Earning points from REPORTS

• 10 reports 10 points each
  
• Submit electronically to andkov and smhofer at uvic dot ca. Consult submission instruction and naming convention
• Two independent grades from Scott and Andrey

Earning points from class ACTIVITIES

• total of 8 points each week
• 4 points earned prior to class
  
• 4 points earned during class

The working metaphor

Scientists are data journalists who tell stories of their data.
They type text to instruct a human reader how to recreate the story in his/her mind.
They type text to instruct a computer how to manipulate data, evaluate models, print graphs, and assemble output.

Documents that contain typed instructions for both human and computer consumption that recreate a story about the data are called DYNAMIC.

See an example of a dynamic document in this markdown simulator, created in javascript by Jeroen Ooms.

markdown language uses special combinations of characters to make text strings appear differently: in bold, italics, as a heading, or as a name of the column in the table. This language is very simple and straightforward, but may take a little bit to get used to. To help you get proficient with markdown consider some of the following resources.

• markdown guide : a well-written “breaking into” guide. Gives ample verbal description. Recommended for newbies. By John Gruber.
  
• markdown cheat-sheet : brief, simple, parallel view of what the code is doing.By Mashery group.
  
• markdown in R : a blog entry on getting started with rmarkdown - a version of markdown enhanced for the use with RStudio. By Jeromy Anglim.

You will need markdown to complete homework assignments and we won’t spend any dedicated lab time on it, so please, pick it up on your own.

Goals in Data Science projects

Adapting reproducible research standards, each project in data science could be conceptualized as having the following objectives:

• Strategic Goal
  Tell a story about your data.

• Tactical Goal
  Develop, evaluate, and interpret statistical models with which you tell a story about your data.

• Technical Assignment
  Write a computer script that generates an electronic document reporting the statistical models with which you tell a story about your data.

Learning R

A GOOD PLACE TO START LEARNING R - The RStudio team collects the best online resources. Check out every link they mention, it’s worth it. In fact, do it right now.

Now we’ll use one of the resources mentioned in the link above, swirl.
Open your RStudio and execute the following code:

install.packages("swirl")  
install.packages("Rtools")  
install.packages("devtools")  
devtools::install_github(c("swirldev/swirl", "swirldev/swirlify"))  
library(swirlify)  

Follow the prompt and complete the first lesson.

I also recommend completing two free interactive courses at DataCamp: Introduction to R and Data Analysis and Statistical Inference. Their content partially overlaps with the training by two available courses by swirl package, but gives a different take and examples.

More Resources

• for brief reviews of key books and resources see Will Beasley’s Resources Opinions
• another presentation by Will provides an excellent overview of Statistical Collaboration with GitHub
• Winston Chan’s R Cookbook is a perfect book to get you started with producing graphs with RStudio
• Quick-R - thorough and convenient resource for R reference

REPORTS

• 10 reports 10 points each
  
• Submit electronically to andkov and smhofer at uvic dot ca. Consult submission instruction and naming convention
• Two independent grades from Scott and Andrey

NOTE: if you haven’t do so already, please register an account with disqus.

ACTIVITIES

Total of 8 points each week

4 points earned prior to class
- Quiz Question ( 2 pts)
- Page/Idea (1 pts) - Slide/Idea (1 pts)

4 points earned during class - various activities
- various point weights

Guess Page. In the current chapter, what page contains one of the most important ideas or concepts? Provide the page number and the answer why in less than 140 characters, No abbr plz! Post anonymously into the corresponding comment thread on the page for the current week of the course.

Guess Slide. In the current lecture, what slide contains one of the most important ideas or concepts? Provide the slide number and answer why in less than 140 characters, No abbr plz! Post anonymously into the corresponding comment thread on the page for the current week of the course

Quiz Question. Please write the question about the content of the current chapter/lecture that you think should appear on the final exam? Post anonymously into the corresponding comment thread on the page for the current week of the course.

NOTE Quiz Question, Guess Page, and Guess Slide must be submitted into the respective comment threads no later than 10:30 am of the Tuesday of the current week. The entries must be UNIQUE: if you post a response similar to an existing one, your response will no be accepted as valid.

Rosetta Stone. A question, a series of questions, or other activity that involves learning some programming language or comparing programming languages.

The activities for the other 4 class participation points will be wildcards - you will not know what they will be ahead of time to keep things interesting. Examples: output interpretation.