This is one of my assignments at Institut Latihan Statistik Malaysia (ILSM).
I post it here just for my own archive.
I post it here just for my own archive.
After you are all set, you then go to the kitchen to make some breakfast for one. Definitely a cup of coffee with a toast since toast is your favorite and the easiest and fastest to make. There are 4 types of your preferred jam in the fridge and even though all 4 are your favorites, your most favorite is the strawberry jam. Compared to the other 3, strawberry jam is the least left in the bottle because you spread it on your bread almost every day. And sure enough, you know that after the working hours today, albeit you still have another 3 bottles of jam in your fridge, you will still have to go to the groceries store to buy another strawberry jam for the upcoming days.
Then, you drive to work all alone as usual, take a sip of the hot coffee through your tumbler, listen to the radio and the rest of the working day is just the same as the other Mondays. Nothing extraordinary happens and the day passes by.
This may seem like a typical morning timeline to most of us, but whether you think about it or not, we use statistics every day and we rely upon standards to make our lives simpler which standards make our fast paced lives possible. Our daily life is surrounded by the product of statistics.
You are aware that last Friday you were late for work because you woke up later than the usual, hence, on the next Monday morning, you wake up at 6.00am so that the unnecessary rush in the morning can be avoided. This is actually the action from the result of your own research on time management. You too have your own most favorite jam which is the strawberry jam while you actually have a total of 4 bottles of your preference jam in the fridge. This is when bias happens.
If every drive to work is the same as the other days, will you remember exactly about what happened during the daily drive? I bet the thing that you really remember is only the thoroughfare. This is because there was nothing along the way that caused your brain to interpret a deviation. Unless, if something happens to deviate you from the norm. For example, the road you are driving is very clear, but suddenly out of nowhere, a pedestrian cross the street right in front of your car. You need to make a real-time decision to avoid collision with the pedestrian. Your response to the situation is your response to a deviation.
Our daily life is full of decisional situations. Whether we have mathematical skills or not, we frequently estimate and compare probabilities, especially when making decisions. We use statistics to analyze and forecast the situation around us. Along a clear road, we expect the car in front of us to keep going. And if we are referring to the naïve trend of forecasting, which the last period’s actual is used as this period’s forecast (without adjusting or attempting to establish causal factors), we assume that no irregular situation would happen along the road such as a pedestrian suddenly crossing the street right in front of your car or the car in front of you does something unexpectedly.
I remember when in high school one of my friends asked the mathematics teacher, “Are we really going to use mathematics in our daily life? Does mathematics really necessary?” Well, the answer is positively yes. We are not just using mathematics in real life, but also statistics, which is major part of mathematics. The previous examples itself already shown on how close statistics to our daily life. Merely most of us do not yet realize on how much statistics are used in day to day and how useful statistics can be especially in today’s era of big data where everything can be measured realistically and statistics is the medium on how to make the data useful.
Statistics in life is like blood running in our veins. There are applicable examples everywhere. Data nowadays is the new gold. I can’t think of better time to appreciate and discover statistics than now. Where the world today produces and long for more data than ever before.
In my point of view, it is not vital for all of us to go very far to see the tracks of statistics and how it weaves its way in and out of our lives. As long as we are capable to ascertain what it all means and able to see how reliable the decision based on the real story behind the numbers, we are already halfway there instead of creating superfluous myths on our minds by the day about almost everything while we have statistics to prove that implications are well captured.
In brief, statistics is important to the whole process of life for decision makings, predictions and new insights. We can save time, money and other valuable resources all by understanding number by using statistics. Statistics links to us in every activity that we do, every decision that we make, every service that we use and also every product that we consume. Time is racing and the world is rapidly changing every day. We need to ceaselessly learn and improve our aptitude to pick up the pace and comprehend the changes around us. Learn to use data and statistics resources as instrument to learn and understand at a deeper level. If not, we will be left behind and continue to be misled by the wrong information and judgment.
