It was great to see you in class this week after such a long pandemic period.

We
started our learning journey from the gorgeous waterfront in this beautiful season.
It was really exciting to hear that many of you had all kinds of wonderful working
experience before. It will be a great opportunity for us to collaborate together to achieve our goal.
You should have got clear ideas about how to learn this course. Please have your Pearson StatLab
account set up ASAP. You can start working on the homework assignments on StatLab. StatLab is a very good
platform for your learning and a good tutoring system as well.
The course subject slides, lecture slides and other additional references can be found on Blackboard. The lecture videos on
YouTube cover most of the subjects of this course. Your practice is very important for your learning. We may only focus on some
key subjects in the lecture. Whenever you have some questions, please bring them up and we can discuss them together.
The learning material in the first week is from the chapter 1 and 2 of the textbook. They give you some basic ideas about
what statistics is doing. Simply speaking, statistics are the techniques about how to collect, organize, present and analyze
data information. As everybody knows, we are living in a digital time that we all face huge data information explosion in
every field. We need statistics to analyze them to find useful message for us. Computer technology has been improved so
much and become so powerful to make it possible to process huge amount of data. Artificial intelligence is on the front line
that all countries are competing now because of the current advanced technology. It is statistical analysis that provides the
huge foundation for artificial intelligence. Obviously, statistical skills are very useful skills to have. In these two chapters,
you get to know some terminologies that are used in statistics. We also roughly get a whole picture about statistics.
When you read the basic concepts, please try to make it clear even though statistics does carry a lot uncertainties.
Statistical technique is helping us understand those uncertainties in a reasonable way. Understanding the basic
terminologies clearly at the beginning will avoid a lot possible confusion in the future. Please start reading
the book and working on the exercises on StatLab. You have unlimited attempts to practice the
questions. Your mark will be improved continuously with your on-going practice.
The Excel file, First Class Survey includes the examples and notes we did in class. We will
continue using this file in following two weeks. It has been updated on Blackboard. You can
Download the updated file time by time.
See you in class next week. Have a great weekend!