Unit 3 Stage 4 efficiency

• What surprised you about programming with such a small set of basic commands?
• That I could still finish that assignment with time  to spare in class.
• Were you able to be creative with such a limited set of tools?
• No, not really especially since I was limited to one color and only straight lines. 
• What was most frustrating about this activity? If you could add one additional simple command, what would it be, and why?
• The fact that there was no right turn made the code a lot longer and more tedious than it should have been so I would have wanted to have a right turn command. 

• Draw (on paper) the simplest image you can that we would be unable to create with our “building block” commands, and explain why it would be impossible to create.
  • A circle, a curvy line. 
• Draw a second image we would be unable to create with the given simple commands, but for a different limiting reason than you cited in the first drawing
• A rainbow because it needs colors. 

Minimum Card Algorithm

• How do you know when to stop?
• We have an end statement where if you get the lowest card possible or have gone through the entire set you stop.
• Do your instructions state where and how to start?
• Yes, it says to put down cards and start with two new cards. 
• Is it clear where to put cards back down after you’ve picked them up?
• Yes, put them back in the same position and take a new card. 
• As we look at these algorithms you came up with, we can see they are not all the same. However, there are common things that you are all making the human machine do and commonalities in some of your instructions. Can we define a language of common Human Machine commands for moving cards around? What are the commands or actions most of these instructions have in common?
• Yes, most of them say to start in a certain place after putting the cards in a line. All of them should define the face cards and the Ace. Pick up, put down, move left, move right, move up, move down, flip over. 

Unit 3 Day 1

• • “Were you always able to create the intended arrangement? Were your instructions as clear as you thought?”
  • No, some people (Alex) got confused by what I thought were pretty clear steps. I thought that certain points like if the wheels were inside or outside were self-explanatory from the instructions.
  • “Why do you think we are running into these miscommunications? Is it really the fault of your classmates or is something else going on?”
  • We ran into these miscommunications because I had the product in mind already and thought that my instructions were clear but for people who had never seen the product it was not as clear.
  • If we were going to change human language to improve our odds of succeeding at this activity, what types of changes would we need to make?
  • Add images with color to provide a visual, add a last step that shows or describes the product.
  
  
  
  

Data Visualization

Do you have to use a computer to create a data visualization? What are some reasons that you need to use a computer to manipulate data?

• I think that you do not need to use a computer to represent data seeing as people have been representing information in written format for hundreds of years. However, computers make the job of representing and manipulating data simple and more efficient than it has ever been. To change things like add lines or take away data points or transfer the visual format can be done easily with computers, and was otherwise hard and time consuming. 

Unti 2 Lesson 13

In order to analyze data with a computer, we need to clean the data first. Based on your experience today, would you say that data analysis is a perfectly objective process? Why or why not?

No it is not objective because the results of the data analysis can still be manipulated by the analyzer and all people are subjective and have biases. 

Information, Knowledge, Data

• What is the relationship between data, information, and knowledge? 
• Data is proven facts based on real world occurrences. Knowledge is the thoughts and understandings of people, everyone has different level and variety of knowledge. Information is the in between, it is the commonalities of facts that all or most people share. So, information and data and knowledge are all based on facts, but they range in accuracy and commonality. 
• What are the best ways to find, see, and extract meaningful trends and patterns from raw data?
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• Where and how does human bias affect the collection, processing, and interpretation of data?
• Often times people say that statisticians create the results that they want to see. This is because there are so many ways to manipulate and interpret data. Human bias in this way dictates the results of data. 

Present your Data

1. I chose to visualize the college ranking data that shows top public and private colleges. The list portrays 300 school of all different locations, tuition costs, and acceptance rates.
2. There is a positive correlation found in the amount of need based aid school give and their retention rate. This shows how certain school have the ability to give more need based aid and therefor students attend the college for longer periods of time. This makes sense because the more expensive a school is the more certain people might have to graduate early or drop out.
3. As I began to explain before school that offer more aid especially for students that have needs for aid have a tendency for students to stay in their college for longer. This makes sense because if students economic pressures to drop school or attend less school years of school they do not have enough aid, but with more aid comes less worries regarding finances. This leads to an overall greater attendance for longer periods of time.