An introduction to measures of variability. I discuss the range, mean absolute deviation, variance, and standard deviation, and work through a simple example of calculating these quantities. I then discuss interpreting the standard deviation, including a brief discussion of the empirical rule.
In this video it is assumed that we are dealing with sample data, and not data representing the entire population. This will be the case the vast majority of the time in practice.
The birth weight data is from random sample of 1000 males drawn from Table 7-2 (Live births, by birth weight and geography – Males) of the Statistics Canada publication 84F0210X, available at \url{http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/84f0210x/2009000/t011-eng.htm}.