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Lesson 1: A Gentle Introduction to Statistics

Professor Sungur and I (Anderson) both think that being a statistician is the greatest job in the world. I think it is like being a data detective. We look at a relatively small amount of quantitative information and observe what it has to tell us about a larger research problem. In this course we will show you some of the ways that we can learn important things about the world from data. You will then be on your way to becoming a data detective too!

In this lesson we will show you how statistics is applied to real-world problems. Do the assigned reading on the cdrom, follow the suggested WWW links, and do the class activity described below. Enjoy!!

Reading Assignment. Read Chapter 1 in the ActivStats cdrom.
Investigate the following examples from other Internet sites:

Housing Vacancy Survey - Second Quarter 1997:
Some Famous Data Sets and Questions
What is Statistics?
The WWW Virtual Library: Statistics: Job Announcements These job announcements will give you some idea where Statisticians work, and what we do.
Introductory Statistics: Concepts, Models, and Applications by David Stockburger This fantasy provides a nice introduction to dealing with data in a "real" situation.
Introduction to Statistics from SurfStat.australia This page shows how statistics is crucial to the scientific method.

Class Activity

Summary

From this lesson we hope that you have been able to see that statistical applications are just about everywhere in the world. It is actually very difficult to think of any academic subject areas, or career professions that don't involve statistics in some way. In fact, here is a challenge for you... if you can think of something that doesn't involve statistics, Professor Sungur will pay you a large ($$$$) reward. Post your ideas to the discussion board and we will procede to shoot them down. Such confidence we have!!

Assessment

If your next box of raisins had ? in it, would you be surprised?
Suppose you worked in a factory that bottled Coca-Cola, and your job was to ensure that the bottles were filled to the correct amount, say 2 liters. How would you decide if the machines that fill the bottles were working properly? Post your responses to the discussion board.
Recent news programs have found that dairies and juice companies have been underfilling milk and juice containers sent to public school lunch programs. This underfilling of containers costs school districts=taxpayers mega-bucks. How could you discover if containers in your school district were being underfilled? Again, post your responses to the discussion board.