Remember from the first lecture, we often don't know the population parameters, that's why we're doing the research.

He expanded his research.

He expanded his research.

Nye That's fantastic.

A few years back a group of researchers at University College London brought a bunch of memory champions into the lab.

It shoots up and it keeps going up.

Size of the total population

So the population is just the entire collection of cases or people that we would like to generalize about in our research.

Recommendation 8

These are commonly prescribed antidepressants.

There is, for example, a project that's underway to sequence a thousand individuals their genomes from different parts of the world.

Population size

The most important topics to take away are again, this idea of sampling error.

Number of success overall

The unconditional cash transfer was accompanied by a systematic study using random control trial methodology.

Now, the reason we knew that was because we spent the previous 10 years studying tribes, studying these naturally occurring groups.

By measuring the students' smiles, researchers were able to predict how fulfilling and long lasting a subject's marriage would be, (Laughter) how well she would score on standardized tests of well being, and how inspiring she would be to others.

So I started interviewing men and asking questions.

A recent study by the World Bank

This is not the research we're interested in. This is sick.

So that's what we want to test.

And we know this because when we study different language groups and associate them with their cultures, we see that different languages slow the flow of ideas between groups.

Standard deviation for the total population

(Laughter)

The lab's the other way.

And suppose that there are only 300 certified wine experts in the entire world.

She lives at the Gorilla Foundation in California.

That's great.

Or you can go to NPR.org and listen to a live interview.

How do I know which rhinovirus I have?

This is called colony collapse disorder, and it's bizarre.

Weak.

And so what I want to tell you about for a few minutes is, what people have learned using DNA sequencing techniques in particular, to study the microbial cloud that lives in and on us.

Terminal ballistics is the study of a projectile as it hits a target and the destruction that it causes.

I concentrated my effort on the study.

Initially we said, what can we do to shrink the fudge factor?

And we have 26 elephants here, and our research is focused on the evolution of intelligence with elephants, but our foundation Think Elephants is focused on bringing elephants into classrooms around the world virtually like this and showing people how incredible these animals are.

And in those examples, it's important that you understand the difference between a population and a sample.

The second strategy of research is to study a subject broadly searching for unknown phenomena or patterns of known phenomena

That's the Pacific Gyre.

What kind of shit research are you doing?

I'm an ecologist, and I study complexity. I love complexity.

At the Biology and the Built Environment Center, we carried out a study in a hospital where we sampled air and pulled the DNA out of microbes in the air.

Sampling error clearly depends on the size of the sample so, and, but also the degree of variance in the population.

And for that reason is pretty tricky to get government to put serious money into it.