Email from students, with replies

>
> Nevertheless, I am glad to be among your STA347 students.  I already
> bought the official course textbook, but it has proven to be a difficult
> read (worse than Spivak from MATH137Y!).  Please do not count this
> question as an objection, but rather I would like to know if you have
> alternative sources of text for the material that you are going to cover.

Yes, as I mentioned in lecture, that text is no joke. It's very good, but
few students -- even quite good students -- can just read it. Lectures
will follow chapters 3, 4 and 5 quite closely. The objective is to make
the text material clear while allowing you to ask questions. So it will be
quite helpful to come to lecture. The text is also very valuable, because
it holds still and contains everything you need to learn. Looking at the
text's coverage of a topic before I get to it will help you follow the
lecture, and the lecture should allow you to read most of what's in the
text.

But first, there is a review assignment, mostly on discrete conditional
probabilty. I covered most of the review on Monday. Your STA257 text is a
better printed source for this than our book is.  See
http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/~jbrunner/347 for the course outline and the
review assignment. It would be good to start work on the problems right
away. They will help you follow material from the beginning of Ch. 3,
which I will likely start around mid-lecture on Wednesday (tomorrow).

> I was wondering if we need to know chapter 3 material (markov chain) for
> the test this week since it is not covered in the assignment?
>

No, Quiz 1 will cover only material from Assignment 1. It will
be like this on every quiz. Each quiz will be based on material from a
specific assignment, and that's it.