Simply Statistics lists some data analysis projects. Skewing towards the intermediate rather than novice student. But still useful in many ways. And—some FitBit ideas!
http://simplystatistics.org/post/32881133740/statistics-project-ideas-for-students-part-2
A little bit ago [July 19, 2012 — so I’m a little behind], the L.A. Times ran an article about whether TV hosts are pulling their own weight, salary wise. (What is the real value of TV stars and personalities?) I took their data table and put it in a CSV format, and added a column called “epynomious”, which indicates whether the show is named after the host. (This apparently doesn’t explain the salary variation.
In reading one of the many blogs that I read, there was a suggestion to use the Baltimore’s parking citation data to see if some makes/models of cars get citations more than others. Now parking citations are very near and dear to me since I get at least one (n ≥ 1) parking citation a year parking near the University of Minnesota–which most often also leads to my car being towed since you only have so many hours to move your car after they ticket it.
I attended useR! 2012 this past summer and one of the highlights of the conference was a presentation by Yihui Xie and JJ Allaire on knitr. As an often frustrated user of Sweave, I was very impressed with how they streamlined the process of integrating R with LaTeX and other document types, and I was excited to take advantage of the tools. It also occurred to me that these tools, especially the simpler markdown language, could be useful to the students in my introductory statistics course.
RevoJoe on Inside-R posted a nice list of data sources. Thanks to Tim Hesterberg for pointing this out on the Iso-stat listserv.
This Friday, I (Rob) had the honor of giving the same talk three times in a row at the Mathapalooza, held at one of the Austin City College campuses. The audience was mostly central-Texas area community college faculty. Giving the same talk three times in a row can be tiring, but the professors were very engaged and very involved and so I had fun. The topic was ‘Educating Citizen Statisticians’, and I mentioned the need to do what it takes so that intro stats is the most important class students take in college.
Jeffrey Breen just gave a talk entitled “Tapping the Data Deluge with R” to theBoston Predictive Analytics Meetup. He suggests there are two types of data in this world
Data you have, and
Data you don’t have…yet.
In the talk Jeffrey provided a nice overview of several methods for importing data into R, including:
Reading CSV files
Reading XLS files
