For our first foray into the 'real' tools of statistical analysis, we explored the concept of Standard Deviation. It is most important for understanding the spread of values within a dataset. Simply quoting the mean of a dataset gives one a general handle on the numbers involved, but with the standard deviation one has a much better idea of the general parameter space one is working with within the dataset. For example, the standard deviation is very sensitive to outliers; so the difference between simply quoting the mean and quoting the mean with its standard deviation in the latter case carries a lot more information.