STATISTICS AND TYPES OF BIOLOGICAL DATA. (part one)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 07:15:00 +0000

(Based on Jerrol H. Zar Fourth edition Biostatistical Analysis book)

Hello again everyone, so long after the last post uploaded, uh?, so, this time I want to post about a new topic that I think involves whoever that reads this kind of blog.

Well, just like the name of the entry says, let’s start talking about the word statistics, which is derived from the Latin voice for state , this word is related principally to demographic information (like census data) and tax collecting. For the most of us, when we hear the word statistics we associated it with the term data, thinking in a quantitative approach, like, how many students from each geographic location enrolled to a college, statistics related to sports, labor statistics (numbers of workers unemployed, numbers of employed in various occupations) and so on and on, but in fact (sorry to disappoint) this is the WRONG approach, at least in order to understand all the data (biological data in this case) and its behavior we have to change this paradigm. After this point (and forward) let’s think that statistic means or refers to: the analysis and interpretation of data with a view toward objective evaluation of reliability of the conclusions based on the data (trust me!! It’s not my quote, is a J.H. Zar advice ;) ).

And what does the biostatistics word means?? What else but statistic related to biological problems, sounds simplistic (maybe even dummy) but that’s the way it is, so we can call it with Karl Pearson conceived term biometry, but today this could sound pretentious, in my personal opinion, a pretentious dude that speaks about statistic is just a bluffing liar (but I’m just a kid :P). So despites this, the biometry word talks us about of a biological measurement that in the end is its literal meaning.

At this point maybe you’re wondering, when we’ll start to calculate stuffs and predict the future and impress that girl with our sexy biological statistics assumptions?? (speaking about bluffers), well, before data can be analyzed, they must be collected, and another important fact is BEFORE DATA CAN BE ANALYZED, THEY MUST BE COLLECTED, was I clear??. So this isn’t the moment to talk about design of the experiment, but I have to tell that before collecting data and before the experiment begins we have to know what the heck we try to answer.

Once we have the data we apply something called descriptive statistics: this consist in getting the data arrive at their orderly and informative presentation. That way if we have a bunch a data well organized we can do some generalized conclusions, for example, if I have a table with the glucose serum levels of a certain population ordered by gender side by side, maybe we might wish to conclude that the females are more sweet than males (I’m joking), what I mean is, we might wish to conclude that the average glucose levels in males are higher than the females levels. We have to get in count that this conclusions are inferring characteristics of the whole from characteristics of its parts, this is the inferential statistics, we’ll talk later of this last “kind of statistic”.

Well this is the end of the PART ONE of this topic, in PART TWO we're going to talk about the types of biological data, so I'm going to try to give some examples by my own, but remember that this topic series are based in the book that is in the references at the bottom.

See you later, please comment and suggest topics.

What do you understand for the word STATISTIC??

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word statistic, … and when you hear Biostatistics??

Reference:

J.H. ZAR, BIOESTATISTICAL ANALYSIS, 4^th Ed. Prentice Hall, New Jersey, EUA, 1999, 663 pp.

New Header

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:57:00 +0000

Look out!!! the new header, do you like it?

Wellcome

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 20:47:00 +0000

Hello everybody. this blog is just beginning, so the incoming posts will be pilot ones, until the theme (topic or topics) blog is defined.

If for some reason you ended here, please make us all the suggestions that you want in order to take a path for this Blog.

Thanks

M.C. DogWood

Dogwood Science

STATISTICS AND TYPES OF BIOLOGICAL DATA. (part one)

New Header

Wellcome