Stats By Any Other Name - Week 5

Okay - I'm almost caught up. I don't know why I find it so hard to keep up on the blog posts. It's not that I don't think about the class, and I certainly get my other work finished on time. I just seem to have some sort of mental block when it comes to actually typing these posts. I have the same problem with my other blog http://mrsdanen.blogspot.com/ where I was supposed to write reviews of the books that I have been reading this year. I challenged myself to read 100 books. I have currently read 67, but if you looked at my blog you would think that I stalled at number 27 in September. I have read the books and I certainly have opinions on them, why does it seem to be so hard to complete that next step?

Anyway, about stats....This week we were looking at Google trends. I actually had a hard time with this assignment. For some reason it seems that google trends is getting blocked by my school's filtering system. I kept getting an error message every time I tried to do a search with google trends. Luckily my group members were able to share their screens with me on our google hangout so I could see what they were talking about. We were also supposed to look at a number of data resources. Talk about information overload...Most of these sites were full of information, some usful and some not, but were hard to search. It really felt like being buried in a sea of facts and figures (so much data, so little time). I found the information to be reliable, but I also found it hard to find specific data that might be helpful to me.

Stats By Any Other Name - Week 4

This was another one of those weeks where the terminology got in my way. I was confused about standard scores and z-scores. I thought that the standard score was the number on the table axis, and that the z-score was the number that you would find in the table itself. This would explain why my group was getting the same answers for the percentage questions, but different z-scores. Once we got this straitened out everything made a lot more sense. Again this week was more about the interpretation of the data, which is a lot more interesting than just crunching the numbers.

I found the videos on Bill Tancer to be intriguing, if not just a little bit frightening. It's amazing to me how much information can be gained just from analyzing peoples search inquiries. As long as the information remains anonymous, I think people should be able to use anything that's out there. If my personal information starts to get shared, that's when I feel it crosses over into an invasion of privacy.

Stats By Any Other Name - Week 3

This week our groups were supposed to start creating our own survey. We had a number of ideas, among which were the surveys that Zac and I were both working on for our respective districts. Zac's was smaller in scope (fewer questions and fewer people involved) and we thought it would be easier to analyze once we got the results. This is the part of stats. that is actually interesting, being able to interpret the data once you have it. It's funny that none of my other stats. classes in college really focused on this aspect. Isn't this the main reason that we do surveys in the first place?

Stats By Any Other Name Week 2

I'm not bad at math, I've actually always done pretty well. This class however, has been a struggle. It's not that the work is overly difficult, or the amount overwhelming. I find myself having a hard time with definitions. Words that I have used often with a fair amount of certainty as to their meanings, no longer have the same definitions. Take for instance the word "sample", I had no idea there were so many different types of samplesm and the word "statistic" more often I have actually meant "parameter" when I used this word. Once I can wrap my mind around the definitions, the actual math hasn't been that hard. Having said that, it still has to be my least favorite subject so far. I still think that's why they tried to disguise the name by calling it "Decision Making Using Data Collection & Analysis" and hoping that none of us would notice.