anyway, today's material was a bit of (very) general background on experimental design, followed by -- in my opinion -- just enough set theory and probability calculus to get us all into trouble, but probably not enough to get us back out again. hmmm. i wondered to myself as i was reading it over again last night just how central these topics were going to be in the rest of our 'primer' of (mostly) regular old parametric stats. i started looking up the terms they chose to boldface (e.g. 'complex events,' 'proper subset,' 'conditional probability') in the index and, curiously enough, most of them don't appear there at all. and most of those few that do appear (e.g. 'venn diagram') only come back up mostly in passing in a later chapter. except 'independence,' of course.
so, given G&E's bold statements on the first page:
In this chapter, we develop basic concepts and definitions required to understand probability and sampling.... The concepts in this chapter lay the foundations for the use and understanding of statistics....i'm curious to see how (and if) they link these back in in later chapters. (note my skeptical tone).
