MAT115: Math for Liberal Arts

For next time: read the article What's the Matter With Eastern Kentucky?, which was one of Mark's inspirations for this project.

1. Define a metric to measure a cereal's "goodness". One or two pages, typed, including instruction on how to use a nutrition label (and box, and anything else) to decide.
2. Choose an NKU classroom intervention that you'd like to investigate, and we'll break up into teams. Think of a couple of them that would interest you (hopefully we can get pairs of students to work together on this). We'll present our discoveries in class on Friday, 9/4.

Teams:

• Psychology and the hope metric (see Prof. Rachel Clark) -- Kara (and Kensey and Robin)
• Public art and Little Free Libraries -- Melody and Grace
• Income inequality -- Marisa and Alli
• Photography -- Betsy and Cassidy
• History -- Emily and Sandra

1. Contact Mark Neikirk, to get the contact info for your project;
2. Contact the person in charge. Find out:
   1. What did they do (or what are they doing): describe successes and failures
   2. What impact will/did their intervention have/had on 505?
   3. What can we learn from their project?
   4. What advice might they give us as we set off on our own project?

3. Write a two-page report (a group report). This should be very well-written.
4. You will present your discoveries in class on Friday, 9/4. Each of your groups will have 8 minutes for your presentation. This should be a formal presentation, as though you're presenting in a board room, in a public meeting, etc.

• How are people in Newport's Westside hurting or healthy?
• How can we measure the hurt or health?
• How can we compare Newport's Westside to other areas?

Type up and justify your work!

Read "The Enemy of My Enemy" (on-line), by Steven Strogatz.

which would mean Andy's first question. So give credit, then paste the question.

Following would be your description of why you chose this question.

You may not choose your own questions.

I need these by midnight, Thursday night, so that I can compile a list for the members of Burkhardt to consider when we get together on Friday morning. (due Thursday, midnight, 10/1).

• Please read this New York Times article about the lead in Newport.
• A more extensive exploration of the Woburn, MA case is at this website. I'd like you to visit and explore this website.

62     12    
89      4

62     12    
 4     89    

62     89    
 4     12    

1. Compute Moran's I for Median income in Newport, for 2000 and 1990. You will need to compute a "pseudo-532" (if you didn't do so in class), and get the other values off of Census Explorer. Use the same adjacency matrix we used for the 2013 data. Compare with the 2013 value. Show your work, but you may use my xlispstat code to do the calculations. That will make your life easy, but you may need to ask me for help -- feel free!
2. Now do the same for the variable "Owner Occupied". Will you compute the "pseudo-532" variable in the same way, given that it's a percentage, rather than a dollar figure?
3. Summarize all results in a table.
4. We saw that the spatial pattern that we expect gives rise to a Moran's I of 0 (if we use the data "1" for Westside, "-1" for Eastside (or, perhaps more truthfully, "not Westside"), and 0 for 532 (which is a bit of both).

   Discuss whether you believe we show any significant departure from a Moran's I of 0 in either variable (median income or owner occupied housing).

• please read this short website about lead pollution.
• Finish the work we start today and submit your data set -- physical locations and your estimated lead levels for the Newport Foundry location (due Wednesday, 11/11). Please submit these in electronic as well as paper form.

• Finish the work we start today on Newport and submit your data set -- physical locations and your estimated lead levels for the Newport Foundry location. Use the Grace/Sandra method if you wish, or create a method of your own (although indicate why you think it superior to the Grace/Sandra method).

• Find the physical locations of the USAToday samples, using our transparency grid, the map I gave you, and place the origin at the Newport Foundry site (aligned north/south -- or rather, with the right edge as vertical). Submit your coordinates electronically and in writing.

Please give me a one-page description of your plans (just so that I have something).

• Pascal's triangle
• Graphs
  • Simple Graphs (e.g. Facebook)
  • Weighted graphs (e.g. The Enemy of my Enemy)
  • PageRank (e.g. Google)

• Adjacency matrices
• Moran's I -- given the formula, how to calculate
• weighted averages -- how to calculate
• how to digitize coordinates -- need for an origin, need for a reference point.
• turning a lead soil depth core into a lead value with the GraceSandra method
• Understand the soil lead profile, and how the model can be used (e.g. for a solution to the lead problems by homogenizing soil). We also used the soil lead profile to obtain surface estimates for the foundry site.
• Turning USAToday lead values into a single estimate for a location as a weighted average.
• know the difference between a normal distribution and a long-tailed, non-normal distribution (and how a normal distribution is related to Pascal's triangle).
• Compute a z-score for the proportions of the Newport study.
• Know how to interpret a z-score for the proportions of the Newport study.