Download a PDF file with 10 data sets that can be used to illustrate a variety of statistical techniques

Useful pages:

• Selected Data-sets from Publications by Martin Bland
• A stroop effect lap report with actual data
• One for the tree huggers – I always loved that picture of a road tunnel in the trunk of a Giant Redwood as a child
• Favourite Data sets from drugs research (Bradstreet)

A spreadsheet with all the data sets is on its way so I can demonstrate how to analyse the data once we have decided what methods are appropriate. I like having a dialogue and a spreadsheet instead of Yet Another PowerPoint!

Click on the thumbnail above for a 1280 by 1024 pixel desktop image with a February 2010 calendar. Its on my desktop computer for what is left of this month. James Watt (with slide rule and plan) on the left, so a tenuous link to Maths.

Just 10 minutes on the five number summary. I’ve not produced a screencast for some time, and this topic presented itself as potentially useful to a range of students but not ‘mainstream’ on any of their courses.

I used the NCH screencam software. This YouTube is a ‘single take’ without script walking through the PowerPoint I usually use for this topic. You may notice that I ‘loose’ it in the middle slightly.

Ruth gets chocolate from an international sweet shop in Birmingham. This Japanese pack seems to contain mock mushrooms with chocolate caps and biscuit stalks. I love the typography on the back of the package…

Some of the details appear to be telling a story (aimed at children?)

And the teacher figure appears in red on the back – I wonder if this is some kind of food labelling thing?

I rather like the teacher-cat, so I used the levels tool in GIMP to remove the colours and exported him (her?) as a GIF cartoon. I might add this as a logo to some of my worksheets to keep the atmosphere light. I can always use the Inkscape trace tool to tidy the edges up.

Download a two sided handout on finding the five number summary for a set of data

The five numbers are the maximum, the minimum, the median and the upper and lower quartiles. This set of numbers can tell you about the central tendency of your data, the spread, the extreme values, and provide low order information about the shape of the distribution. The blood pressure data sets came from Dr Bradstreet’s Favorite Datasets in Early and Late phases in Drug Research.

Box and whisker plot next, so I can explain how to interpret the five number summary. This series is part of a few sessions I’m planning for some degree students. The box and whisker illustration here was produced using the Gnumeric spreadsheet – it has a useful selection of statistical graphs and can export graphs as SVG or in a variety of bitmaps. Version 1.9.9 is in the Ubuntu 9.10 repositories.

...that have solidified his believe that the PC industry needs to move away from just selling hardware and towards a service-based model that could be used to establish an educational infrastructure. “It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships,” he told me, something that mobile phone companies have been practicing for years.

Alan Kay on the Apple Tablet and its alleged included phone plan. I suppose a move from rent a pipe to pay per megabyte is inevitable. Via daringfireball.

Electricity costs less than 10p per kilowatt hour. You can charge quite a few laptop batteries for that, so I assume the notice was to do with health and safety, or encouraging people to move after their latte.

I see a lot of small odds and ends of space like this around the cities I visit. How do we use them to increase (positive) interactions, break down barriers, and increase social cohesion (or confront and resolve the differences)?

The ninjawords on-line dictionary is fast and carries no adverts. Definitions are short and many have usage examples provided. There is an iPhone app, and the page is mobile friendly. I’m putting it on the front of our Moodle.

Definitions contain hyper links to other defined words so you can play the game where you look up a word then look up the words used to define the word…

#! /bin/sh
curl  --basic --user "username:password"
        --data-ascii "status=`echo $@|tr ' ' '+'`"
          "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml" > /dev/null

Update of something I found from 2007, when twitter was using a different API by the look of it.

The curl command line should all be on one line, no line breaks. I’ve had to add line breaks here so the line does not disappear into the sidebar. The redirect to /dev/null simply suppresses the 20 lines of xml that are returned by twitter when the twit is received.

If I used the short version of the—user option to curl, and if I put up with the xml output, I could have a script that posts to twitter that I could tweet.

Download a one side worksheet with some workshop questions on number. Some symbolic questions (equivalent fractions, multiplication) and some word problems (VAT increase).

The main phase of the lesson was about probability. Packs of playing cards, coin tossing, and a discussion about smoking cessation, the National Health, and individual behaviour versus averages. Good stuff, and I’ll post an evaluation here in a bit.