Statistics is the science of making effective use of numerical data relating to groups of individuals or experiments.

It deals with all aspects of this,

including not only the collection, analysis and interpretation of such data, but also the planning of the collection of data, in terms of the design of
surveys and experiments.[1]
A statistician is someone who is particulary versed in the ways of thinking necessary for the successful application of statistical analysis. Often such
people have gained this experience after starting work in any of a list of fields of application of statistics. There is also a discipline called
mathematical statistics, which is concerned with the theoretical basis of the subject.
The word statistics can either be singular or plural.[2] In its singular form, statistics refers to the mathematical science discussed in this article. In its
plural form, statistics is the plural of the word statistic, which refers to a quantity (such as a mean) calculated from a set of data.[3]
• Descriptive statistics summarize the population data by describing what was observed in the sample numerically or graphically. Numerical
descriptors include mean and standard deviation for continuous data types (like heights or weights), while frequency and percentage are
more useful in terms of describing categorical data (like race).
• Inferential statistics uses patterns in the sample data to draw inferences about the population represented, accounting for randomness. These
inferences may take the form of: answering yes/no questions about the data (hypothesis testing) estimating numerical characteristics of the
data (estimation), describing associations within the data (correlation), modeling relationships within the data (regression), extrapolation,
interpolation, or other modeling techniques like ANOVA, time series, and data mining.

Key terms used in statistics

[edit] Null hypothesis

Interpretation of statistical information can often involve the development of a null hypothesis in that the assumption is that whatever is proposed as
a cause has no effect on the variable being measured.

[edit] Error
Working from a null hypothesis two basic forms of error are recognised:
• Type I errors where the null hypothesis is falsely rejecting giving a "false positive".
• Type II errors where the null hypothesis is erroneously confirmed and an actual difference between populations is missed.

[edit] Confidence intervals

Most studies will only sample part of a population and then the result is used to interpret the null hypothesis in the context of the whole population.
For various reasons any values obtained or derived from the sample will only be an approximation of the true value. Confidence intervals allow
statisticians to express how closely the answer dervied from the sample data matches the true value in the whole population. Often they are expressed
as 95% confidence limits so that there is a 95% chance of the whole population value lying between the two limits. If these intervals span a value
(such as zero) where the null hypothesis would be confirmed then this can indicate that any observed value has been seen by chance. (For example a
drug that gives a mean increase in heart rate of 2 beats per minute but has 95% confidence intervals of -5 to 9 for its increase may well have no effect
whatsoever.)

[edit] Significance
Statistics rarely give a simple Yes/No type answer to the question asked of them. Interpetation often comes down to the level of statistical
significance applied to the numbers and often refer to the probability of a value accurately rejecting the null hypothesis (sometimes referred to as the
p-value).
When interpreting an academic paper reference to the significance of a result when referring to the statistical significance does not necessarily mean
that the overall result means anything in real world terms. (For example in a large study of a drug it may be shown that the drug has a statisically
significant but very small beneficial effect such that the drug will be unlikely to help anyone given it in a noticeable way.)
Engineering statistics is a branch of statistics that has several subtopics which are particular to engineering:

1. Design of Experiments (DOE) uses statistical techniques to test and construct models of engineering components and systems.
2. Quality control and process control use statistics as a tool to manage conformance to specifications of manufacturing processes and their
products.
3. Time and methods engineering use statistics to study repetitive operations in manufacturing in order to set standards and find optimum (in
some sense) manufacturing procedures.
4. Reliability engineering which measures the ability of a system to perform for its intended function (and time) and has tools for improving
performance.
5. Probabilistic design involving the use of probability in product and system design
Competence is a standardized requirement for an individual to properly perform a specific job. It encompasses a combination of knowledge, skills and
behavior utilized to improve performance. More generally, competence is the state or quality of being adequately or well qualified, having the ability to
perform a specific role.
For instance, management competency includes the traits of systems thinking and emotional intelligence, and skills in influence and negotiation. A person
possesses a competence as long as the skills, abilities, and knowledge that constitute that competence are a part of them, enabling the person to perform
effective action within a certain workplace environment. Therefore, one might not lose knowledge, a skill, or an ability, but still lose a competence if what
is needed to do a job well changes.
Competence is also used to work with more general descriptions of the requirements of human beings in organizations and communities. Examples are
educations and other organizations who want to have a general language to tell what a graduate of an education must be able to do in order to graduate or
what a member of an organization is required to be able to do in order to be considered competent. An important detail of this approach is that all
competences have to be action competences, which means you show in action, that you are competent. In the military the training systems for this kind of
competence is called artificial experience, which is the basis for all simulators.
Competence is shown in action in a situation in a context that might be different the next time you have to act. In emergency contexts, competent people
will react to the situation following behaviors they have previously found to succeed, hopefully to good effect. To be competent you need to be able to
interpret the situation in the context and to have a repertoire of possible actions to take and have trained in the possible actions in the repertoire, if this is
relevant. Regardless of training, competence grows through experience and the extent of an individual to learn and adapt. However, there has been much
discussion among academics about the issue of definitions. The concept of competence has different meanings, and continues to remain one of the most
diffuse terms in the management development sector, and the organizational and occupational literature (Collin, 1989).
It is interesting to register competences, in HR it is much more important to have a policy for developing competences especially the general competences
described below.
Dreyfus and Dreyfus[citation needed] has introduced a language of the levels of competence in competence development. The causative reasoning of such
a language of levels of competence may be seen in their paper on Calculative Rationality titled, "From Socrates to Expert Systems: The Limits and
Dangers of Calculative Rationality." The five levels proposed by Dreyfus and Dreyfus were:

• Novice: Rule-based behaviour, strongly limited and inflexible

• Experienced Beginner: Incorporates aspects of the situation
• Practitioner: Acting consciously from long-term goals and plans
• Knowledgeable practitioner: Sees the situation as a whole and acts from personal conviction
• Expert: Has an intuitive understanding of the situation and zooms in on the central aspects
The process of competence development is a lifelong series of doing and reflecting. As competencies apply to careers as well as jobs, lifelong competency
development is linked with personal development as a management concept. And it requires a special environment, where the rules are necessary in order
to introduce novices, but people at a more advanced level of competence will systematically break the rules if the situations requires it. This environment is
synonymously described using terms such as learning organization, knowledge creation, self-organizing and empowerment.

[edit] General competence

Within a specific organization or professional community, professional competence, is frequently valued. They are usually the same competencies you
have to show in an interview for a job. But today there is another way of looking at it: that there are certain general areas of occupational competence
required if you want to keep a job or get a promotion. For all organizations and communities there is a set of primary tasks that competent people have to
contribute to all the time. For a university student, for example, the primary tasks could be:

• Handling theory
• Handling methods
• Handling the information of the assignment
The four general areas of competence are:

• Meaning Competence: You must be able to identify with the purpose of the organization or community and act from the preferred future in
accordance with the values of the organization or community.
• Relation Competence: You must be able to create and nurture connections to the stakeholders of the primary tasks.
• Learning Competence: You must be able to create and look for situations that make it possible to experiment with the set of solutions that make
it possible to complete the primary tasks and reflect on the experience.
• Change Competence: You must be able to act in new ways when it will promote the purpose of the organization or community and make the
preferred future come to life.

[edit] Occupational Competence

The Occupational Competence movement was initiated by David McClelland in the 1960s with a view to moving away from traditional attempts to
describe competence in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes and to focus instead on the specific self-image, values, traits, and motive dispositions (i.e.
relatively enduring characteristics of people) that are found to consistently distinguish outstanding from typical performance in a given job or role. It
should be noted that different competences predict outstanding performance in different roles, and that there is a limited number of competences that
predict outstanding performance in any given job or role. Thus, a trait that is a "competence" for one job might not predict outstanding performance in a
different role.
McClelland argued [1] that these competencies could neither be identified nor assessed using traditional procedures. The fundamental problem is that high
level competencies such as initiative and the ability to understand and intervene in organizational processes are difficult and demanding activities that no
one will engage in unless they very much care about the activity in which they are engaged – or unless they find these activities intrinsically satisfying
(here is the link to McClelland's work on social motives [2])[citation needed]. Such qualities will, therefore, most often only be developed and displayed
while people are undertaking activities they care about. Furthermore, success in undertaking them depends on bringing to bear a range of cognitive,
affective, and conative components of competence, such as thinking about what is to be achieved and how it is to be achieved, turning one’s emotions into
the task, and persisting over a long period of time. Note, again, that these components of competence cannot be assessed except in relation to activities
people care about, i.e. they cannot be assessed through the processes favored by traditional psychometricians. Hence their neglect in conventional studies
of occupational competence based upon traditional knowledge—and especially tests of “academic” knowledge—tests knowledge of content.
As it happens, McClelland and his colleagues had developed an alternative framework for thinking about and assessing high level competencies but,
unfortunately, presented it as a way of thinking about motivation. And, because it is at loggerheads with conventional thinking in psychometrics, it has
been widely misunderstood. Over time, it became clear that the high level competencies differentiating effective from ineffective performance in
occupational roles could be identified using detailed Behavioral Event Interviews because these interviews do capture thoughts and behavior in situations
in which the interviewee is more or less fully engaged, as the interviewee normally has free choice of the situations to describe. These studies revealed the
importance of a wide range of previously neglected competencies.
By the time Lyle and Signe Spencer sought to bring them together in their book “Competence at Work”[3] there were about 800 such studies.
Unfortunately, a significant part of the multi-billion dollar international competence based education and training movement which followed largely
corrupted the orientation of the program back into the very framework that McClelland had tried so hard to replace. Recent work has re-emphasized the
connection between competences and outstanding performance on the job. However, it must be emphasized that while generic competencies, as found in
"Competence at Work"[3] provide a useful 'rough cut' of the competencies most relevant to a common range of roles, it is also the case that many of the
competencies that are linked to outstanding performance are unique to those roles. The more different a role is from those described in Competence at
Work,[3] the more different the competencies are likely to be from those listed in that book.
Nevertheless, as can be seen from Raven and Stephenson,[4] there have been important developments in research relating to the nature, development, and
assessment of high-level competencies in homes, schools, and workplaces.

Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate")[1] is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred
Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.[2] However, the
word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:

• Excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture
• An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
• The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group
When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or
horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the
fulfillment of national aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human capacity.
In the twentieth century, "culture" emerged as a concept central to anthropology, encompassing all human phenomena that are not purely results of human
genetics. Specifically, the term "culture" in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent
experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and
represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Following World War II, the term became important, albeit with different meanings, in other disciplines
such as sociology, cultural studies, organizational psychology and management studies.