- Author
-
McEwen, T.
|
Miller, C. A.
- Title
- Fire Data Analysis Handbook.
- Sponsor
- Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, DC
- Report
-
Handbook
[date unknown]
197 p.
- Distribution
- AVAILABLE FROM: U.S. Fire Administration (USFA), 16825 South Seton Ave., Emmitsburg, MD 21727. Telephone: 301-447-1000. Website: http://www.usfa.fema.gov
- Keywords
-
data analysis
|
handbooks
|
statistics
|
fire departments
- Abstract
- The fire service exists today in an environment constantly inundated with data,but data are often of little use in the everyday, real world in which first responders live and work. This is no accident. By itself, data are of little use to anyone. Information, on the other hand, is very useful indeed. What's the difference? At the recent Olympic games, in Korea, a stadium full of people held up individual, multi-colored squares of cardboard to form a giant image or text which could only be recognized from a distance. This is a good analogy for data and information. The individual squares of cardboard are like data. They are very numerous and they all look pretty much alike taken by themselves. The big image formed from the organization of thousands of those cards is like information. It is what can be built from many pieces of data. Information then is an organization of data that makes a point about something. This handbook has a primary objective to describe statistical techniques for analyzing data typically collected in fire departments.