STA 6166 Distance

STA 6166 (Distance) --- STATISTICAL METHODS IN RESEARCH I --- Spring 2005

Announcements

April 11: You may submit soft copies of Assignment 5 instead of mailing them in as usual. Please convert your work to a PDF file if possible, and send it to the course TA. Also, most of you missed a lot of points on the regression part of Assignment 4, so here are some notes on what you should have done. Assignment 5 is on multiple regression, and will take considerably more effort than any prvious assignments. You should already have started!
Mar 31: Assignment 5 (the last one) is up.
Mar 21: Quizzes 7 and 8 have been assigned. (Quiz 8 will become available April 1.)
Mar 10: Assignment 4 is up.
Mar 9: Quiz 6 is up. I've also added approximate due dates for all remaining quizzes and assignments (to be assigned in due course). You can use this for planning the remainder of the semester.
Feb 24: Quiz 5 is up. (Technical problems have been fixed.)
Feb 17: Assignment 3 is up.
Feb 15 (3:30pm): The problems with the viewing of the formulas in Quiz 4 have now been corrected. Quiz 4 answers saved prior to this change will need to be re-entered.
Feb 10: Quiz 4 is up.
Feb 6: Some of you are a little behind on the work that's due this week, so i've extended the deadlines for Assmt 2 and Quiz 3 by a few days. (See below.)
Feb 4: Graded Assignments 1 have either been returned to you, or can be found on an envelope outside my office door. Grades are posted in WebCT. For those of you that wish to submit work directly to my office, this is also where you should place future assignments for grading (the cleaning crew tends to dispose of papers that are slipped under my door). During normal business hours you can also submit work to the secretaries in the main Statistics office, Griffin-Floyd Hall 101/102. If mailing in, remember to do so by the beginning of the week when the work is due, so that I will get it by the end of the week.
Jan 25: Quiz 3 and Assignment 2 have been assigned.
Jan 14: Quiz 2 has been assigned.
Jan 11: Assignment 1 and Quiz 1 have been assigned (see below). Everybody should have access to the quiz via WebCT now, so try it out as soon as possible and report any problems.
Jan 10: In the lecture slides you will occasionally see/hear references to self-tests and practice problems. Disregard these and any other similar instructions that are in the slides themselves; they are remnants from last semester's course taught by a different instructor. The only practice problems you should be doing for this course are all the odd problems in the textbook.
Jan 3: The course has officially started. Lecture notes are available below and you can start viewing them. Two points of immediate urgency are (i) to get the book; (ii) to decide which statistical software package you will use and install it on your computer. Assignment 1, due late January, will require you to use this software.

Basic Information

This is a distance course offered only to those that are off-campus. On-campus students wishing to take STA 6166 should register instead in the regular classroom-taught (non-distance) section 6622 (listed under department STATISTICS-CALS on the UF schedule of courses [http://www.reg.ufl.edu/soc/spr/index.html]). The regular section is NOT taught by Dr. Trindade.
There are two sections in this distance version of the course: Section # 4745 is for UF students. Section # 5608 is for those in the Forensic Toxicology program.
The web-based course will involve you going through the on-line notes at a certain pace, and submitting assignments by certain dates. The required pace will be similar to that of a regular 3-credit-hour course taken over a regular 15 week semester. Plan on devoting about 10 hours per week to the course.
The course starts January 4 and ends April 28, 2005.

Contact Information

Contact with the course instructors should take place via the indicated e-mail addresses below, and NOT via WebCT. Messages will normally be answered within one working day.

Questions on course concepts (for example, what is a t-test?), should be addressed to the course TA: Zhen Li, via the e-mail: zhenli79@ufl.edu.
All other questions (WebCT, assignments, quizzes, grades, etc.) should be addressed to the course instructor: Dr. Alex Trindade, via the e-mail: trindade@stat.ufl.edu. Dr. Trindade's office hours are Mondays 1-2 pm, and Wednesdays 2-3 pm.

Text Book

Required: A First Course in Statistical Methods, 2004, R. Lyman Ott and Michael Longnecker, Duxbury-Thompson-Brooks/Cole, Belmont, CA [ISBN 0-534-40806-0]. We will cover all 13 chapters. A "Student Solutions Manual" containing solutions to selected exercises is available [ISBN: 0-534-40807-9]. (To find the link to the solutions manual, scroll down to the Ancillaries section near the bottom of the above textbook webpage.)

Course Objectives

This is an introductory course for graduate students in the biological, physical, agricultural, or engineering sciences, who have little background in statistics, yet who plan to use statistical techniques in their research. Students having no background in statistics are strongly encouraged to take (or audit) a basic statistics course (such as STA 2023) prior to taking this course. Primary objectives are to:

Provide a foundation in basic statistical concepts.
Introduce statistical inference based on the t, F and Chi Square tests.
Introduce simple linear and multiple regression analysis.
Introduce statistical aspects of experimental design and the associated analysis of variance and covariance.

Secondary objectives: provide practice in using a statistical computing package to perform the basic analyses covered; introduce a few of the many "nonparametric" alternatives to the standard "parameteric" methods covered; discuss research data management to facilitate data analysis. Note that this course is very similar to STA 6126 (Statistical Methods in Social Research I). The main difference is that 6166 concentrates on statistical techniques for quantitative data, 6126 for categorical data.

Grading and Other Policies

Your course grade will be based on a mix of Assignments (50%) and Quizzes (50%). The former is meant to be the homework portion of your grade; the latter the test portion. Although discussion with others in broad conceptual terms is encouraged for the Assignments, your submitted work must be your own. You MUST NOT discuss the quizzes with others at all. I'll remind you that you are bound by the honor code in this respect.
Course averages of at least 90%, 80%, and 70% will guarantee the passing grades of A, B, and C, respectively. (I may also subdivide these into "+" and "no +".) Course averages below 70% are login using your Gatorlink IDcandidates for the failing grades of D and E. If your course average starts to fall in an undesirable (or catastrophic) category, it is your responsibility to counsel with me about what your options are, and what you might realistically be able to get. Once final grades have been awarded there will be NO APPEALS! You have been warned.

Course Syllabus, Lecture Notes, Practice Problems

The course is organized into 5 units, each comprised of several sections. There are about 30 lectures in total, each a downloadable narrated PowerPoint® slide presentation. A PowerPoint Viewer® can be downloaded from the Utilities section of this page to allow viewing of the lectures. No special hardware or software is needed to view the course lectures, but you may have trouble downloading them if you have a slow internet connection. For such cases, a CD of the lectures is available upon request. An investment in a comfortable pair of headphones will also make listening to the lectures easier. There are video segments in the lectures that require you to have video player software (such as Windows Media Player, Realtime Player or Quicktime player). If the video does not automatically play you may have to download and install a small video codex program from the Utilities section of this page.

Lecture Notes and Syllabus

You are strongly advised to do all the exercises in the book whose solutions appear in the back (mostly odds). Assignment and Quiz questions will be similar. You'll also find it helpful to augment the lecture notes by reading the appropriate sections in the book. In the lecture notes you will occasionally see/hear references to self-tests and practice problems. Disregard these and any other similar instructions that are in the notes themselves; they are remnants from last semester's course taught by a different instructor.

Assignments

There will be approximately 5 Assignments, each involving an extensive statistical analysis of a dataset, and subsequent writing of a report. Your analysis should be typeset in the form of a report (like a paper), with any pertaining graphs and tables clearly labeled, and incorporated into one document. Submit a hard copy of your assignment via regular mail to:

Prof. Alex Trindade
Dept. of Statistics
University of Florida
P.O. Box 118545
Gainesville, FL 32611-8545

Include an addressed envelope (no stamp) if you would like the graded assignment returned, else you will just see the grade in WebCT. The due dates below indicate when your work must be received by me. No late work will be accepted.

Assignment 1 (out of 20): (Word file, Data). Due Thursday January 27.
Assignment 2 (out of 20): Due Thursday February 17.
Assignment 3 (out of 20): Due Thursday March 10.
Assignment 4 (out of 20): Due Thursday March 31.
Assignment 5 (out of 20): This is the final assignment, due Thursday April 21.

Quizzes

There will be approximately 8 quizzes, about one every other week. These are administered through WebCT. Access is through your Gatorlink ID. Once you log in you'll see the link for "STA 6166 (Trindade) - All Sections". Four options are available on the toolbar (top right) of the page: My Grades, Assessments, Discussions, Mail. Click on "Assessments" to see the list of available quizzes. Start a quiz by clicking on it. Although each quiz is not timed, you are only allowed to submit your answers once. This is achieved by clicking "Finish". You can logout and come back in to the quiz as often as you choose (don't forget to "Save answer" to retain already answered questions), but once you click "Finish", that's it! A good option might be to print the entire quiz, work on it offline, and then return online to submit the answers. Each quiz will also have a deadline date by which you must submit it. You can check your grades at any time through the "My Grades" tool. Do NOT use the "Mail" tool to contact us. Answers to frequently asked course concept questions will appear in the "Discussions" tool, so check this before asking a question.

Quiz 1: Due midnight Tuesday Jan 25. It's over Sections 1-2 of Unit 1.
Quiz 2: Due midnight Thursday Jan 27. It's over Section 3 of Unit 1.
Quiz 3: Due midnight Sunday Feb 13. It's over Unit 2.
Quiz 4: Due midnight Sunday Feb 27. It's over Unit 3, Section 1.
Quiz 5: Due midnight Sunday March 13. It's over Unit 3, Sections 2 & 3.
Quiz 6: Due midnight Sunday March 27. It's over Unit 4, Section 1.
Quiz 7: Due midnight Wednesday April 13. It's over Unit 4, Sections 2 & 3.
Quiz 8: This is the final quiz, due midnight Wednesday April 28. It's over Unit 5.

Statistical Computing, Software, and Other Course Resources

This course will require extensive statistical computing work, most of which you will have to pick up on your own. Since the software package you choose to do this with is up to you, the following statistical software overview may be useful. The course text shows output from MINITAB, SAS, JMP, STATA, and SPSS. The course notes have some example code and output from MINITAB, R, SAS, SPSS, and EXCEL.

You should probably select a software package that you already have access to (through your home department's computing system for example) and/or will most likely end up doing research with. Failing this, if you have no prior computing experience and are not very computer-adventurous, I suggest you use MINITAB. If you are more ambitious, computer-savvy, and plan on doing extensive statistical computing in the future, including preparing statistical plots for publication, I would encourage you to become acquainted with R; but beware that it is a steep learning curve! Follow this link to access some of my resources on statistical computing, particularly R.

Disclaimer

This is meant to address the barrage of questions from students who can attend a regular live section of the course but would rather take this one for reasons of convenience. In my view the technology for offering a distance web-based course such as this one, is either barely there and/or has not yet been fully implemented here to its fullest extent. The slides which constitute the lecture notes are merely an outline of the material; much verbal filling in, reinforcement, and examples, takes place during a live lecture. The narrations we have added to the slides are only a first small step in this direction, much more still needs to be added. Also, questions involving formulas which can be quickly discussed face-to-face, become problematic over the telephone or via email. All this means a distance student must be highly disciplined and self-motivated, putting in substantial more time by augmenting the material with additional readings from the text and online discussions with the instructor. Be prepared to work hard!