Month: September 2025

Another Monday! Today in class we got to see some of what people have been working on and finding. Nicole presented about her findings.

Wednesday’s class was supposed to be focused on R and RStudio. Using the introduction to R page we were supposed to try playing around in the program.

Today starts with spurious correlations. We are looking at various graphs that have two variables that are seemingly entirely unrelated, but their data appears similarly within a single graph. Tyler Vigen spurious correlation page uses AI a lot to write papers based off the data it presents.

Starting off with a webpage update since not everyone had their latest post showing first. Then onto the “Software application notes” from page 18. It has an introduction for various programs that we can use to look at and analyze data in this course. “The easiest way to learn is to start by doing it.”

Wednesday’s class we were supposed to start using Mathematica, but a lot of the computers don’t have it working because the wifi or other issues. But I was able to download it to my laptop so I will be trying to get things started on my end. I have also downloaded R and R Studio to my laptop as well. I believe one program was more user friendly while the other had more capabilities. As I have never used either before, I am going in with no prior knowledge for either.

The plan for Friday’s class was to use Mathematica to go over Samuel’s question about body cams. As we currently don’t have access because the student subscription has expired, the plan has been adjusted. Looking at the data from the table and doing a T-test to compare the means of the data. I would like to start using R and R studio to try and see its capability in understanding the data better.

On Monday, we talked about histograms and how to read data from them. The y-axis on the one we looked at was the percentage of ages in each “bucket” as Dr.D put it. This makes it so that the data is easy to compare from a second one. If there was a lot of overlap or very little, both are easily observable.

Task for Wednesday’s class is to come up with a question and email it. My question: is there a correlation between race and the “armed with” category? From this question there was other correlations that I got curious about. From the columns; threat_type, flee_status, and armed_with is there a correlation between theses three or even two of three if there’s any trend to notice. 

This Friday, we’ve discussed the difference between states and counties. Not every county has had a shooting in it as there are plenty of counties per state and the area as well as the population size of them varies. I enjoyed seeing Nicole’s graph and hearing she wants to focus more on the counties that had the most shootings.