Computing has always been an essential ingredient of statistical practice. While probability theory provides us with a mathematical foundation for describing data and studying statistical inference, computing technologies act as a medium through which analyses are actually realized. Our ability to manipulate data and to audition new methodologies depends on and is limited by our familiarity with computing technologies. To some extent, even our notion of what constitutes "data" is a product of our background in computing.

Through a series of group projects, we will study tools for "exploratory computing." We will emphasize programming and scripting languages over point-and-click interfaces. We hope to instill a problem solving ability so that you will learn languages on your own, cull online documentation or tutorials, find books and manuals.

Last Week

In our first meeting, we formed quarter-long work groups. In lecture, we began with Unix and "pipe" basics. We also spelled out our first two homework assignments.

This Week

We will hold extra (voluntary) lab sessions on Tuesdays, led by Ryan Rosario. These will begin this week. In lecture we will cover more Unix basics and so-called regular expressions, a language for expressing patterns in text.