Benjamin Paxton Salzer

The most important takeaway from this course is that data is everywhere. In addition to needing to understand how to manipulate and analyze data in any type of career, it is equally important to understand how to spot bad data visualizations and the like in our everyday lives when we look at social media and television. It is often important, both…[Read more]

A data driven service I use frequently is Netflix. The rows would be the shows and movies I watch while the columns may be number of seasons watched (if a tv show), number of minutes spent watching the tv show or movie, how long I browsed before choosing that tv show or movie, whether or not I have watched the tv show or movie before, the way I…[Read more]

The amount of invoices I process in a certain work period is a good KPI
Specific – Many invoices are similar and therefore it is a specific task
Measurable – A simple numerical count of invoices processed
Achievable – I have a number in my head (about 15 invoices an hour) that I can reach
Relevant – Since I work in accounts payable it is vital…[Read more]

I have not made any of these mistakes before but I believe that #6 would have the most impact since it is quite tricky to catch when dates are integers or integers have dates when you have a huge data set. You would have to implement clearly defined columns and know the data that you are working with very well in order to avoid this type of mistake.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/unc-duke-really-is-college-basketballs-best-rivalry/
As a huge fan of college basketball (and a good friend who is a crazy duke basketball fan) this article was very interesting because it was able to quantify something that many people only judge qualitatively: a rivalry. While it is very easy to just throw…[Read more]

The most important principle is to be skeptical about the data that you create and the data that you see. Too often in the media portrays infographics that are clearly trying to get the audience to believe their viewpoint of the data. This however, is not the entire story. Sometimes the data is misleading (like making some numbers much larger than…[Read more]

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-lines.html

Good Visualization (Ben, Chris, Jessica)

The industry that has most been affected (either positively or negatively) by big data is the sporting industry. Not only has the data enabled teams to more accurately evaluate their own players and opponents, but has also allowed the networks who put the games on television the viewing data to maximize their profits with advertisements. In…[Read more]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-could-really-mess-up-mexicos-economy/

This article is very interesting to me because it breaks down the economic impact that the Trump presidency could have on the Mexican economy due to his proposed trade restrictions. As economists have known for hundreds of years, trade between countries helps both…[Read more]

Conventional wisdom states that the smarter you are (IQ wise) the better you will do in school. I would collect the IQ’s and GPA’s of a random sample of students in a collection of high school’s from around the country. I would then run a regression analysis to find the correlation between IQ and GPA. Although correlation just tells whether or not…[Read more]