DAY 2 of STATISTICS: A lot less bloody ...

Day 2 of statistics, and at least today didn't seem as bad as yesterday. At yesterday's bloodbath more than half the students struggled with Excel (myself included). The material itself wasn't so difficult, but manipulating graphs as quickly as the professor was practically impossible and so many of us struggled to follow his practicum using Excel.

Today was a lot easier, first because the material covered probability and using it to make simple forecasts given past historical data. All that sort of data is punched into Excel, which, fortunately, does all the hard work and spits out the numbers that you need.

Later, in the afternoon, we worked with binomial distributions and Poisson distributions (which I still don't understand) but at least I got the stuff to work on Excel -- thanks to a classmate sitting next to me, a French guy named Arnaud who looks like Sean Penn and who spent two years in Chicago. Amazing guy, sportive and smart, and who used to work for the French upstart telcom Neuf Telecom.

I'll be going home in a few minutes but I feel a lot better than yesterday. At least, a lot less demoralized. Will read forward the material so I can keep up with the lectures.

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Links:

What in the world is a Poisson distribution?
(Wikipedia definition)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution

Neuf telecom
http://offres.neuf.fr/offres/home/index.html