- Submit (by e-mail) a one-page resume of your experience and interest in environmental statistics. Include related educational and work experience. Indicate whether and how your job currently involves environmental statistics. [15 - 30 min]
- Carefully review Chapter 1 (pp 1-12) and parts of Chapter 3 (pp 53-137; skip 109-132: we will come back to those sections later). [2 hr]
- Prepare answers to exercises 3.1, 3.2, 3.7, and 3.8. (Skip 3.1 c-f and 3.2 e-f.) We will discuss these in class. [1 - 2 hr]
- Create stem-and-leaf diagrams and letter summaries for the data shown in Table 3.12 (p 134) and Table 3.15 (p 136) [15 min].
- Create a spreadsheet, computer program, or calculator program to generate summary statistics for a batch of data. Do not use any built-in functions or macros (except for sorting and ranking, where appropriate). Instead, compute the statistics directly from the formulas (as provided in the textbook or obtained elsewhere). The statistics should include:
 | Mean, Variance, Standard deviation (sd), Coefficient of variation (cv) |
| Maximum, Minimum, Median, Range [requires order statistics or sorting] |
| * Skewness, Kurtosis [harder] |
| * Geometric mean, Geometric sd [requires logarithms] |
| * Median absolute deviation (mad) [more complex] |
| ** Trimmed mean, for arbitrary trimming between 0% and 50% [tricky] |
At a minimum, do the first group. If you are more ambitious or skilled, do as many of the remaining groups as you like. Test your code on the "reference" and "cleanup" data (Table 3.2, p 55). [1 - 3 hr]
- (Follow-up to 5.) Compare your results to the results of any built-in macros or functions available in your software. In particular, determine which "flavor" of variance, sd, cv, and skewness your software uses and estimate how many significant figures it is using in its calculations (if you can). [0 - 30 min]
- Read the first part of Chapter 2 (pp 13-18) and all of Chapter 4 (pp 139 - 199). You need not spend much time with Chapter 4, but look at each page so you know what is in it. [1 hr]
- Explore the links to other Internet resources from these pages. [15 min - as long as you like]
Total estimated time: 5:45 - 9:30+ hours