Statistics and Statistical Programming (Spring 2019)/Problem Set: Week 2: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:29, 25 March 2019

This is general advice going forward but it makes sense to include it here: My advice is to start working through the programming challenges first. The programming challenges will only include material that we covered in the readings for the previous week.

If you're having trouble loading up your dataset (PC2) please find me or Jeremy for help asap because the other questions depend on doing this successfully.

Programming Challenges

PC0. Create a new project and RMarkdown script for this week's problem set.

PC1. Navigate to [1] and download the RData file in the week_02 subdirectory with your name associated with it.

PC2. Load that file into R. It should load up one variable. Find that variable!

PC3. Compute and present summary statistics for your variable. Be sure to include the minimum, maximum, mean, median, variance, standard deviation, and interquartile range.

PC4. Write your own functions in R to re-compute the mean and the median. Be ready to walk us through how your function works.

PC5. Create some visualizations of your dataset: at the very least, create a boxplot and histogram.

PC6. Some of you will have negative numbers. Whoops! Recode all negative numbers as missing (i.e. NA) in your dataset. Now compute a new mean and standard deviation. How does it change? (Hint: the mean() function may now produce an error. You have to include the argument na.rm=TRUE to work around this.)

PC7. Log transform your dataset. Create new histograms and boxplots, as well as new mean, median, and standard deviation.

PC8. Briefly discuss any important differences between the original data and the log-transformed data.

PC9. Save your work and archive the project (i.e., in a .zip file) and upload it to canvas.

Statistical Questions

Exercises from OpenIntro §2

Q0. Any questions or clarifications from the OpenIntro text or lecture notes?

Q1. Exercise 2.12 on kids missing school

Q2. Exercise 2.20 on "assortative mating"

Q3. Exercise 2.26 on twins (and conditional probability)

Q4. Exercise 2.32 on the birthday problem (This is a super famous problem! Don't look it up!)

Q5. Exercise 2.38 with the example of baggage fees

Q6. Exercise 2.44 on income and gender

Empirical Paper

Let's take a look at this (very dated!) paper which I published in graduate school:

Shaw, Aaron and Yochai Benkler. 2012. A tale of two blogospheres: Discursive practices on the left and right. American Behavioral Scientist. 56(4): 459-487. [available via NU libraries]

Read enough of the paper to get a sense for what it's about and to answer the questions below. Many of them refer to the top part of Table 5 (about the authorship of posts). Feel free to ignore all the other stuff that's not relevant.

EQ1 Identify (a) the population of interest and (b) the sample used in the study.

EQ2 Given that a blog in the dataset has a left perspective, what is the probability that it is "solo" authored?

EQ3 Given that a blog in the dataset is a "large-scale collaboration", what is the probability that it has a right perspective?

EQ4 In substantive terms, do these probabilities provide evidence that left wing blogs are more or less collaborative? Identify a reason to support your answer as well as reason to be skeptical.

EQ5 Given your answers to EQ1 and EQ4, do you think that your conclusion genereralizes from the sample to the population? Why or why not?

@@ Line 29: / Line 29: @@
 === Empirical Paper ===
-Let's take a look at this paper which is the second paper I published in graduate school (!):
+Let's take a look at this (very dated!) paper which I published in graduate school:
-:Buechley, Leah and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2010. “LilyPad in the Wild: How Hardware’s Long Tail Is Supporting New Engineering and Design Communities.” Pp. 199–207 in ''Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.'' Aarhus, Denmark: ACM. [[https://mako.cc/academic/buechley_hill_DIS_10.pdf PDF available on my personal website]]
+: Shaw, Aaron and Yochai Benkler. 2012. A tale of two blogospheres: Discursive practices on the left and right. American Behavioral Scientist. 56(4): 459-487. [[https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0002764211433793 available via NU libraries]]
-At the very least read enough of the paper to get a sense for what it's about and to understand Table 2 but we the questions here are all basically going to be drawn from that table. It might be expedient to read [https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/on-feminism-and-microcontrollers the blog post that I wrote about this]. Feel free to ignore all the stats or other stuff that's not relevant.
+Read enough of the paper to get a sense for what it's about and to answer the questions below. Many of them refer to the top part of Table 5 (about the authorship of posts). Feel free to ignore all the other stuff that's not relevant.
-Looking at data from the US, answer a few questions we ''didn't'' answer in the question but that seem like they might be interesting (I has basically only finished taking a class like this one at the time I wrote this this paper!)
-: '''Q7.''' Given that a US customer in the dataset has bought a LilyPad (either alone or in combination with a "normal" Arduino), what is the probability of that that they are female?
+: '''EQ1''' Identify (a) the population of interest and (b) the sample used in the study.
-: '''Q8.''' Given that a US customer in the dataset is female, what is the probability that they bought a LilyPad (either alone or in combination with a "normal" Arduino)?
+: '''EQ2''' Given that a blog in the dataset has a left perspective, what is the probability that it is "solo" authored?
-: '''Q9.''' In substantive terms, do these two numbers evidence of that the LilyPad design is successfully appealing to women? Ideally, you should be prepared to present at least one reason why and one one reason you might be skeptical.
+: '''EQ3''' Given that a blog in the dataset is a "large-scale collaboration", what is the probability that it has a right perspective?
+: '''EQ4''' In substantive terms, do these probabilities provide evidence that left wing blogs are more or less collaborative? Identify a reason to support your answer as well as reason to be skeptical.
+: '''EQ5''' Given your answers to EQ1 and EQ4, do you think that your conclusion genereralizes from the sample to the population? Why or why not?