My colleague Mark Hansen used to assign his class to keep a data diary. I decided to try it, to see what happened. I asked my Intro Stats class (about 180 students) to choose a day in the upcoming week, and during the day, keep track of every event that left a ‘data trail.’ (We had talked a bit in class about what that meant, and about what devices were storing data.
For various reasons, I decided to walk this weekend from my house to Venice Beach, a distance of about four and a half miles. The weather was beautiful, and I thought a walk would help clear my mind. I had recently heard a story on NPR in which it was reported that Thoreau kept data on when certain flowers opened, a record now used to help understand the effects of global warming.
I read a piece last night called 5 Ways Big Data Will Change Lives In 2013. I really wasn’t expecting much from it, just scrolling through accumulated articles on Zite. However, as with so many things, there were some gems to be had. I learned of Aadhar.
Aadhar is an ambitious government Big Data project aimed at becoming the world’s largest biometric database by 2014, with a goal of capturing about 600 million Indian identities.
This article at Slate is interesting for a number of reasons. First, if offers a link to a data set listing names and data of the 325 people known to have been killed by guns since December 14, 2012. Slate is to be congratulated for providing data in a format that is easy for statistical software to read. (Still, some cleaning required. For example, ages include a mix of numbers and categorical values.
A new report released by CAUSE is well worth reading: _Connecting Research to Practice in a Culture of Assessment for Introductory College-level Statistics, _www.causeweb.org/research/guidelines/ResearchReport_Dec_2012.pdf
Read it. We’ll discuss later. Pop quiz.
I haven’t yet read it myself (in my eagerness to publicize it as quickly as possible), but of particular interest to this blog is the role that data science plays, or does not play. For instance, Question 1 under Research Priority 1 is “What core learning outcomes employed in a particular profession do individuals need to develop in order to perform well in that profession (e.
Just read a great paper by Anna Bargagliotti in the current Journal of Stats Education, “How well do the NSF Funded Elementary Mathematics Curricula align with the GAISE report recommendations? “. The answer: it depends. Anna compares three math curricula designed to meet the Common Core Standards for grades K-12: “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space”, “Math Trailblazers”, and “Everyday Mathematics.” Anna compared them to the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education K-12 report, which, to quote her paper, “defines a statistically literate person as one who is able to formulate questions, collect and analyze data, and interpret results.
We have just finished another semester, and before my mind completely turns to rubble, I want to share what I believe to be a fairly good assignment. What I present below was parts of two separate assignments that I gave this semester, but upon reflection I think it would be better as one.
Read the article Let’s Practice What We Preach: Turning Tables into Graphs (full reference given below). In this article, Gelman, Pascarica, & Dodhia suggest that presentations of results using graphs are more effective than results presented in tables.
