Materials

Books

Some students prefer to have a textbook from which they can learn and to which they can turn to help explain concepts. Some instructors prefer having a textbook to provide additional material and homework assignments. In this section there are no such homework assignments from a textbook. Nonetheless, it is important to at least point you to possible textbooks.

There is an "official" textbook for this course. As of Fall 2015, this was Elementary Statistics by Navidi/Monk, published by MCG CUSTOM. The ISBN for the book is 9780077762841, and this is the 13^th Edition. In the WCC bookstore this should cost about $85.75 - $114.30. This is actually quite a good book. It covers all of our topics and does so in a fairly straight forward manner. In addition, the book contains helpful guides on how to do the statistical computations using a TI-83/84 calculator, or using Excel, or using Minitab. You might note that the book does not cover using the R language to do statistical work.

The previous textbook is just a modified version of Elementary Statistics by Navidi/Monk, published by MCG CUSTOM. The ISBN for the book is 0077762843, and this is the 1^st Edition. You could look for this on-line or at other bookstores.

An alternative textbook is OpenIntro Statistics, the 3^rd Edition, available on-line, at no cost, at https://www.openintro.org/stat/textbook.php?stat_book=os. This book (site) has almost no coverage for descriptive statistics, but it does a good job of presenting inferential statistics.

Another alternative text is Applied Statistics, also available on-line at no cost. [Note that the process for getting this book includes you identifying your email, your area of interest/study, and the university you are attending. Washtenaw Community College is not in that list, but there is no harm in selecting the name of the university that you want to attend after WCC.] This book does cover probability, descriptive, and inferential statistics.

Finally, there is the no cost approach of just using my web pages which will present all of the material needed for the course.

Tables

Inferential statistics is based on probabilities, some of which are quite complex. Therefore, teachers of statistics, and authors of statistics books would provide many tables of precomputed probabilities. It is still nice to look at such tables in order to get a feel for certain probability distributions, but, as we will see in the course, the calculations needed to arrive at the values in those tables will be done by our tools (calculators or computers) or we can always find the appropriate tables on-line. In fact, we will be looking at a number of on-line tables later in the course. At this point it is sufficient to point out that one does not need the textbook just to have the tables that are in it.

Calculators

For many years this course has been taught with students using a TI-83/84 calculator. Such an advanced calculator is capable of doing virtually all of the computations needed for an introductory statistics course. There are, however, two huge limitations to the use of the calculator for doing real statistics. First, there is no nice way to get data into the calculator. In the overview presentation for this course we looked at five different values for each of 13,856 credit students at WCC in a particular semester. In fact, you were provided with a link to the file that contains all of that information. Even if we only wanted to look at the first 50 of those lines of data, there is no nice way to read the data into the calculator without entering it one character at a time. Second, as you might have guessed, the calculator cannot "hold" and "deal" with that large amounts of data. Thus, even if we typed the data into the calculator, at some point, early on in the process, we would run out of room on the device. The TI-83/84 calculators are amazing in terms of demonstrating on small sets of data the computations needed for statistics; they are useless in terms of doing any large analysis.

Computers

Computers have been used to do statistical analyses for well over six decades. However, the availability and ease of use of computers for such tasks has changed dramatically in that time. Some of us have been using computers for so long that we can remember using 80-column cards to hold data that we punched onto the cards and read into the computer via a card reader. [FYI: the 13,856 lines of data in our example from the Overview page would have been coded on 13,856 cards, taking up almost 7 full boxes of cards. It would have taken minutes to read in all of the cards.] Or, we would wait to receive the 2400 foot, 9-track computer tape that contained census data from the government that we could then mount on a tape reader and read the data into the computer. [FIU: the 13,856 lines of data in our example would have taken less than 7 feet of the 2400 foot tape, and it would have been read in less than 5 seconds -- once the particular 7 feet was found on the tape.] Now, I can store the data on a USB drive where the 13,856 lines of data would require 343,478 bytes of data, not even 0.0022% of a 16 gigabyte drive, and a PC would read that data in less than a second.

The advantage of the computers has always been that they can hold large amounts of data, they can get that data by automated means, and they can process that data in almost no time. Any real statistical work is done on computers.

Kinds of computers: Computers are everywhere today. There is a computer in your phone, in your car, in your sewing machine, in many of your appliances, in your calculator, in your tablets, and of course in your notebook, laptop, and desktop devices called computers. In addition, computers act as the servers that hold web pages on the internet, servers to run email accounts, servers to handle instant messaging and video conferencing, servers to handle electronic banking and online purchasing, servers to do web processing for our various popular search engines, and virtually all of the other automatic processing that we have grown to just assume will always take care of us.
Our particular desire is to use the computer to do statistical computations. For this we will use a general purpose computer, usually a PC or a Mac, running some sort of statistical program. That computer needs to be able to allow for data input (often directly from the web, but also from data entry via a keyboard or data entry via a USB drive). The computer will also need to run the R language. In general, desktop, laptop, and notebook computers fit this need, whereas tablets do not.
Software: Programs that run on computers are referred to as software. Our statistical software is designed to do statistical computations as well as to interact with us to get and correctly interpret our commands. The number of different versions of software, programs which do statistical computations, is large and growing. Some of these (e.g., SPSS) are dedicated systems that purport to provide you, the user, with every conceivable statistical command that you will need. Others (e.g., Excel) have added statistical processing to some other functionality, thus giving their users the ability to do some statistical processing in the midst of what is considered a different task. And some, (e.g., R) provide access to statistical processing as part of a computer language. One additional note here: While we can use R on a PC or on a Mac directly, there is yet another program, RStudio, that is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for R that we will use to help us use R. RStudio also runs on both PC's and Mac's.
Internet: The Internet provides all sorts of tools for everyone to use. As noted above, all of the statistical tables that used to be provided in textbooks are available on the Internet. In addition, there are various sites that will do some statistical processing for you. In general, those sites require you to have done some "preprocessing" to get the values that are needed in those computations.
Another, interesting aspect of the Internet is that it now provides us with an incredible diversity and depth of data. Where we used to have to ask governmental units to prepare, record, and send to us data, those same agencies now post their data on the web, ready for us to access and use. For example, see http://www.ewashtenaw.org/government/boc/open-book/open-book for such things as all Washtenaw County credit card expenditures [Now updated to https://www.washtenaw.org/584/Open-Book.] And, just to give a small example, you might look at the EPA Air Quality site to see just a tiny fraction of the data from the federal govenment that has been provided for anyone to use.

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