This lesson provides a wonderful introduction to why organic compounds play such an integral role in our bodies and the world around us. You will learn how to identify organic compounds, the role carbon plays in the amazing diversity of organic compounds, as well as further emphasis on why shape matters so much in chemistry.
Producers: Coast Learning Systems
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Chemical Reactions: Atoms Find New Partners
The presence of ongoing change is a reality we cannot escape, but most change is related to chemistry and takes place at a level you can’t see. This lesson explores three key topics: How to identify whether a chemical or physical change has occurred. How to classify chemical reactions into categories to help predict the outcome. How to calculate substances to ensure the necessary amounts of the ingredients are used and the desired amount of material is created.
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Understanding Chemistry in Our World Box Set (14 Lessons on 2 DVDs)
Understanding Chemistry in Our World is a one-semester introductory course that speaks to the beginning student as well as those who have previous knowledge. This course takes students on a journey of experimentation and investigation. The concepts they learn will guide them to identify chemistry at work in everyday situations, and hopefully inspire them to explore new topics outside of the classroom setting.
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Chemistry and the Amazing Table
The more you know about chemistry the more you will be able to predict, control and manipulate the world around you. Since human kind learned to control fire, we have yearned to understand why the world behaves the way it does. Chemistry is often referred to as the “central science,” because of its pivotal role in the study of all other sciences.
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Bonding: Atomic Glue
Lesson 2 is a crucial lesson because it takes you from discussing the elements in isolation to exploring how these elements interact with each other at the atomic level, and how chemists, including you, can predict these interactions. As you were introduced, or most likely reintroduced, to the elements in the periodic table, you learned the important role protons play in defining one element from the next. As we move our focus to bonding in this lesson you will shift your focus to the electrons, since they define how elements interact with each other.
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Bootstrap Methods & Permutation Tests
In this lesson, you’ll learn what statisticians do when they need to analyze data that does not meet the strict requirements for the tests covered so far in this course. In our previous lessons, the tests have required Normal distributions and proper sample sizes. But sometimes these conditions simply cannot be met. For instance, some investigations involve collecting data on human subjects with serious illnesses where it would be simply impossible or unethical to keep sampling in order to meet all the criteria for traditional statistical analysis. Other times, the sample sizes are limited due to expense or the availability of subjects to study. Rather than simply discard the data or abandon the study, statisticians have gotten around the problem by using the power of computers to simulate the necessary conditions in a way enables them to make reliable estimates and draw valid conclusions. While these methods make for a far more complex analysis, they allow researchers to investigate important data sets they could not have otherwise analyzed.
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Nonparametric Tests
So far, all of the tests introduced in this course have required that the data have a Normal distribution. However, what about those studies in which the distribution is not Normal? Most of the tests studied thus far are robust with regard to Normality, and can be used as long as the sample size is large enough. However, there are times when a study has a small sample size that does not take a Normal distribution. What happens then?
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Statistical Process Control
Throughout this course, you’ve seen many real world examples of how statistics is applied when researchers want to gain new information. In this lesson, you’ll see how the statistical procedures you’ve learned are applied to business and manufacturing processes. While you will not be learning any new tests of significance in this lesson, it does apply what you have learned about descriptive statistics to events in the workplace.
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Logistic Regression
This lesson deals with a special type of regression in which the response variable is categorical and the explanatory variable is a quantitative variable. It is often the situation where researchers want to predict the outcome of a categorical variable, such as the survival of a patient given a variation of some measurable variable or the pass/fail of a device under changing conditions. Neither linear nor multiple regression will yield an answer in these cases. In this lesson, you will learn how statisticians do evaluate the success or failure of a categorical variable given a single predictive explanatory variable. In doing so, you will learn about yet another regression technique.
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One-Way ANOVA
This lesson introduces another type of statistical test that evaluates the means of numerical data. In previous lessons, we used the two-sample t test to evaluate differences between the means of two groups. But many problems that researchers examine involve more than two groups. For instance, a study on smoking might require researchers to look at smokers, quitters, and lifelong nonsmokers; or a study about psychological health based on marriage status might involve looking at married, single, and divorced individuals. In this lesson, you’ll learn how statisticians examine the differences among the means of three or more groups using a test statistic you have seen before: the F test. This test was used to evaluate the variation seen in multiple regression. Now, you will learn another important application of this test: evaluating the means of multiple groups.