Syllabus

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Week-by-week

• Week 1

• Week 2

• Week 3

• Week 4

• Week 5

• Week 6

• Week 7

• Week 8

• Week 9

• Week 10

Week 6

Both The Cartoon Guide to Statistics and Understanding Scientific Reasoning take us into the idea of hypothesis testing this week. How do you justify accepting or rejecting hypotheses when you have only statistical data? The answer is fairly simple, and it is based on the confidence intervals we have already discussed. We will also look at the drawings we made on the first day of class showing scientists doing science.

Assignments:

CGS = Cartoon Guide to Statistics by Larry Gonick and Woollcott Smith
USR = Understanding Scientific Reasoning by Ronald Giere (4th edition)
GC = Galileo's Commandment edited by Edmund Bolles

Before coming to class, you should have completed the following readings:

CGS: Chapter 8
USR: chapter 6b (pp. 172-187)
Handout: Statistics quiz (titled 'Statistics: Week 3')

In addition, you should have completed the following exercises:

USR:

• Exercise 6.7: Homicide Is Top Cause of Death from On-Job Injury for Women
• Exercise 6.9: Agression in Men: Hormone Levels Are a Key
• Exercise 6.14: Majority of Women Perceive Job Bias
• Exercise of your choice: Pick one of the remaining exercises that is of interest to you and analyze it.

CGS:

• All exercises in chapter 8 of the study guide.

Activities:

• Evolution lecture
• Guest lecture: The culture of Darwin's era
• Scientific reasoning seminar: Evaluating statistical hypotheses
• Workshop: DAST
• More sampling and t-tests

Looking ahead:

In week 7, we will have another guest lecture about Islamic science. We will continue to look at hypothesis testing and issues concerning correlation and causation.