Announcements

XKCD Statistics

The xkcd cartoon in the course notes isn't the only one that is about statistics. The web site explain xkcd, exists to explain xkcd cartoons that have too much science or too much pop culture or too much whatever (in some cases too much statistics) for some people to understand or just some esoteric details that people want to know about (and in a few cases, all the contributors to this web site can't quite explain some detail). It indexes xkcd cartoons that deal with statistics.

Talk to the Bear

I told a student in office hours about talk to the bear. This is just a reminder to tell the story to the whole class.

About R

A very interesting talk by Martin Mächler (who is on the R core team), which is not required viewing for the class, just interesting. It is titled Seven guidelines for good practices in R programming, and the guidelines are

  1. Work with source files!
  2. Keep R source well-readable & maintainable
  3. Do read the documentation
  4. Do learn from the masters
  5. Do not Copy & Paste!
  6. Strive for clarity and simplicity
  7. Test your code
Note that none of these is about any particular feature of R or any particular bit of statistics. They are all about good programming. Rules 1, 3, and 7 are already being emphasized in this course, but the rest are important too. BTW, this talk contains the best explanation of why you should use <- rather than = for assignment in R.

Quizzes

Quiz Date
Quiz 1 Wednesday, Feb 1
Quiz 2 Wednesday, Feb 15
Quiz 3 Wednesday, Mar 1
spring break
Quiz 4 Wednesday, Mar 22
Quiz 5 Wednesday, Apr 5
Quiz 6 Wednesday, Apr 19.
Quiz 7 Wednesday, May 3

There will be no final exam. All quizzes are in the usual classroom at the usual class time.