College Statistics that I Missed

So, today I actually started enrolling in an online course. This one is called "Statistics: Making Sense of Data" (https://www.coursera.org/course/introstats)

What's special? I mean of course else than the fact that I actually enroll after clicking "enroll" -_-

It's that they explain some basics that I didn't know earlier, but hesitated to ask anyone about them. Including (but not limited to):

- How to make some basic visualizations useful (such as scatter plots, box plots, and histograms)

- The origin of some basic formulas (for example why the hell we divide by n-1 instead of just n while looking for variance)

- How to deal with data with extremities (such as with trimmed data & the notion of robust measurement)

Whoever reads this must think that I'm such an idiot for not knowing these things earlier, but whatever. Hahahaha.

Up to this point, the course basically makes descriptive statistics look a lot cooler! That's real neat! I had been wondering why the hell we still used the descriptive ones when we had the inferential ones. What's more important is now I know the basics on how to use both to make sense of those messy jumbling numbers.

Oh ya, along with these conceptual lessons, they also teach you practical R, so that's one hell of an added value! So, if you're not a Statistics student, but is - a weirdo who's - attracted to such things, you may want to try it out!

P.S. 

This is the first course which announces itself to be "basic" and is aimed at novices that I find useful!

Abi

"Abi!" anak perempuan itu menjerit riang seraya menunjuk-nunjuk. Dari pintu _arrival_ seorang pria paruh baya berjalan dengan senyum lebar. Hal pertama yang dilakukannya adalah mendaratkan cium sayang untuk anaknya, lalu istrinya, tanpa memedulikan ratusan pasang mata memandang.

Si kepala keluarga tidak terlihat sempurna. Aku membayangkannya sebagai ayah yang jarang ada di rumah, ayah yang tak sempat ke sekolah bahkan untuk mengambil rapor anak perempuannya. Tetapi apa yang bisa membuat anak itu begitu bersemangat akan kedatangan ayah yang tak hadir dalam momen-momennya? Apa yang membuat istrinya tak ragu bertukar kecup di bibir di tengah-tengah kerumunan orang?

Berjalan pulang bersama dengan senyum terkembang lebar, sebuah keluarga yang tak sering kutemukan.

Menyadari bahwa satu-satunya alasan aku dapat menyaksikan kejadian ini ialah karena aku tiba lebih awal tanpa disengaja, aku merasa terberkati.