Who are you?
I haven’t really checked this page since I taught it in Spring of 09. But I just did, and I see that there is a low level of continued usage – particularly for the function scatter.color.
So, I’m curious… who are you? What are you using? Who knows, if a lot of people are using something, I may just improve on it.
If you know me, say hi. Heck, even if you don’t know me, say hi also.
Hello,
I’m a new grad student in Geography at the University of Alabama. I am anticipating Quant Methods in the Fall and I was researching how to best prepare for the class when I ran across your site. Thanks for your work and time. Any suggestions on how to best prepare for the class are welcome.
Chad,
Since every Quant Methods course is slightly different, the best thing for you to do would be to contact the instructor of the course. They should be happy to answer your question.
But my answer to a student taking a course from me, would be: If you’ve ever taken a statistics course, review your notes on t-tests, correlation and confounding. If you’re looking for an elementary/intermediate text for review, I highly recommend Experimental Design and Data Analysis for Biologists by Quinn and Keough. It is well written, seems to convey the intuition of statistics really well, and covers slightly advanced topics that are frequented in geography without too much math.
If you’ve never ever had a statistics course and the slightest bit of math scares you, then I highly recommend the Freedman, Pisani and Purves text. You can pick up old editions online for a song.
If you think that you might specialize in spatial analysis, then you might start with something that also introduces matrices and uses them throughout. Perhaps Faraway’s Linear Models with R.
But the strongest advice is to contact your instructor. And good luck with your graduate education in Geography!