 This is Chih-chou. Welcome to my channel. And I thought what we do for this video is sort of continuing on with the theme that I've asked for the last few videos, right? Which is sort of doing readings and talking about books and doing book recommendations. But I thought I'd slant that towards a little bit of mathematics, right? Because one of the first things first things that happened when I started producing math content and sharing it online was people started asking about books, right? For me to give a book recommendation regarding certain branches of mathematics or physics or, you know, maybe calculus, linear algebra, basic introductory mathematics even, right? So, you know, I guess in 2008, 2009, one of the first videos I loaded up, I think it was for series two of the language of mathematics, was doing a book recommendation. It might have been the last video for series two of the language of mathematics. It was a book recommendation, right? Where I recommended some math books, a couple math books, I believe, a physics book and a couple other books as well, right? And if you're following some of my work, you'll know that I recently got access to my library, right? Which included a few boxes of math books. And I've gone through those boxes and created my library and I've been going through some of my books, taking a look at them and pulling some of those out and looking through them again, right? And one of the things I've been doing recently is looking into stats again, sort of refreshing myself on some of the statistics that I've studied and relearning some of the techniques, some of the processes, right? And definitely familiarizing myself with some of the terminology because there's a lot of terminology and statistics and statistics will get into the mathematics, the language of statistics, I guess, for language of mathematics do a whole series of problems in statistics. But statistics basically is mathematics where you're focused on collecting a whole bunch of data and analyzing that data, right? And statistics is not a hard, it is a hard science, but it's not pure mathematics, right? So there's a little bit of finesse involved with statistics, sort of statistics. You can think about it as a merger of art and science, art and math, where you're taking raw data and massaging that raw data and trying to interpret that raw data for whatever system that you're taking a look at, right? And for me, I've studied a little bit of statistics, I took some courses at university and I've taught high school math statistics as well. And unfortunately, for the last few years, they've taken that out of the curriculum, which is one of the reasons why I'm refreshing myself on some of the statistics, because it's not, it hasn't become a yearly thing for me to have a lot of stats students to teach, right? So I've been trying to relearn some of the terminology, because as you know, one of the things we're going to do for the math curriculum we're building online is create a series on statistics and there's sort of a direction I want to go with it, right? We'll talk about this a lot more, but I've never found an amazing stats textbook, right? The statistics I've learned and I've used and I've taught is basically taking a little bit of stats from one place, taking a little bit of stats in another place, a little bit of here, a little bit of here, a little bit of here, and you know, working with that and putting the whole picture together, right? And what I want to do right now is sort of, you know, I've been going through my books, I pulled out one book with statistics, which I think is a fantastic introductory. Well, let me rephrase that, it's not an introductory course, it's an introductory book on stats, but it could be used as an introductory book on stats, but it's an amazing book when it comes to if you want to review your stats, which is one thing I'm doing right now, right? Re-learning the terminology, getting comfortable with the flow of logic, right? So if you're looking for a good, short, small textbook where you can get some of the terminology and sort of have a book for review, and you might be able to use this to learn some of the stats, but I don't think so. It's got examples, but it doesn't have solved problems, not too many of them, and it doesn't go into it, which is one thing stats needs to do, because there is a fair bit of subjectivity involved with statistics, okay? And the book is called Starting Statistics, E.L. Hansen and G.A. Brown, okay? And I found this book to be really good, and it's, it's basically, as it says, starting statistics, so it starts off from the basics, and it goes through it fairly rapidly, defining a lot of terms, and it's easy to read, very, very, I love the layout of this book, right? It's, you know, they've got nice pictures, they've got definitions at the beginning, they sort of explain exactly what they're about to do, right? Fantastic, because that's what stats says, you take data and you, from the beginning, if you're involved in any type of statistical work, hopefully you're involved from the proposal aspect of it to setting up the data collection system that you're going to set up, right? The model that you're going to use to collect all the data, and you're going to be involved in collecting the data, analyzing data, interpreting data, and writing reports based on that data, right? And if you ever get an opportunity to find a job where you're doing all those, take it, right? Because you'll learn a lot through that process, okay? But basically this book, it lays it out very nicely, it's got beautiful pictures, somewhat simplistic, but that's, you don't need intricate pictures of things to be able to understand those things, as long as you have representations of those things, right? So it starts off very simple, defines terms, right? And, you know, it gives you, it gives you tables, it gives you figures, it gives you very few equations, there isn't very many equations here, right? It's more explaining what the process is. And, you know, it's a very good book. There's one, here, let me read you one place that was like, oh, fantastic, this is a beautiful way to explain it, very simple, where they're talking about, you know, what's the difference between counting and measuring, right? Right here, what's the difference between counting and measuring? And they highlighted in red the important words, terms that you need to know. And I'll read you three sentences, and these three 10 sentences will tell you the difference between, what the difference is between counting and measuring, right? And here's the three sentences. All statistical information or data is found by either counting or measuring. Data which we collect by counting things is called discrete data. Data collected by measuring things is called continuous data. In those three sentences, there's a lot of information being conveyed, especially if you have the visual in mind of what a discrete graph looks like, what a continuous graph looks like, and how you can set up your surveys, right? Are you going to connect, collect, are you going to be counting things, are you going to be measuring things? There's a lot there, right? So it's a fantastic book if you want to review your stats, if you already know what's going on to a certain degree, because I don't think this is a very good book to teach statistics, but it's an amazing book to have as a companion of a book that's teaching statistics, because I think a textbook to teach statistics would have to be quite large, really, because there's a lot of subjectivity involved with statistics, okay? So that's the book recommendation I have if you sort of want to do a real review on statistics, which is sort of what I've been doing right now. So I'm sort of sharing sort of the background of some of the work that I'm doing right now to be able to put a series together, to put the, you know, contact together for the statistics stuff that we're going to put together, right? Sort of build a little module for statistics where we can learn it, right? So that's sort of one thing I've been using to review some of the terminology myself for stats. And for statistics, any stats course you take, hopefully, if it's not theoretical, involves, you know, some kind of program that you're using to analyze data, because statistics is a very hand-on, really. You have to be, when you're studying stats, what you need to do is read whatever the, you know, section you're focused on, look at the example, work yourself through the example. Ideally, what you want is take the data of the example that they're using and do everything that they're doing yourself, right? That you can convince yourself you understand the process involved in analyzing that data. And then what you need to do is take your own data that's not in the book, right? Maybe it's an exercise in the back where you can look up the solutions, but take your own data and do the same thing that the example showed you to do, ideally, in a spreadsheet, okay? So what I've been doing right now is looking at the, you know, reviewing my terminology, the processes involved in doing statistics. And I'll be using a couple of programs to refresh myself on how to set up the tables and how to do the graphs and how to set the limits, restrictions, parameters, and all that jazz, right? And two things I've been using. I'll give you the first one that I've sort of just started using and sort of relearning right now, not relearning but learning, right? And it's an open source software and I'm sort of trying to gear myself towards open source programs, okay? And it's called JASP, J-A-S-P, and I'll provide the links in the description of the video right now. This book, I couldn't find too much info on it. You can get it on the cheap online, but there isn't too much info on it, so I'll provide a link to, you know, the name of this book and I'll provide a link to the other stuff that I'm going to talk about right now, but one of the first ones being JASP is an open source software that's used to do statistical analysis and the Wiki page for it, the description for it, this thing started off recently in the last couple of years. It's an open source community that's out of Holland, I believe, right? But the Wiki page for it says this, JASP is a free and open source graphical program for statistical analysis designed to be easy to use and familiar to users of SPSS. Additionally, JASP provides many Bayesian, I can't pronounce Bayesian statistical methods, and Bayesian is amazing, it's basically, but we'll get into that a lot later when we create the content on statistics. The first paragraph of the about page for JASP says this, and I've used this program a little bit, it's super easy to use. There are certain things I still need to look into specifically, you know, how to bring in, you know, the data sets, the type of data sets you can bring in, but very just clicking and getting graphs and analyzing stuff, I liked what I saw. I haven't played around with it too much, but it's for something being very recent in the last couple years, it has huge potential, and this is the first paragraph of the about page for JASP. Our main goal is to help statistical practitioners reach maximally informative conclusions with a minimum of fuss. This is why we have developed JASP, a cross-platform software program with a state-of-the-art graphical user interface. The JASP interface allows you to conduct statistical analysis in seconds and without having to learn programming or risk risking a programming mistake, and that's exactly what it was, the little bit that I played around with it. I didn't have to know, you know, I don't have to punch in formulas, I just clicked boxes and saw the results on the side and it was beautifully done, right, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to spend more time to learn this, so aside from the book where I'm doing the review, I'm playing around with JASP, and one other thing that I'm doing is I've, you know, the stats, all the data that I've processed during the decade-long life that I had as a geophysicist, where I was collecting a lot of data, processing a lot of data, interpreting a lot of data, where I did everything involved from proposing a project, to collecting, to interpreting, to setting up everything, right. We did a lot of processing of the data and there was some statistics involved with that data as well, and doing all that work, I ended up using Excel, right, so I've been messing around with Excel a little bit, right, just remembering how to create tables and how to have sort stuff and how to punch in the formulas and use some of the, some of the math, some of the options available, like Excel is very powerful and it's very useful, okay, and I will continue to use Excel without a doubt because it is the software I learned and it does do an excellent job processing data and allowing you to interpret data, right, sort data, not process but sort data, so one thing I've been doing is going through Excel, while I've been going through that, I've been going through a playlist, okay, and this playlist is from, I'll provide the link in the description of this video, it's fantastic, there's 103 videos on there and this person has put out a lot of videos on statistics on and his whole library is about how to use Excel, okay, so he's an expert in Excel and he's provided a lot of videos on statistics and the playlist that I've been looking at and he's got multiple different playlists so definitely, you know, if you're interested in learning Excel more or learning Excel or learning statistics and some of the other stuff that he does, take a look at his channel, it's very good, right, but the playlist that I've been looking at is Excel 2010, statistical formula, formulas, functions, charts, pivot tables and there's 103 videos on that, okay, and what I've been doing is I've been watching these videos at either one and a half or two times the speed because there's a lot of videos, right, so you know, I've, by watching it twice or one and a half times or twice the speed that, you know, the time frame says it at, you go through this stuff a lot faster and I'm not, you know, if anything that I'm hitting that I want to try myself then what I do, I just pause it, you know, maybe backtrack a little bit, put on normal speed, go to Excel and practice it myself, right, so the playlist I've been looking at is Excel 2010, statistical formulas, functions, charts, pivot tables, okay, and the person's website is, Excel is fun, okay, and here's the, you know, about information, the paragraph he has on there, right, his name is Mike, quotation marks, Excel is fun, Gervin, and he's written a couple of books on Excel, how to do better in Excel, I forgot what the names of the books are, and he's created a couple of DVDs and stuff like this, and he's got 2,800 videos on his channel, fantastic, amazing, does a fantastic job teaching, I wish I had him as a teacher when I was learning statistics, okay, on that level, which is a compliment that many people have given me running mathematics, so I don't dish that out lightly, okay, here's the description on his channel, it's about page, over 2,800 Excel how-to videos for beginners to advance, Mike Excel is fun channel, Gervin is a business instructor, I should put on my glasses, instructor at Highline Community College, and an Excel MPV, I had to look up what MPV was, was Microsoft something professional, it's like, you know, has gotten badges from Microsoft for being very good Excel, right, Excel MVP in the year 2013 to 2016, he has created over 2,800 free Excel how-to videos and over 50 playlist videos, Excel is fun has also authored 2 Excel books and 3 DVDs, hopefully these videos will help you to become better with Excel, so you can save time at work, help workers become better at Excel and save so much time you can take an extra vacation, okay, so I'll provide the link to the playlist, I'll provide the link to his channel as well, and there's another playlist that I've been looking at which is Excel Statistics 88, Confidence Intervals and Hypothesis Testing, right, because that's where we're going to be leading with the material that we're going to create for our curriculum, I guess, for the module that we're going to create, okay, so I thought I'd share that info with you guys because, you know, I've had a lot of people ask me to recommend math textbooks and they have asked me to recommend statistics specifically as well and I haven't really touched statistics other than I believe the only video we've done regarding statistics is looking at the probability distribution for a two set of dice, right, and that's where we're going to build up a lot of stats from as well as we're going to look at certain other aspects of some of the other content that we're creating on my channel that's not yet really too directly involved with mathematics, but it will definitely go there and if you're curious about it, it is comic books, right, so we're going to overlap a lot of the comic book content with, especially the comic book halls, investing, we're going to start off on that aspect and connecting that up with the mathematics, right, and the odds are we'll do a little bit of statistics on there as well, right, so I thought you'd find that useful if you're looking for some recommendations on stats and either to review stats, practice stats, or learn stats, that'll, those three sort of sources should give you a pretty good start on it, okay, and it's something that I'm working on right now behind the camera, okay, that's it for now, I'll see you guys in the next video.