So, right here in chapter one, I just wanted to take a few short minutes of your time to just motivate why we're using the Wolfram Language to do biostatistics. In my research unit, we certainly make use of other languages, but I always default to the Wolfram Language. There are many reasons for that. If we look at the programs out there that are available to do biostatistics, they certainly are quite a few. One that comes to mind would be IBM's SPSS. Now, read this document. All these documents are going to be available for you to download. They are written in the coding environment that we are going to use throughout our code to do our statistical analysis. But you can see it's a beautiful written document, just another reason to use the Wolfram Language. Read up about SPSS there. Read up about other softwares such as Statistica. They really exist, and they are wonderful. But what they do is, they constrain you just to do a specific type of data analysis. You don't learn how to express yourself in code. To express yourself in code, your thoughts, the analysis that you want to do in code, is really just the modern way of doing it. The world has changed fundamentally, and to have the ability just to write some computer code is just going to open up a whole new world for you. It is going to empower you in ways that you can not imagine. There's old-fashioned type of software where you just push a button that will do the analysis for you. It really does not resonate in a modern world, and that really I feel strongly about. These programs are also very expensive. It might be fair if you have a copy at your research institution. But when you leave there, and you want to carry on and do your own analysis, you will not have access to this. I tell you you will not be able to afford this. Again, in a modern world and a modern computer age, that is just not acceptable. So, a programming language is really the way to go. If you learn how to write code, really, it's going to set you up for the rest of your life. You do not know what lies ahead in the rest of your life. The ability to write some code, that's going to mean a lot to you. It really is a modern world, and the ability to speak a language, and just normal human language, is really now or that's at least as important to be able to do a computer language as well. The Wolfram Language stands apart from all other languages. It is very simple and easy to learn how to use. It spans a vast array of possible fields. There's so much you can do with the Wolfram Language. On top of that, there's knowledge built right into the language, and you're going to see that. That is very unique to this language. As I mentioned, I do a lot of research. We use a lot of languages, but really, number one choice here, the one that I want for you to start with is the Wolfram Language. Now, I mentioned this notebook environment that you can see here. It is just the screen here. You see the white background. You see the text. You see the titles, the subtitles, It's a notebook. This is exactly where we're going to write our code, but you can see we can also do other things. You can see that I created a document here that looks like a Word document or a Microsoft Word document. That allows you to produce this document that we actually refer to as a computational essay. In other words, I can write these lines of text. I can create this document that I can share with others that I can look at it again in weeks, months, years down the line with all this beautiful text, but I can also do the computation right inside of there, do my analysis, get my graphs, my figures, everything done in this one document creating this computational essay, a very powerful way to do data analysis. I mentioned that this language split over so many domains. If you go to their website, you can just actually click there if you have the document in front of you, then you will come to this page, and you'll see this stuff on geometry, on scientific and medical data, and computation engineering data and computation graphs, machine-learning, financial data and computation, learning a few lines of code. Really, it's so much easier to write code than it is to learn a human language. Really, it's going to mean so much to you. As I said, you don't know where your life is going to take you. It's just going to empower you no matter what happens. So, really, there's just no other language that I can really suggest you start off with than the Wolfram Language. I mentioned knowledge is built right into the language. Let's execute this line of code. Now, you can see from that line of code, it's got this little star with the equal sign. I'll show you how to do that. Instead of writing a line of code, I wrote, Population of the United States of America since 2010. I wrote that in as a line of code. This is a line of code. It is not a part of normal text, as I wrote up there. We can see that on the right-hand side, there's a little cell there. I type that in as a line of code. Again, unique to the Wolfram Language. Instead of writing computer code, I can actually create this little star sign there with equal. I'll show you how to do that. Then, instead of computer code, I write in normal English sentence, and that will be transcribed into computer code, which will then execute and look what it does, the Wolfram Research Company, making data computable at the heart of their company. They have servers that contain so much data that you can just search, and that's what happened here. I created the search term and look what it returned. It said things what I wanted is United States population, 2010 till today. Indeed, it says at the moment, there's 316.6 million people. We've seen 2010, there was 308, and now, 2017, the latest data, 325. Shows me this little projection, where it thinks that's going. Gives me this little binary gender breakdown into the different age groups, how many there were, and it gives me some of the largest cities and their population, et cetera. Just absolutely fantastic. Look at this next line of code I entered. Now, this is a proper line of code. So, I said, geo-region value plot to resource data, infectious diseases by country 2009-2014, that's one of the datasets on Wolfram service, or, and give me the country and measles cases, for instance. Look at this, a beautiful plot that gives me that information from a line of code. Absolutely fantastic, and you're really not going to find that in another language. I think I've said enough. I want to take just a few minutes of your time to motivate for the use of the Wolfram Language. It is really easy to use, it is powerful, and it is really going to contribute to your life and your aspirations as a researcher. No end. Let's get going.
