For your next social bookmarking assignment, find and bookmark an example of probability in the news. Note in your bookmark whether your example uses the empirical, subjective, or axiomatic notion of probability.
For Diigo users, tag your bookmark with “probability.” For Pinterest users, include the hashtag “#probability” in your bookmark’s description.
To get credit for this assignment, complete it by Friday, February 3rd, before class begins.
Image: “Interesting Pin,” Derek Bruff, Flickr (CC)
Here’s your next reading assignment. Read Section 2.3 (omitting 2.3.7 for now) in your textbook and answer the following questions by 8 a.m., Wednesday, February 1st. Be sure to login to the blog before leaving your answers in the comment section below.
Here’s your next reading assignment. Read Sections 2.1-2.2 in your textbook and answer the following questions by 8 a.m., Monday, January 30th. Be sure to login login to the blog before leaving your answers in the comment section below.
There’s an interesting opinion piece in this week’s Hustler by Akshitkumar Mistry, a fourth-year Vanderbilt medical student. “Weed out weed-out courses” argues that intro courses in the sciences, engineering, and mathematics are preventing too many students from succeeding in those fields. Mistry writes:
Research has consistently demonstrated that students grasp concepts better with active learning rather than passively hearing a lecture for an hour, and then watching some graduate student solve practice problems that they couldn’t. STEM fields in reality are all about application in the real world with visual, experiential, hands-on problem solving.
That’s a pretty good summary of why I’ve designed this course the way I have.
Image: “Untitled,” efwp, Flickr (CC)
Here’s your next reading assignment. Read Sections 1.5-1.7 (omitting Section 1.6.2) in your textbook and answer the following questions by 8 a.m., Wednesday, January 25th. Be sure to login to the blog before leaving your answers in the comment section below.
The dataset that you’ll work with in class today comes from the Significant Earthquake Database run by the National Geophysical Data Center. Here’s the earthquakes2000.csv file you’ll use in class today. (That file contains NGDC information on all earthquakes since 2000.)
For help with R commands, try these resources:
Want to use your budding data visualization skills to try to earn a little money? The blog Information Is Beautiful is hosting monthly visualization challenges. This month’s challenge is called “Hollywood Budgets” and asks participants to visualize data (revenues, budgets, review scores, etc.) on every Hollywood film released in the last five years. You can submit a visualization in any one of three categories: interactive visualizations, “regular” visualizations (like the ones you can use R/RStudio to create), and “napkin” visualizations (sketches of visualizations like the ones you did in class the other day). Prizes for “regular” and “napkin” visualizations are $1000 for the winners in each category and $500 for the runners-up.
The deadline is January 30th, so act fast. See the challenge website for more information. And if you submit something, let me know!
Here’s your first problem, in Word and PDF format. It’s due at the start of class on Wednesday, January 25th. Remember, you can collaborate on your problem sets; just identify those with whom you worked when you turn in your problem set. Also, don’t forget about our office hours, including three on Tuesday.
Update: For question 9, I’m looking for the significance of that red cell in the Norway row within the dataset itself. I’m not looking for social or political implications of that data point.
Second Update: Here’s the ecological footprint data from the Global Footprint Network. You might need to look at it for some of the questions on the problem set.