Pat is having her statistic exam next week, so she is studying hard this weekend. Somehow her nervous in preparing for the exam affects me. I already helped her walking Charlie everyday, did laundry, cooked dinner and washed the dishes on the weekend. As a arts student, Pat seems struggling in the statistic course. I wonder how tough is the course and I picked up her textbook and see hard the material can be. I spent about half an hour go through all the chapter summary. As I expected, the undergrad statistic course for psychology students is a piece of cake to an engineer. There is only one central idea connecting everything in the course: you got some sample data, then you pick a distribution curve, then apply some math formulas to find whatever parameters in the curve. There are some assumptions, from time to time, you have to test whether the sample data justify for the curve you are trying to fit. You don’t want to fit the data into a wrong curve or your experiment result is meaningless. I did not learn statistic in engineering school, but the basic concept is the same for probability and statistics course. It is the same basic mathematics to see whether a new drug is effective on the patients or to decode cell phone signal received from the antenna.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"