We will learn the basics of statistical inference in order to understand and compute p-values and confidence intervals. We will provide examples by programming in R in a way that will help make the connection between concepts and implementation. Problems sets requiring R programming will be used to test understanding and ability to implement basic data analyses. We will use visualization techniques to explore new data sets and determine the most appropriate approach. We will describe robust statistical techniques as alternative when data do not fit assumptions required by the standard approaches. We will also introduce the basics of using R scripts to conduct reproducible research.   Topics: Distributions Exploratory Data Analysis Inference Non-parametric statistics