A polling company has conducted a survey, usually a pretty big one because they can afford it. This kind of remark is entirely unremarkable in the papers or in everyday life, but let’s have a think about what it entails. “I have a tough job,” the Premier said in response to a poll which found her government is now the most unpopular Labor administration in polling history, with a primary vote of just 23 per cent. For instance, here’s a tiny extract from a newspaper article in the Sydney Morning Herald ():

Once you start thinking about statistics in these terms – that statistics is there to help us draw inferences from data – you start seeing examples of it everywhere. The bigger and more useful part of statistics is that it provides tools that let you make inferences about data. In fact, descriptive statistics is one of the smallest parts of statistics, and one of the least powerful. However, statistics covers much more than that. Kind of like stamp collecting, but with numbers. To a lot of people, this is all there is to statistics: it’s about calculating averages, collecting all the numbers, drawing pictures, and putting them all in a report somewhere. Up to this point in the book, we’ve discussed some of the key ideas in experimental design, and we’ve talked a little about how you can summarize a data set. I have studied many languages-French, Spanish and a little Italian, but no one told me that Statistics was a foreign language. Sections 4.1 & 4.9 - Adapted text by Danielle Navarro Section 4.10 - 4.11 & 4.13 - Mix of Matthew Crump & Danielle Navarro Section 4.12 - 4.13 - Adapted text by Danielle Navarro

4.13.6 Estimating the population standard deviation.

4.13.3 Experiments and Population parameters.

4.10.3 Sampling distributions exist for any sample statistic!.4.10.1 Sampling distribution of the sample means.4.10 Sampling distributions and the central limit theorem.4.8.5 Population parameters and sample statistics.4.8.4 How much does it matter if you don’t have a simple random sample?.4.8.3 Most samples are not simple random samples.4.4.2 Working with the binomial distribution in R.4.3.1 Introducing probability distributions.4.2.3 What’s the difference? And who is right?.4.1 How are probability and statistics different?.

Samplism samples