Instruction
will require you to find data that are of interest. You will use these data along with statistical analyses that you’ve mastered to make an argument. An example of an argument is, “Children are better off now than they were 10 years ago,” or “Cities should convert the core of their downtown area to pedestrian only.” If you were going to try to make that argument, you would find data that supported your argument, analyze it appropriately and present your results in a paper. A large part of this assignment is finding data that will provide support for an interesting argument. This report will focus on your interesting results and not your data analytic odyssey. An excellent report will look professional, use appropriate language, grammar, charts, graphs, and provide a minimal but essential amount of statistical text so that the interested reader with the same amount of statistical training as you can understand the data or at least your snapshot of it. You will also need to read the reports presented by all of your fellow students, and comment on them to me. A sufficiently high level of performance will include both creating a very good report and providing very good comments on the reports presented by your fellow students. A set of very good comments will note all of the relevant deficiencies in the other reports, with the easiest method of remediating that deficiency if it is minor. Good comments restrict themselves to deficiencies in the report, and do not make judgments about the writer of the report.