 Welcome to our first what, why, and what for video. That serves as a very brief introduction and overview of the material we're gonna be learning in this first chapter. Now, this first chapter is an introduction. It kind of just lays the stage for the whole rest of the course, although it does include a little bit of technical material. And so I wanna give you a brief idea of what we're gonna be talking about, why it matters or why it's a sign and what you can use it for when you get out into the real world. So first off, what? We're gonna be learning a little bit about what statistics is. It's an attempt to use data to reach conclusions. It's an attempt to find patterns in things or exceptions. It's an attempt to use data to tell stories about people. And in that sense, it's a lot like translation. You're taking information in one language and in this case, it's numbers. And then you're going through a process to try to get the most important and essential elements of that and then put it into another language that means something useful to your audience. So maybe conclusions about human nature or trying to decide what to do next in your business. Also, we're going to talk about some basic terminology like samples versus populations and inferential and descriptive statistics just so you have a layout of terms that work for the rest of the course. And then finally, we're going to talk about something called levels of measurement. The idea there is that sometimes a number brings different amounts of information along with it. In some context, a one just simply means yes, like a person graduated or they're employed or it might mean how many children they have or it might mean how many hours they spent studying this week. In each case, that one tells you different things that they're in a particular bucket or that they're first in order or lots of different things. Now the reason that matters and the reason this information is required for this course because it changes how you look at the data. Knowing whether you're working with a sample or a population, knowing whether your data is nominal or ordinal or interval or ratio affects the kind of analyses you do, the kind of graphs you make and the information you can get out of it. So it lays a basis for every single other thing we're going to do in this course. That's why we're learning it. Now the third thing, however, is what for? What does this do in the real life? I know that most of you aren't planning on being researchers. On the other hand, all of you are going to be thinking about people, thinking about yourself and trying to decide what to do. And I sincerely believe that even just a little bit of data can go a very long way in helping you do the things that matter to you better. I'm not saying you have to turn into some big, quantitative, nerdy type of person. Rather, it just means thinking carefully. So for instance, I know people who simply weigh themselves each day. They don't change their diet, they don't change their exercise, but simply having that information and graphing it in a spreadsheet can be helpful. I know some great examples of people who decided that they wanted to get into a relationship. And so they actually created a spreadsheet, put down people's names, when they met with them, and just a little bit of evaluation about each one of them. I know it's kind of a silly thing. It seems to go against the spirit of dating, but it can be very helpful. More often, simply knowing what activities make you happiest, knowing what's the most time consuming, what things have the most headaches, and what leads to what. These are things that you can get from statistics, including the basic concepts of levels of measurement, samples versus populations, and really trying to tell a story with the data that you come up in your own life. So that is our what, our why, and our what for for chapter one. Thanks for joining me.