Statistics is everywhere!

It all began when Mr. Etzioni, a professor of computer science and engeneering at University of Washington realized that with the help of computers the airfares can be predicted. All he needed was a data on seat supply and demand and an algorithm to predict how airlines’ systems were going to price those seats. Mr. Etzioni together with Hugh Crean created an airfare search engine called Farecast which predicts how much the price of an airline ticket will rise or fall over the upcoming days. It actually buys data on the availability of seats and their prices from ITA Sofware that sells the same information to the travel agents, travel web sites, computer reservation services and airlines. How it works, the computer uses an algorithm that focuses on the volatility of airline prices and its relation to the airline inventory. So, when the traveler pick the dates and the destination of the desired trip, Farecast generates a list of available flights, listing them from the cheapest to the most expensive and then it tells you what fares are going to go down. Farecast offers information on almost all of the carriers except Jet Blue and Sothwest and promises ones it covers all of the United States major cities; the company will go internationally by adding foreign routes. Farecast also tells you what are the best days to travel, displays the cheapest tickets from the city you’re traveling from, and shows which departure and arrival time would have the cheapest fare. So, it works similarly to the other sites like Zillow.com which used to estimate the price on the real estate and Inrix that uses global positioning satellite receivers to predict traffic, so if a freeway is jammed, for example, its computers would alert the driver to the least busy alternative route.

Leo McCloskey, the founder of the Enologix believes that by using computers and mathematics winemakers can compute taste quality from statistical correlations between chemistry and critics tasting scores.What this system does is it takes grape samples and extracts the juice to measure some of its chemical compounds. Then it uses the software to compare the chemistry of the projected wines with the benchmark example. Enologix runs sample through the liquid chromatograph to separate and then measure the compounds. It compares the chemical compounds to those bottled wines that were previously analyzed and criticized by growers and wine critics. The outcomes of this testing is based on a 100-point scale, which is an analogous to those used by the famous wine critics. It divides wine in four categories the lower the tannin which makes wine taste bitter and astringent the higher the category, thus better quality. It basically focuses on the chemicals such as terpenes, phenols and anthocyanins which are responsible for the following characteristic such as texture, aroma, taste and color, which are the quality determinants of the wine. So, by using this modern technology winemakers can predict their own critical scores with 95 percent accuracy.

Overall, the bigger picture here is that everything in the world has to do with statistics. The more modernized we become the more of the statistics we utilize. We may not notice it, but everything we do is related in some level to statistics. Our everyday decisions are based on statistics. Whether it’s something simple like traveling or shopping or more complicated like buying a house or choosing a school for your child; all of these are based on statistics. A simple activity like food shopping is clearly related to statistics. Supermarkets like Shoprite and Pathmark use statistical data to figure out what product should go on sale this week or what product should have its price raised. As we know people tend to buy more things when they are on sale, or more accessible and convenient for them. For example, statistics show that if a certain product is positioned on the middle shelf of the grocery store people would buy more of it just because it is at their level of reach, rather than reaching or bending for the same product if it was positioned on the upper or lower shelves. If you are looking to buy a house or a car, the best time to buy a house is toward the end of the year because prices tend to be lower around the winter time. Statistically more people tend to buy cars right after the New Year’s, because new cars drop in price around that time.

The government constantly uses statistics for many economical and political reasons. It is used to prevent government deficits and surpluses, forecast government spending, and to analyze economical status. Statistics are also used during elections. The presidential polls people take help to predict which president will win the election. However, these polls can be misleading at times because not all people who respond to the polls will go out and vote. Therefore poll results could actually be opposite to election results. Today, during the economic crisis the government uses statistics to calculate the current economical status of the country, to compare unemployment rates and to predict the future of our economy. Agencies such as the FDA, WHO, and other major organizations use statistical data to test new drugs or to calculate how much vaccine will needed to help prevent H1N1 virus (swine flu).

Personally, I deal with statistics all the time. I work as a dental hygienist in a dental office, and we always analyze our performance as well as patient flow and set daily production goals using statistical data available to us through the special dental software called Dentrix. Then we build our patient schedules based on the production goals set. Moreover, my yearly bonuses are based on production from my own patient pull. My boss uses statistical data that shows how many patients I treated and what my production for the year was. It calculates how many hygiene dental cleanings I did, how many radiographic x-rays I took, and what was my overall performance. Lastly, he calculates the percentage of overall hygiene production and adds it as my bonus.

Today’s society is completely overtaken by statistics. Everywhere you go and everything you do is probably observed and transformed into statistical data. How much exercise on average a person should do to stay healthy or how much coffee does an average person consumes a year; all of it is statistics. Every decision we make and every step we take in life leads to statistics and nothing more. Statistics is the way to understand the world around us.