Overview of Course

The very rapid and sustained progress of information technology has had many consequences. Salient among these has been the persistent increase in the generation and storage of all types of quantitative or quantifiable data in all fields of knowledge. To make appropriate use of this growing amount of information the discipline of statistics has developed a variety of techniques and procedures that help to organize, summarize and analyze the data in a coherent and consistent manner. Of these variety of techniques and procedures, this class will discuss the following: Graphical representation of data, measures of central tendency, measures of variability, confidence intervals, correlation, simple regression, tests of hypothesis and tests of association. To understand these topics, students need to be familiar with two-variable graphs and they also need to have taken a class of basic algebra.

As concrete application of the statistical techniques that will be discussed in class, we will make a comparison of the level of economic development of the countries that we will visit. We will make this comparison by gathering several key socioeconomic indicators, such as life expectancy and the level of economic complexity of exports, for each one of these nations. This comparison will be complemented with discussions of the limited impressions that we will obtain in our short visits to these nations.