Hello there, my name is Juan Klopper. I'm a surgeon, a lecturer, and a research at Groote Schuur Hospital, the academic hospital of the University of Cape Town. I'm really happy to see you in this course teaching you statistics using the Wolfram language. As part of my research work I also teach statistics and data analysis. I really believe that if you want to be a true researcher, it is important for you to have the ability to do your own data analysis. It is really a very powerful skill to have, and I want you to have that skill. My fondest wish for this course and for you is to become part of this community of researchers, people with the ability to do their own data analysis. I want you to start a research group, I want you to join a research group. I want you to have the skill to be able to do your data analysis, and that is what this course is all about,. I'm going to show you how to use a modern programming language to do data analysis. Now in this course we're going to use a programming language, the Wolfram programming language. Now I really believe it´s important to learn how to use a language, a computer language, to do your data analysis and not to use a standalone program just to push a few buttons and do the analysis. When you write code, you intimately experience and engage with your data. It is a much more powerful way to do data analysis. Now in my research unit, we use a lot of programming languages but really the Wolfram language stands apart. It is my favorite language and it's the language that I use when I teach new students about data analysis. It is a unique language, it is a powerful language, and it is so easy to learn. Knowledge is built right into the language. The Wolfram company is really trying to make knowledge computable. It really is a fantastic environment to work in. Now you can use it in two ways, you can either download a desktop version, or you can use it in the cloud. And I'm going to tell you all about that. I'm very excited for this course, because after completing it you'll be able to do your analysis to such an extent that you can actually produce a manuscript of research and submit it for publication. That is what I want for you at the end of the courses. Very early on in the course, I'm going to just show you a quick document which right at the end we're going to reproduce. That is a research document, a computational essay. That is something that we really do in my research unit. And in many research units all over the world, we're going to create a computation essay. A document that is going to have words in it, titles, a whole hierarchy, our code, and our data analysis. And that is what we see as researchers as we produce our document ready for submission for publication. So how is this course going to be structured? Well, first of all, you're going to see me talk to you every now and again, specifically at the beginning of each chapter. And this whole course is going to be divided into chapters. There's going to be some screen cast videos where you're going to see my screen initially as I type. Now, I'm a terrible typist, it's very slow and there's lots of mistakes. So eventually we'll move on and as we progress in the course by just showing you the already created documents. So that you can see the code happening on the screen, coding happening on the screen. But the videos are only a small part of this course, because you do not learn how to write code and how to analyze data by watching someone else do it. You have got to do it yourself. So all of the documents that you're going to see on screen, is going to be available in the course. You'll be able to download them and view them either in the cloud, in your web browser, or in the desktop version. Now these documents are very complete, you'll see a lot of words as you would in a textbook. About the cod, what to do, how to think about it, and the actual code, and the actual analysis. So you can always refer to these documents. You can even print them out or just keep them as PDF files. Now these notebook files, they have a .nb extension, these are files that exist on your hard drive, or that you upload to the cloud and use in your browser. So those files will also be available for you, and you can interact with those documents. You can add your own notes to it, it almost looks exactly like a word document and you can just add normal words, and you can add code, change the code, do whatever you like. Of course, I want you to get your own documents. Now to help you along, there's also going to be two sets of other notebooks. One is a notebook just with a set of instructions, and it's going to ask you to write some code and get some results. But you'll also get a version that is fully complete, so that you can check how to do it and how it was done. Now this is a computer language, there are many ways to achieve the same result. So you'll see one way of doing it and you can compare that to your own. I want you to practice, I want you to write the code to do your data analysis. Let's talk about the assignments. I really don't want to burden you with a whole set of exams just to pass this course and get your certificate. I want to empower you to be able to do your own analysis. So I really want to keep the assignments really in the background. Now, of course, there are going to be a few that you have to do. Those are going to be simple multiple choice questions. And the idea behind them is that you will have to either remember the code, but that's not so important. It's going to force you at times to go to your computer and actually look at the documentation and look at the code, type in the code, and see what works. Because that is what I want you to do. I want you to sit down and write some code, I want you to sit down and do your data analysis. So really I'm going to keep those assignments really to the minimum just so that it does exist and that you can get your certification. In the end though, I want you to be able to do your own data analysis to contribute to this wonderful world of scientific research.
