We are exposed daily to studies concerning health, behavior, attitudes, beliefs, and scientific and technological discoveries. How does one use these data and statistical analyses to guide decision making? This course will help students become educated consumers of data.
Students will learn basics of study design, exploratory data analysis, and inferential statistics. The focus will be on understanding rather than producing statistical results. Students will read popular-press accounts of studies reported in The New York Times, Science News, Discover, Nature, Chance, and Scientific American. Popular-press readings will be supplemented by readings from scientific journals as well as reading on basic probability and statistics related to the topic. Topic possibilities include, but are not limited to, the safety of cell phones, grade inflation at elite universities, statistical evidence in court cases, global warming, undercount errors in the U.S. Census, environmental justice, DNA evidence in the courts, the AIDS epidemic, detecting steroid use in sports, the reliability of political polls, etc. For each topic, we will examine in depth the interplay of scientific advancements and advancements in statistical computing that provide the technologies necessary to answer these complex questions. We will also examine how these solutions can be used to impact decision making and hence the political, economic, ecological and sociological aspects of our daily lives. |
