Mathapalooza and Citizen Statisticians

This Friday, I (Rob) had the honor of giving the same talk three times in a row at the Mathapalooza, held at one of the Austin City College campuses. The audience was mostly central-Texas area community college faculty.  Giving the same talk three times in a row can be tiring, but the professors were very engaged and  very involved and so I had fun.  The topic was ‘Educating Citizen Statisticians’, and I mentioned the need to do what it takes so that intro stats is the most important class students take in college.  Intro Stats should be most important because today’s students have access to data and to data analysis tools, and so have access to opportunities as never before.  And it should be most important because data privacy issues are of such importance and have the potential to do real harm to those who aren’t aware of these issues.

Some sites mentioned in the talk:

• Diary of a pizza girl

• newsmap.jp–the news as data

• http://www.visualizing.org/visualizations/twitterverse –visualizing the twitterverse

• factual.com–data aggregate

• freebase–social data aggregation, whatever that means

• scraperwiki—techs, tools for scraping data, and a community that can provide advice

• daytum–daily personal data collection site

• data.gov–repository of U.S. federal data and more

• Crime L.A. via L.A. Times http://crime.latimes.com/

• spokeo–otherwise known as spooky-o

• Google Data Liberation Front

• OpenPaths —a personal data storage locker for your location data

• The Guardian Data Blog — a great source for data. Check out their recent section on the Olympics

• Many Eyes–free data visualization from IBM

• Google Charts – data visualization tools

• Wordle – visualization tool for text data

• R – free, powerful, but steep learning curve.  But also see RStudio, which makes the interface a bit friendlier.  Or RCommander, if you want menu-driven.

• StatCrunch–a Pearson product.  Roughly $10/term, but bundled with Pearson textbooks, and so rates may vary.  Nice handling of html-data tables, twitter feed, facebook friends.

• Fathom –published by Key Curriculum. Also about $10/term. Randomly samples U.S. Census data, nice handling of html-data tables.  Probably the most intuitive of all statistical softwares.  Highly visual and tactile.

• SOCR – free data analysis tools and simulation “games”

• Did You Feel It? –Informal, participatory data gathering.

• CENS education—integrating censor technology into education

• Technology Innovations in Statistics Education — peer-reviewed e-journal.