Free Essays on The Road To Wigan Pier

In The Road To Wigan Pier, Orwell has described the lives of the coal miners in the 1930’s. In reading another assigned book, Hiroshima by John Hershey, a much greater compassion for the people of Hiroshima immerged in the reader. Both books communicate the lives and conditions the people of these two towns were subjected to and how they survived their surroundings. Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier is full of facts and accounts but nothing compared to the feelings brought forth in the visual image story telling style of Hershey’s Hiroshima. Orwell is very factual in his account of the conditions and lives of the coal mining community and its people while Hershey tells of the lives, the pain and the desensitizing of an entire town when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Orwell discusses the wages, living conditions, working conditions and how they survived on the food that they could afford. He seems very unattached to his entire surroundings and is only writing the facts as he sees them. As any person reading this book, feelings of sadness can arise for the people of Wigan Pier as well as any other coal mining town. In Hershey’s book he paints a picture of the people of Hiroshima who were left with nothing and wandered the town passing people they could not help and knew would die. This line of story telling draws the attention of the reader and makes a point at the same time. The points made in both books are the same, despair and helplessness but also of pride. The coal miners in Orwell’s book are in a helpless situation, the same as the people of Hiroshima. Pride was the source of strength in both books that seemed to be overlooked by Orwell in his depiction of the times and lives of the people. Orwell was much more passionate in the second part of his book discussing Socialism and Fascism, then he was for the people of Wigan Pier. Hershey’s vivid characterization brought a human face to the destruction caused... Free Essays on The Road To Wigan Pier Free Essays on The Road To Wigan Pier In The Road To Wigan Pier, Orwell has described the lives of the coal miners in the 1930’s. In reading another assigned book, Hiroshima by John Hershey, a much greater compassion for the people of Hiroshima immerged in the reader. Both books communicate the lives and conditions the people of these two towns were subjected to and how they survived their surroundings. Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier is full of facts and accounts but nothing compared to the feelings brought forth in the visual image story telling style of Hershey’s Hiroshima. Orwell is very factual in his account of the conditions and lives of the coal mining community and its people while Hershey tells of the lives, the pain and the desensitizing of an entire town when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Orwell discusses the wages, living conditions, working conditions and how they survived on the food that they could afford. He seems very unattached to his entire surroundings and is only writing the facts as he sees them. As any person reading this book, feelings of sadness can arise for the people of Wigan Pier as well as any other coal mining town. In Hershey’s book he paints a picture of the people of Hiroshima who were left with nothing and wandered the town passing people they could not help and knew would die. This line of story telling draws the attention of the reader and makes a point at the same time. The points made in both books are the same, despair and helplessness but also of pride. The coal miners in Orwell’s book are in a helpless situation, the same as the people of Hiroshima. Pride was the source of strength in both books that seemed to be overlooked by Orwell in his depiction of the times and lives of the people. Orwell was much more passionate in the second part of his book discussing Socialism and Fascism, then he was for the people of Wigan Pier. Hershey’s vivid characterization brought a human face to the destruction caused...

Finding Chi-Square Functions in Excel

Finding Chi-Square Functions in Excel Statistics is a subject with a number of probability distributions and formulas. Historically many of the calculations involving these formulas were quite tedious. Tables of values were generated for some of the more commonly used distributions and most textbooks still print excerpts of these tables in appendices. Although it is important to understand the conceptual framework that works behind the scenes for a particular table of values, quick and accurate results require the use of statistical software. There are a number of statistical software packages. One that is commonly used for calculations at the introductory is Microsoft Excel. Many distributions are programmed into Excel. One of these is the chi-square distribution. There are several Excel functions that use the chi-square distribution. Details of Chi-square Before seeing what Excel can do, let’s remind ourselves about some details concerning the chi-square distribution. This is a probability distribution that is asymmetric and highly skewed to the right. Values for the distribution are always nonnegative. There is actually an infinite number of chi-square distributions. The one in particular that we are interested in is determined by the number of degrees of freedom that we have in our application. The greater the number of degrees of freedom, the less skewed our chi-square distribution will be. Use of Chi-square A chi-square distribution  is used for several applications. These include: Chi-square test- To determine if the levels of two categorical variables are independent of one another.Goodness of fit test- To determine how well-observed values of a single categorical variable match with values expected by a theoretical model.Multinomial Experiment- This is a specific use of a chi-square test. All of these applications require us to use a chi-square distribution. Software is indispensable for calculations concerning this distribution. CHISQ.DIST and CHISQ.DIST.RT in Excel There are several functions in Excel that we can use when dealing with chi-square distributions. The first of these is CHISQ.DIST( ). This function returns the left-tailed probability of the chi-squared distribution indicated. The first argument of the function is the observed value of the chi-square statistic. The second argument is the number of degrees of freedom. The third argument is used to obtain a cumulative distribution. Closely related to CHISQ.DIST is CHISQ.DIST.RT( ). This function returns the right-tailed probability of the selected chi-squared distribution. The first argument is the observed value of the chi-square statistic, and the second argument is the number of degrees of freedom. For example, entering CHISQ.DIST(3, 4, true) into a cell will output 0.442175. This means that for the chi-square distribution with four degrees of freedom, 44.2175% of the area under the curve lies to the left of 3. Entering CHISQ.DIST.RT(3, 4 ) into a cell will output 0.557825. This means that for the chi-square distribution with four degrees of freedom, 55.7825% of the area under the curve lies to the right of 3. For any values of the arguments, CHISQ.DIST.RT(x, r) 1 – CHISQ.DIST(x, r, true). This is because the part of the distribution that does not lie to the left of a value x must lie to the right. CHISQ.INV Sometimes we start with an area for a particular chi-square distribution. We wish to know what value of a statistic we would need in order to have this area to the left or the right of the statistic. This is an inverse chi-square problem and is helpful when we want to know the critical value for a certain level of significance. Excel handles this sort of problem by using an inverse chi-square function. The function CHISQ.INV returns the inverse of the left tailed probability for a chi-square distribution with specified degrees of freedom. The first argument of this function is the probability to the left of the unknown value. The second argument is the number of degrees of freedom. Thus, for example, entering CHISQ.INV(0.442175, 4) into a cell will give an output of 3. Note how this is the inverse of the calculation we looked at earlier concerning the CHISQ.DIST function. In general, if P CHISQ.DIST(x, r), then x CHISQ.INV( P, r). Closely related to this is the CHISQ.INV.RT function. This is the same as CHISQ.INV, with the exception that it deals with right-tailed probabilities. This function is particularly helpful in determining the critical value for a given chi-square test. All we need to do is to enter the level of significance as our right-tailed probability, and the number of degrees of freedom. Excel 2007 and Earlier Earlier versions of Excel use slightly different functions to work with chi-square. Previous versions of Excel only had a function to directly calculate right-tailed probabilities. Thus CHIDIST corresponds with the newer CHISQ.DIST.RT, In a similar way, CHIINV corresponds to CHI.INV.RT.