The winner of the Discovery Seeker Ideas that I presented to class was a survey exploring high school extracurriculars of ITP students.
I made a web-based survey and sent a test to the class. Problems that I ran into even creating it was finding myself double-guessing every option I chose because I felt overly conscious of making it flexible enough to catch every sort of response. The service has its own limitations of how many questions you can create and responses that can be collected, so the process was frustrating.
The test feedback from the class was really helpful because I was able to fix things that I had totally overlooked while being overly neurotic. Like better ways to phrase questions and options that were too limiting.
I’m hoping to tweak some more over the next couple of days before blasting the survey to the whole program. I’m really looking forward to gathering and analyzing the data.
This week’s homework assignment was to do a coin toss 1oo times. Caveat for my group was that I had to pretend to do it. I wrote Heads and Tails in a spreadsheet and alternated arbitrarily.
Here’s the track that Chika and I made with a combination of found sounds on her end) and mostly instrumental sections from songs that I gathered.
Made using Soundtrack Pro, definitely not the most intuitive program. There were definitely edits we wanted to make hindered by no clue to make it happen.
Here are six ideas I’ve been kicking around the potential to do some discovery on:
1) A rehash of the city data experiment, but this time to explore the road I didn’t travel down: population loss and its relation to a city’s education levels.
2) My original idea for the data gathering experiment: when is drunk o’clock?
Some background: I have a lot of bartender friends and I call the time when the drunk to sober ratio is bad (or good, depending on your perspective), the noise levels rise, and the place becomes insanely busy/annoying is drunk o’clock. I want to measure things like crowd numbers, sound levels, and do some social observation to have a bit of a definitive idea on that.
3) Create a survey to administer to NYU students, along the lines of choose your own adventure. I want to see if majors correspond to the responses along the lines of 7 Habits of Highly Innovative People.
4) Similar to 3, but administering a personality test instead.
5) Study on how Facebook, etc. encourage news/memes to move around virally. Partially inspired by the Balloon Boy story of the other week where I was able to learn of and follow the whole story unfolding through friend status updates.
6) Survey of ITP students extracurriculars from high school. I found that learning those gives you interesting insight into people.
I surveyed eight people about their guesses on the percentage of countries in Africa in the United Nations.There were 2 groups of 4 with the percentage reference point as 65% or 10%.
The results:
Survey Results
What I found interesting was how curious people were about what the right answer was. (I looked it up and it was about 27-28%.) I also have pretty smart friends because most were within 10%.
My hypothesis was: is there a connection between the higher education level of the population in major cities and their lure to new residents? I looked up the top 10 largest metro areas in the US on American Fact Finder/US Census and got the list: Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Antonio, and San Francisco. I decided to substitute Atlanta for San Antonio to even out the regional areas a bit.
I was able to determine that in some cases there was a connection between the very well educated cities and new residents moving there, but I feel like I left out a piece of the puzzle.
The experiment might have been better served if I was able to find out what the level of education was in cities experiencing a decline in population. Maybe then it would’ve been a stronger connection between education and population. I also should’ve chosen cities with around the same populations because a places like New York and Los Angeles skewed the charts because their populations are so much larger than everyone else. I also wish my population data had been more exact. I tried to extract the actual city population from the general metro area populations, but it’s unclear if the criteria for separating them was consistent through all cities. All in all, the answers are murky and inconclusive.
The assignment for class was to use stop motion techniques to create a :30 video. Bunmi and I partnered up and once she mentioned that her kid had a Transformer toy, we were off and running.
My first idea was to score it to “I Go To Work “, but ultimately we decided on “Stronger.”
This assignment was a ton of fun. Editing was the hardest part because once we cut out all the mistakes and boring stuff, we only had about 17 secs worth of stuff and basically had to double it. The moving frame transitions were completely an accident that we ended up liking. We had been trying to throw fade in/out slugs in there and Final Cut wasn’t cooperating (and we didn’t quite know how to use it, but that’s neither here nor there). We liked the way it looked and decided to keep it.
I pretty much hate blogs…well, the act of maintaining them at least. At this point in my life, I’ve abandoned 3 plus an LJ and Tumblr account. Remembering to write down events really isn’t my strong suit.
But, with it already being 2 months into the program and me not quite sure where the time went (or what the hell I’m doing), it is vaguely starting to seem useful as a way for me to know what the hell I’m technically supposed to be up to. A milestone tracking to counteract the blur. Let’s see how long this inclination can last.
Give a number and then estimate the 50% confidence interval (a range in which the true number most probably lies) for each of the following:
• percentage of people who are “black” on the 1990 Census 15%-25%
• total egg production in 1965 (number of eggs) 1 million – 3 million
• number of airline passengers killed in plane crashes in 1980 worldwide 25 – 100
• percentage of babies born in the US that are girls 45% – 55%
• percentage of entering college freshman whose probable field of study was physical sciences (1990) 10% – 20%
• number of people who watched the 1995 Super Bowl 20 million -30 million
• number of native French speakers in Canada in 1992 500,000 – 2 million
• number of babies born in the US in 1992 50 million – 100 million
• number of abortions in the US in 1992 150,000 – 300,000
• median household income in the US in 1996 40,000 – 50,000
In my Crafting With Data class, I’ve got the chance to get back in touch with my Sociology routes. An assignment for last week was to craft a self-portrait using data. I had planned out a nice visual representation inspired by the Feltron Annual Report, but due to a fun non-backed up CS3 crash, all I have at the moment is raw data with no pretty pictures.
