Here is my attempt at an excel flowchart. The wording of Matic's grade system didn't give people with scores of 45 or 90 a grade, so I hope my interpretation is okay... Also here is a fun graph from The church of the flying spaghetti monster which shows how you can find supposed relationships where they don't really exist.... Sorry spaghetti monster!

I thought the lab on linear regression was interesting. It was a lot of work doing the algorithms "by hand" so it was a relief to find out there are simple Excel commands to do the job, as well as an easy way of creating a whole page of regression analysis statistics. I thought it would be fun to search the web and find statistics to create my own regression charts with facts slightly more interesting than shoe sizes, so here are a few.
First, I looked to see if how much a person weighs can possibly effect how they vote. I did so on a state-by-state basis comparing % of people considered obese with % of people who voted for Bush in 2004. Here is the chart I came up with..

This chart seems to show a correlation with living in a state with a high obesity rate and living in a state that supports Bush. This brought to mind the stereo-typical overweight businessman in a suit, possibly smoking a cigar, getting into a big shiny car with a "Support Bush" bumper sticker. So I decided to see if the correlation could be due to these highly successful educated folk who can afford a big steak now and again. Maybe these people drive up both the education levels and obesity levels of their states. So I next charted obesity levels with the percentage of people over age 25 with at least a bachelor's degree, per state.

As you can see the above chart disproves the educated large businessman theory as obesity also seems to be correlated with having a lower level of education. Perhaps uneducated people are only able to afford fast food, or are not aware of its effects. I can only speculate.. Maybe it would be interesting to conduct an exit poll of people leaving McDonalds to see who they voted for in the last election..

Another interesting thing I came across when making these charts was the effects of an anomaly. I originally in error left in Washington DC as a state in the 2nd chart. The level of education there is way higher than the highest state. This fact in combination with an average level of obesity flattened the trend line drastically for the entire chart, there almost appeared to be no correlation. This would have been a good example of how people in the media and government can play around with charts and stats to distort perceptions to their advantage. But unfortunately I deleted the chart and now have to get back to work on my Individual Installment also due today...

A final note, if anyone actually reads this post, and does not like the facts presented on the charts, remember you also have the tools learned in lab to create your own charts to discredit my charts. :))

Here is a link to a BIGGER VERSION of this chart. It was taking over my entire blog at the original size...

Thoughts on the reading..
I found Andy Clark's chapter on Global Swarming to be interesting. It is interesting how links between webpages, rather than just the content itself is being used in search engines and so forth. Also, I found interesting the concept of "highlighting" much used areas, and the problem that this could pose as people are drawn a less desirable area, which was perhaps highlighted by mistake after a few random hits. Maybe a bunch of people were instructed to go there for a college course, as an example of a bad source of information. They are told to pay particular attention to a very misleading detail. Other people might then go there for the mere reason that the site, particularly the misleading detail, are indeed highlighted. These new people thus make the area remain highlighted and possibly even cause it to obtain some greater level of highlightedness. This pattern follows the real life patterns of movies or books that are not very good, but get ranked highly on a list because of some sort of initial hype. Then people who do not examine closely, perhaps do not read reviews, might go to the movie or buy the book based merely on its position on a list, only to be disappointed, but in the same time having strengthened its ranking. Perhaps, some sort of ranking devised in the viewing of a website, etc, of a likeminded person, as we saw in the Amazon example of book recommendations would be better suited than the highlighting method..

Notes on Unix Commands

I found the Unix commands to be simple to understand and easy to use. Also, I liked the black on white format, it somehow seemed less mysterious than DOS through command post. Here are a few of the commands we learned and their DOS and Windows counterparts.

FUNCTION	Unix	Dos	Windows
change directory	cd directory name	cd file name	click on icon of desired folder
view contents of current directory	ls	dir	double click on its folder icon
remove a directory	rmdir directoryname	deltree foldername	right click on folder icon, then choose "delete"
remove a file	rm filename	del foldername	right click on name of file, then choose "delete"

I haven't posted anything in awhile so I'm going to do a quick post. Here is the link to the home page I did for last week's assignment. http://www.msu.edu/~coond/terri/home.html I like the modeling we've been doing in class, with the flocking and plant growth simulations. I decided my eight year old son would really like this class, watching Lion King and doing Star Wars html assignments! Plus, in my Children's Literature class before Wednesday's lecture we watched a pretty long scene from Harry Potter. All of this is right up his alley! I think the picture says it all...

I enjoyed Monday's lecture, particularily the part about the early home computers. My dad had a model I TRS-80, so I was disappointed it "didn't make the history books". I'd like to include a picture of ME with the old TRS-80, but my parents are in Arizona for the cold months, so I'll have to wait until Spring to see if they can dig any up. But meanwhile, here's a picture I found online..
I peeked ahead at the first installation of the individual project, and must admit I find the Black Box to be perplexing! But I guess we'll learn more tomorrow..

I liked the intro to Andy Clark's Natural Born Cyborg chapter describing his visit to the Black Hole (even before I found it was Prof Rocha who took him there!!)So here is a link to the Black Hole website. In case you are too busy to check out this link here is a picture of one of the big chunky techno type machines he mentions in his intro..
Further along in the reading he writes of the "wearable remembrance agent" giving a detailed description of its usage. I found this to be a little disturbing, not just because of the traceability of ones movements, but also in what it could do to one's brain. If we don't use the connections in our brains they can shut down on us. For example, I have a son who has horrendous vision in one eye and perfect in the other. If left unattended the brain could opt just to use the good eye, possibly eventually causing the connection to the bad eye to shut down.

This isn't his normal eye patch!!!!!

Luckily the problem was discovered, and he wears a patch a few hours a day over the good eye in order to keep the connection between the bad eye and the brain active. It seems that having two memory systems, the virtual RA system and the actual brain might not be the best idea. Perhaps the brain's connection to its own memory reserves would weaken as it went unused.

Out of fairness, I am including a picture of my other son, alongside his hero..

don't forget to visit infoport
2 quick questions for the instructors: why isn't my colspan working in the bottom table??? why are there large breaks before the tops of my tables???? only answer if it's not too much of a hassle to scour my code!! thanks!!