People should think, computers should work.

Computers - and computer software - are integral to statistical analysis today: all Boot Camp participants bring a laptop/notebook computer to the sessions.

Computers are good at arithmetic: they can be relied on to get their sums right, but we have to ensure that they are doing the right sums. Understanding the principles underlying the analysis we want to do is more important than ever if we are to avoid the temptation to accept whatever the "black box" churns out.

People should think

The first sessions focus on developing an intuitive understanding of sampling and making inferences from samples, including Information Theory and Bayesian analysis.

We use simple hands-on activities to simulate data: rolling dice to simulate detection of frog calls, pulling numbered chips from a bag to simulate sampling squirrels in a forest, shuffling clam shells from different sources to see if differences are real. We compare the results among participants, and compare too with the true value, which we know for our simulated data.

Comparisons work best with huge numbers of simulations: this can be done quickly on a computer, and R provides simple methods to do this.

These activities provide opportunities to explore concepts, discuss with other participants, and to ask all sorts of questions.

When we come to deal with the specific techniques used to estimate occupancy, population size, and diversity, we still use practical activities – rolling dice, shuffling cards, searching for ants on the lawns - to simulate data for analysis. And of course we see examples of analysis of real-world data sets.

Computers should work

We make some use of Microsoft Excel for organising data and simple analyses, but most of the time we use free specialist software packages: PRESENCE, DISTANCE, MARK, and EstimateS (and WinBUGS or OpenBUGS too, if there is time and demand).

Specialist courses - usually 4-5 days - exist for each of these packages, but we only devote one day to each. The aims of this short introduction are to:

• see what the package can do, which goes beyond anything which could be done with pencil and paper or standard analysis packages;
• get practical experience of running a simple analysis, including assembling  and formatting the data;
• understanding and interpreting the results.

Using the web-site materials

The primary purpose of the web-site is to make course materials available to past and prospective course participants; they aren't designed as on-line tutorials. If you just come to the web-site and just read through the stuff, you won't gain much from it.

Ideally, come to our Boot Camp! If you can't do that:

• download the software and work through the examples yourself;
• do as many of the hands-on simulations as you can - roll dice (they can be 6-sided), write numbers on cards and pull them out of a hat, etc;
• most useful, get together a group of friends and work through the activities together.

Some pages contain links to additional on-line materials; in particular, Wikipedia has a good statistics section.