Day 4: Decisions and Fighting With Photoshop!

So I have now finally decided on a topic and have contacted someone who can help me to review it and correct me when I get something wrong! I am going to (probably fail to) make some sort of ebook on understanding statistics. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to teach exactly how the chi-squared test works or how to perform the students T-test…keeping it simple and real guys; what does a p-value do (and some smart quibs about what they are not), what is a confidence limit, why do we even care and most importantly why do we use them?

So I started today by thinking about what I might want to put into my ebook and decided I wanted to make it as interactive as possible; I don’t want 30 pages of just numbers and stats because I think even the most devoted statistician would get a little bit fed up. And that led me to the other part of my progress today; I decided to make a short video of what this ebook would cover and of course, I had to do some drawings…please note that this is the guy who not only didn’t want to do art past 3rd year of school but was told that if I tried to, I would be removed me from the classroom…let that sink in a little.

So I set to work sketching out two simple things and realised that one of them, I could make excel do for me (such a handy piece of kit!). However trying to remove the background of the Bell-curve in photoshop…that took a lot more effort than I thought and in the end, I had to ask for help! Glad I live with an architecture student for reasons like this!

So I then drew out another drawing, which is included in the video as a bit of a joke and a “mood-lightener” (you can guess when you see it which one it is) and proceeded to use photoshop to colour it in…2.5-3hrs later and I have literally just finished wrestling with the dang programme that art/photography/architecture etc. students make look so easy.

Unfortunately, free WordPress hosting does not allow you to add videos so I attach a general photo of the end of the video and perhaps will put the video itself on twitter!

Until later!

Fearghal