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Thursday 9/17/15

Here is my lesson plan from today. Feel free to skip to the bottom of this post where the homework is!
September 16 2015
Thoughts
  • On what we are doing:
    • We are a team
    • We have a project
    • I am the project manager for this team
  • On rules:
    • I don’t think we should start with rules. Let’s all keep in mind that we should respect each other, ourselves, and the space we are in, and maybe we will all act in such a way that we don’t need rules. If we do need rules, we’ll figure them out as needed.
      • How to ask to eat or go to the bathroom in such a way that it will make a teacher like you more (hint: respectfully).
Goals
For each team member to:
  • Become more comfortable and confident with the idea of themselves as “someone who does math”
  • Develop their problem solving skills
  • Practice thinking rationally
  • Translate math words and symbols into plain language
  • Feel comfortable communicating about numbers
    • Especially big groups of numbers
Skills to acquire
  • Be able to talk about collections of numbers
  • Be able to gather data
  • Be able to identify “biased” data (we will define that later)
  • Be able to understand and create common graphs to communicate information
  • Be able to use math to help discuss the likelihood of an event
Why spend your time doing this?
  • It gives you power
    • We are learning statistics. “Big Data” and “Machine Learning” are very hot fields right now, and they are based on statistics
    • It allow you to figure out things that know one knows
  • It can give you security
    • People who can do statistics have job security and the freedom that comes with having enough money
  • It really is fun and interesting
      • “Could we predict whether a Kickstarter project would meet its funding goal before it was even published?
To find out, we wrote software to analyze the text of every Kickstarter project ever in existence. We were looking for patterns that distinguished the most successful projects. Did they have celebrity endorsements? Did they have pop culture appeal? Did they propose brilliant new innovations?
To our surprise, none of these things had much bearing on fundraising success. What mattered instead? The words used in the listing, the fonts that were chosen, how the images got placed, and how many verbs were included. In fact, the specific project idea was mostly irrelevant to its funding outcome. Using machine learning and linguistic analysis, we were able to predict Kickstarter project success with almost 90% accuracy.
    • What does this mean? Does it matter?


chart (2).pngPenultimately
Tell me about the interactive visualization you played with for homework. Understand that the fancy math symbols don’t say anything but what you said... they just say it differently.
HOMEWORK

For Homework, find a chart/graph, anywhere on the internet. Send it to me with an explanation via the form. Don't use the one in the example above. Here are places to look for interesting charts/graphs/data visualizations: r/DataIsBeautiful

DadaViz

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