Some Famous Data Sets and Questions

Statistics is the science of collecting, organizing, and interpreting numerical facts called data to answer real-world questions. Some famous questions include:

• Did the the low temperature the morning of the Challenger disaster cause the O rings to shrink significantly?
• Does smoking cause lung cancer?
• Are the stars randomly spread in the sky?
• What are the best methods of teaching reading?
• How do we decide the odds that a DNA sample came from a particular defendant?

This course discusses how to collect efficiently the data needed to answer such questions as well as how to address such questions in a rational way once we have the data.