As the final project for DCS 204 approaches, I am looking for ways that data can be used to move Bates College forwards. As such, I think it would be a great idea to look at the results of the recent sustainable energy movement and the impact of Bates becoming carbon neutral. By looking at… Continue reading Reflection 10

Thinking forwards to the final project for DCS 204, there are a few questions that are worth asking to ensure that the project fits an equitable frame that avoids lying through omission and appropriately represents the overarching arguments and ideas that the project aims to express. Q: What are the main arguments and ideas I… Continue reading Reflection 9

In lab 8, we used the chi-square test to hypothesize the independence of gender and literacy, and of household value and donation size. To visualize the differences between our categorical data, we can posit our data into a tables. Gender vs. Literacy id_m id_f literate_y 37 10 literate_n 0 1 Gender vs. Literacy table shows… Continue reading Reflection 8

R can be used to calculate, analyze and visualize correlations in the Bates Mill Co. Financials data that we collected as a class. Existing functions in R like plot(x,y) and cor(x,y) are extremely helpful in this process. The function plot(x,y), takes two columns of a data frame and plots the rows against each other on… Continue reading Reflection 7

At around the midway point in the semester, I think DCS 204 has been going pretty well. In retrospect, there has been more reading but less programming than I had expected and I’m not sure if this is a point that to advocate or to hold in contention. Personally, I would like to get more… Continue reading Reflection 6

I enjoyed thinking about the Human-Centered Design exercise. It’s my opinion that Human-Centered Design is key to creating a comprehensible and accessible UI. This is likely due to the concept that at its roots, UI is meant for people, and paring down the complexities of UI back to this core concept advocates intuitive design. Furthermore… Continue reading Reflection 5

In our Lab 4 comparison of donation amounts from step 42, we compared the amount of money donated by benefactors named Daniel, and benefactors not named Daniel. When we ran our t-test: [213] Welch Two Sample t-test data: daniel_donations and not_daniel_donations t = -3.877, df = 22.777, p-value = 0.000774 alternative hypothesis: true difference in… Continue reading Reflection 4

Yuhao and I made a histogram of the time that it would have taken in days for enslaved African-Americans to pick a bale of cotton, based on the average weight of cotton bales in our data. Assuming that roughly 150 pounds could be picked in one day, we were able to determine the amount of… Continue reading Reflection 3

On Thursday, September 16th, our class visited the Muskie Archives to take a look at some of the financial history of Bates College. This was a good preview of the data that we will be working with in DCS-204 and insightful into how that data is read. The logs inform of who donated when and… Continue reading Reflection 2

Before taking Archives, Data and Analysis (DCS 204) at Bates College, I have had a bit of a scattered but enjoyable education in coding. I started in High School with ROBOTC, from writing code that would allow simple robots to drive forwards based on conditions like feedback from a light-sensor to writing code that would… Continue reading Reflection 1