NCTM has finally published books on statistics in its EU series. This is a rather traditional approach to statistics, given the context of this blog. But, since I’m a co-author (along with Roxy Peck and Stephen Miller), why not point you to it?
http://www.nctm.org/catalog/product.aspx?ID=13804
And while the book is not computational in theme, it does address a central issue of this blog: universal statistical knowledge.
A grades 6-9 version is due out any moment.
I have been mourning the loss this week of my FitBit. No idea where it went. That’s the problem with small, portable data collection devices. The very feature that makes them useable makes them lose-able. Then I came across this possible solution
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/21/australian-firefighters-test-data-transmitting-pills/
which raises entirely new questions about edible lines of data collection devices.
I had the privilege last week of listening to the dissertation defense of UCLA Stat’s newest PhD: Nathan Yau. Congratulations, Nathan!
Nathan runs the very popular and fantastic blog Flowing Data, and his dissertation is about, in part, the creation of his app Your Flowing Data. Essentially, this is a tool for collecting and analyzing personal data–data about you and your life.
One aspect of the thesis I really liked is a description of types of insight he found from a paper by Pousman, Stasko and Mateas (2007): Casual information visualization: Depictions of Data in every day life.
As a celebration of Florence Henderson’s 79th birthday (on February 14), I have created this scatterplot to use in my regression course.
The plot depicts the relationship between time spent on mathematics homework outside of school (expressed as z-scores) and mathematics achievement scores (expressed as T-scores, M=50, SD=10) for 200 8th-graders taken from the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Study. The color–in a display of very poor data science–is just randomly applied to the observations rather than meaning anything substantial.
We spend too much time musing about the Data Deluge, I fear, at the expense of talking about another component that has made citizen-statisticianship possible: accessible statistical software. “Accessible” in (at least) two senses: affordable and ready-to-use. This summer, Chris Wild demonstrated his group’s software iNZight at the Census@ School workshop in San Diego. iNZight is produced out of the University of Auckland, and is intended for kids to use along with the Census@Schools data.
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.
