It's Friday of the last week of semester one and I have now finished all classes - this was the 31st semester that I have completed in NCI. The last week of a semester always gives me mixed feelings in that as each day passes I have a last lecture/tutorial with each class in turn. Some I will see in class again in semester two, others not. They say that time flies if you are having fun, I definitely had a lot of fun working with students this semester, as it absolutely flew by. I also notice that the older I get, the faster the time goes!
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| Sir Ronald Fisher. Image source: Wikipedia. |
I was asked a lot of questions this semester by students during and after classes - most I hope I gave satisfactory answers to. By far the toughest question I was asked was "Who makes up this shit?"! I had just completed a statistics class and the topic was Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). While the class giggled about this, I was a bit taken aback as I had never been asked a question like this before. I sensed it was asked with tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless it is an interesting question. Why and how do people come up with new ideas, and who was the first to do something?
A one-way ANOVA is a statistical test to determine if there is a significant difference between the means of 3 or more groups, and it was created by the well-known statistician Ronald Fisher in the 1920s - see a profile of him in Wikipedia. If you want to know how to perform a one-way ANOVA test, check out my video below which shows you the technique that I covered in class - which led to the "Who makes up this shit?" question!
V interesting. Not for the first time, I find it's easier to take material like this on board if I'm told who first thought of the idea, and why! I often wonder should all of maths and science be taught in this 'how the idea emerged' way..
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