This is an introductory course on statistics and how it can help us answer the kind of questions that arise when we want to better understand the world.

We will use real-world examples from the social and natural sciences to establish the foundations of probability and distribution theory, and introduce important statistical skills, from descriptive statistics to sampling and inference. In addition to these examples, we will conduct interactive experiments in the classroom to demonstrate the use of key techniques.

The main objectives of this course are:

• Understand that the point of statistics is to answer questions about the world.
• Learn to work with data, from constructing simple visual and numerical summaries, to fitting models and assessing the accuracy of their predictions.
• Develop the ability to critically evaluate uses (and misuses) of statistics.

The course should be of value to anyone intending to pursue further study in any field involving the analysis of data.