Confusion

JV chap7 was really hard... Too hard for me!
As for JV chap6, I didn't understand most of it. I know chap7 was a hard chapter, but even the non-mathematic part, the text was really hard to understand for me. Trying to do the exercices was really hard and even for chap6 I could do a lot before the class where I asked for help to Mike. Even with this help, I am not sure I could do it again, because the exercices are never the same and I think I don't manage to think in the mathematical way...
Is there a trick? Something to help me think the math (stats) way ?

Still trying hardly to understand maths... :-s

Still Progressing - just because it can help everyone

it worked, but it added a "X" value as a first column with the number of the row, I don't know if it will do it everytime I modify the csv.

Mike:
that's weird that it added a column. i can't think why it would do that. anyway, you can use 'subset()' to remove extraneous columns from a data frame:
> attach(ChickWeight)
> head(ChickWeight)
weight Time Chick Diet
1 42 0 1 1
2 51 2 1 1
3 59 4 1 1
4 64 6 1 1
5 76 8 1 1
6 93 10 1 1
> new.data.frame = subset(ChickWeight, select= -Chick)
> head(new.data.frame)
weight Time Diet
1 42 0 1
2 51 2 1
3 59 4 1
4 64 6 1
5 76 8 1
6 93 10 1

Progressing

i tried to add a new column to my data set for my project but i can't find the command to do it, because i created a new vector that i would like to incorporate to my dataset. there is the same number of values as in my dataset, but the problem is that there is the same number if the name of the vector is included as a new header for the new column. is there a way to do that? and on top of that, i would like this new column to be added in my csv file too, so not doing it by using the attach() command. is it possible?

Mike :
try "cbind()" and "write.csv()" as follows:
> attach(faithful)
> head(faithful)
eruptions waiting
1 3.600 79
2 1.800 54
3 3.333 74
4 2.283 62
5 4.533 85
6 2.883 55
> length(eruptions)
[1] 272
> new.data.vector = rnorm(272, mean=100, sd=25)
> head(new.data.vector)
[1] 121.88050 78.59724 99.48620 98.39534 88.22590 82.78630
> new.data.frame = cbind(faithful, new.data.vector)
> head(new.data.frame)
eruptions waiting new.data.vector
1 3.600 79 121.88050
2 1.800 54 78.59724
3 3.333 74 99.48620
4 2.283 62 98.39534
5 4.533 85 88.22590
6 2.883 55 82.78630
> write.csv(new.data.frame, file="new_file.csv")

Big progress

Thanks to Mike, I can now try to run my data on R ! Big part of it because when you have a lot of data, doing it manually or with excel is a hard work !

Independent Project

I had more tine to look at the data my anthropology teacher gave me.
It is length of long bones among different human population, as well as gorilla, chimps and Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis.
I don't know yet what i'm going to do with it, but as I am more interested in palaeontology, I will probably infer ecological features of Lucy, knowing modern adapatations of humans to environment. Or maybe food habits... I don't know!
The only thing I know is that I need to search for papers on top on this data because figures only are not enough.
Or maybe if I am brave enough and I have enough time, I can do my Independent Project on as many aspects of Lucy I can infer from this data as I can!
Let's see what will happen...

Is it really desperate ?

I am not a great fan of mathematics, even if I know it is more important than what I would think, and that I probably will need it in my everyday life (in particular statistics), I am really bad at maths. But yesterday, while I wasa reading Chapter 3 (G&E), I was amazed by how I could understand most of it ! Really better than the first 2 chapters... I know it is really the basics, but after taking two others statistics classes and seing my results to them, I could really feel happy !
Unfortunately, I know that most of the time even if I understand what I am reading, I can't really reuse it, use the appropriate formula at the right place ! It's kind of hard to me !
But I came to this class in order to understand it.
It's a real challenge to me.
Hoping I won't fail it...

Personal Project

As I'm majoring in Anthropology, I asked to my teacher if I could have some data.
What I would like to do is a paper about Paleoanthropology (Phylogeny? Evolution? Forensic? I don't know yet...) I think I could incorporate a statistical part in this paper, adding a mathematic approach to it.