which a list could be displayed.
In my corporate world experience there were many occasions when the performance of a certain department or sales unit was recorded over a certain amount of time and when those numbers were presented they were still either in a list or just the minimum and maximum values were presented. Knowing what I do now I wonder if anyone in the office had ever had to make a histogram or if they had any idea how easy it was to do. Graphically representing data in a chart is easy on the eyes and the brain. Our minds naturally take in charts and we can mentally input so much more information than with a list of numbers.
So, for those who have never been exposed to the world of statistics or those who took a class so long ago that they have cobwebs on that information look forward to my upcoming eBook. The title of the first draft is: A Step by Step Guide to Meaningful Histograms and Bar Charts.
If there are any other concepts that you would like to see addressed here feel free to let me know and if I don’t already know about it I will research and learn!!