Guest Column: 'What is Stats?' written specially for Not Scientific
Science column at BackWash.com. Mrs Yasmin Cassimally (my mum) has
generously accepted to write an article about her speciality,
statistics. It is thus easy to guess her profession: Senior
Statistician at the Mauritius CSO (Central Statistical Office).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What is Statistics? This is a question I'm often asked when I tell
people that I work in the Stats Dept. I do not have a single answer
for this. In fact, I have one for every occasion or almost!

To the old people without formal education, I usually tell them
that I work in that dept that carries out censuses. 'You know, the
office that enumerates the number of people in the country. You
remember the last time they called at your place and asked you a lot
of questions. Well basically, that's my line'. 'But why on earth
should you be poking your nose in people's private business and ask
all sorts of embarrassing questions like age, place of birth, whether
I have any disability or things of the sort?' would the granny be
retorting. And I'll explain, 'Well, you know it's important to get to
know the number of people in the country and also their age. If you
know that there are so many young children then the government will get to know they need to build so many schools. If you know that there are so many people in their fifties then the government will get know that in some ten years' time there will be around so many in their sixties and thus it can save some money for the old age pensions of these people.' 'That they better do, considering the peanuts that we're getting now and...'. Let's move on to someone else cause I don't think you'd like to hear more of her blah blah blah.

To those I want to impress not to say put off, I would put on an
intellectual tone and say 'Well, Stats is a branch of mathematics. We
work a lot with figures, you know. That's what Stats are actually;
lots of figures and formulae. Fortunately we have the computer to help
us out.' 'Oh!' would be the reply. And I would continue, 'Stats is also about comparisons and hypothesis testing like when a new drug is
being introduced, the drug will be tried on a sample of people and a
placebo administered to another sample. Then the Statisticians would
collect information on both groups, compare the results and carry out
statistical tests to find out whether the medicine is actually
effective.' And this, believe me, would leave my interlocutor
spellbound.

Well when I'm on a good days I may try this. 'Stats is about
collecting information and processing the information to come out
with something meaningful so that you can make a decision. You
yourself, make use of Stats in your everyday life. When you, let's
say, would want to take some music lessons. You won't be starting with
just any teacher. You'll find out about the music teachers that are
around, whether they teach your style of music, the instrument you
want to play, whether they're good at it, their fees and things of the
sort. Then when you get all the details and also know about your
requirements, you'll make your choice. So you see you've been using
Stats, that's basically what we do in our job, we collect information,
be it through censuses and surveys and record all the information on
forms. These data as we call them are then coded, fed into the
computer and then we churn out stats. – Summary measures like the
total population is such figure; the estimated number of internet
users in the country is such figure.' So now, hopefully the number of
people not knowing about Stats is less by one.

What do you say to that? Which of my audiences would you
rather be? The choice is yours!

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