Crash Course
Measures of Spread - Crash Course Statistics
Today, we're looking at measures of spread, or dispersion, which we use to understand how well medians and means represent the data, and how reliable our conclusions are. They can help understand test scores, income inequality, spot...
Crash Course
Charts Are Like Pasta - Data Visualization Part 1 - Crash Course Statistics
Today we're going to start our two-part unit on data visualization. Up to this point we've discussed raw data - which are just numbers - but usually it's much more useful to represent this information with charts and graphs. There are...
Crash Course
Intro to Big Data - Crash Course Statistics
Today, we're going to begin our discussion of Big Data. Everything from which videos we click (and how long we watch them) on YouTube to our likes on Facebook say a lot about us - and increasingly more and more sophisticated algorithms...
Crash Course
Confidence Intervals - Crash Course Statistics
Today we’re going to talk about confidence intervals. Confidence intervals allow us to quantify our uncertainty, by allowing us to define a range of values for our predictions and assigning a likelihood that something falls within that...
Crash Course
The Binomial Distribution - Crash Course Statistics
Today we're going to discuss the Binomial Distribution and a special case of this distribution known as a Bernoulli Distribution. The formulas that define these distributions provide us with shortcuts for calculating the probabilities of...
Crash Course
Fitting Models Is like Tetris - Crash Course Statistics
Today we're going to wrap up our discussion of General Linear Models (or GLMs) by taking a closer looking at two final common models: ANCOVA (Analysis of Covariance) and RMA (Repeated Measures ANOVA). We'll show you how additional...
Crash Course
The Normal Distribution - Crash Course Statistics
Today is the day we finally talk about the normal distribution! The normal distribution is incredibly important in statistics because distributions of means are normally distributed even if populations aren't. We'll get into why this is...
Crash Course
The Shape of Data Distributions - Crash Course Statistics
When collecting data to make observations about the world it usually just isn't possible to collect ALL THE DATA. So instead of asking every single person about student loan debt for instance we take a sample of the population, and then...
Crash Course
Randomness - Crash Course Statistics
There are a lot of events in life that we just can’t predict, but just because something is random doesn’t mean we don’t know or can’t learn anything about it. Today, we’re going to talk about how we can extract information from...
Crash Course
Probability Part 1 Rules and Patterns - Crash Course Statistics
Today we’re going to begin our discussion of probability. We’ll talk about how the addition (OR) rule, the multiplication (AND) rule, and conditional probabilities help us figure out the likelihood of sequences of events happening - from...
Crash Course
When Predictions Fail - Crash Course Statistics
Today we’re going to talk about why many predictions fail - specifically we’ll take a look at the 2008 financial crisis, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and earthquake prediction in general. From inaccurate or just too little data...
PBS
What was Fermat's "Marvelous" Proof?
If Fermat had a little more room in his margin, what proof would he have written there?
Crash Course
Correlation Doesn’t Equal Causation - Crash Course Statistics
Today we’re going to talk about data relationships and what we can learn from them. We’ll focus on correlation, which is a measure of how two variables move together, and we’ll also introduce some useful statistical terms you’ve probably...
Crash Course
Probability Part 2 Updating Your Beliefs with Bayes - Crash Course Statistics
Today we're going to introduce bayesian statistics and discuss how this new approach to statistics has revolutionized the field from artificial intelligence and clinical trials to how your computer filters spam! We'll also discuss the...
PBS
Making Probability Mathematical
What happened when a gambler asked for help from a mathematician? The formal study of Probability.
Crash Course
Henrietta Lacks, the Tuskegee Experiment, and Ethical Data Collection - Crash Course Statistics
Today we’re going to talk about ethical data collection. From the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and Henrietta Lacks’ HeLa cells to the horrifying experiments performed at Nazi concentration camps, many strides have been made from...
Crash Course
Test Statistics - Crash Course Statistics
Test statistics allow us to quantify how close things are to our expectations or theories. Instead of going on our gut feelings, they allow us to add a little mathematical rigor when asking the question: “Is this random… or real?” Today,...
Crash Course
Statistics in the Courts - Crash Course Statistics
As we near the end of the series, we're going look at how statistics impacts our lives. Today, we're going to discuss how statistics is often used and misused in the courtroom. We're going to focus on three stories in which three huge...
Crash Course
What Is Statistics - Crash Course Statistics
Welcome to Crash Course Statistics! In this series we're going to take a look at the important role statistics play in our everyday lives, because statistics are everywhere! Statistics help us better understand the world and make...
Be Smart
The Science of Snowflakes
Snowflakes are infinitely beautiful, but are they infinitely unique? Here's all the science behind Earth's favorite cold crystal
Crash Course
P-Hacking - Crash Course Statistics
Today we're going to talk about p-hacking (also called data dredging or data fishing). P-hacking is when data is analyzed to find patterns that produce statistically significant results, even if there really isn't an underlying effect,...
PBS
Does Math Really Exist?
Math is invisible. Unlike physics, chemistry, and biology we can't see it, smell it, or even directly observe it in the universe. And so that has made a lot of really smart people ask, does it actually even EXIST?!?!
PBS
The Multiplication Multiverse
What happens if you multiply things that aren't numbers? And what happens if that multiplication is not associative?