Back in modern stats' infancy, when Florence Nightingale was busy counting dead and dying soldiers, she did all of her calculations by hand.
Surely you've already done enough math by hand and, by extension, with a calculator. It's time to take off the training wheels and give you a real calculator, one much more powerful than what was used to put people on the moon. [1] Instead of punching an endless sequence of numbers on a hand calculator, you'll instead be writing to your computer and it will write back. This back-and-forth of writing is called programming, or just coding. It's how we talk with computers to make them do stuff, and for them to tell us neat stuff in return.
Lets introduce you to Python. These are the steps to perform to get your computer set up. We will use the Enthought Canopy package. [2] Follow these instructions as exactly as possible.
Windows
- Go to http://www.enthought.com/canopy-express/ with your browser and download Canopy Express. If you are asked to create an account first, do so.
- Go to your downloads folder and double-click the Canopy installer.
- Follow the prompts (Click "Next" a bunch of times) to finish the installation.
- Double-click the Enthought Canopy Express icon on your desktop.
Windows: What You Should See
On my computer, one window appears. It is a welcome screen and shows this:
Click the Editor button. The Editor window will appear:
Click Create a new file.
Mac OSX
- Go to http://www.enthought.com/canopy-express/ with your browser and download Canopy Express. If you are asked to create an account first, do so.
- Go to your downloads folder and double-click the Canopy installer.
- Install Canopy by drag-and-dropping the Canopy icon into your Applications folder.
- Go to your Applications folder and click the Canopy icon.
OSX: What You Should See
On my computer, one window appears. It is a welcome screen and shows this:
Click the Editor button. The Editor window will appear:
Click Create a new file.
Linux
There are many flavors of Linux with a multitude of installation options. If you're using Linux you are probably comfortable with how to install packages. The general approach is to:
- Go to http://www.enthought.com/canopy-express/ with your browser and download Canopy Express. If you are asked to create an account first, do so.
- Go to your downloads folder and double-click the Canopy installer.
- Follow the prompts (Click "Next" a bunch of times) to finish the installation.
- In your Applications folder, click Enthought Canopy Express.
| [1] | Even playing the game Angry Birds performs more math than the moon rocket launch. |
| [2] | While OSX comes with Python already, it doesn't have some extra stuff like graph-making abilities, so we are going to use the Enthought Python distribution. |
Learn Stats in 10,000 Hours by Jonathan B. Miller is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.