Day 2, Mat115H

Announcements:
- Roll and some introductions
- Sis's is a nice "greasy spoon" in Census Tract 505, on Monmouth Street. It's also non-smoking, which is rather unusual. Would it be possible to meet there some morning?
3x5 cards: Please fill out the card, indicating
1. Name (that you want me to call you)
2. Hometown
3. What is your calling? ("a calling has to do with one's larger purpose, personhood, deepest values, and the gift one wishes to give the world.... A calling is about the use one makes of a career." David Orr, Earth in Mind)
4. What is your dream job?
5. What is something special about you?
Let's take a look at the syllabus, before we begin.
Mr. Mark Neikirk (executive director of the Scripps Howard Center for Civic Engagement at Northern Kentucky University) presented last time. Let's recap and think about some of the things he brought forward:
- Could someone give us their recap of the history of 505 (or the West End of Newport)?
- Can you paraphrase his objective? What is our mission?
- What were the two different types of interactions he described between classes here at NKU and the community?
- How does NKU's continued intervention impact our mission?
- Mr. Neikirk asked two intriguing questions:
  1. How can we use county data to learn something about tracts?
  2. Does poverty look the same wherever we look at it?
Let's take a look at the info Mr. Neikirk provided:
- Map of Census Tract 505
- Fast Facts: Census tract 505
- American Community Survey 2007-2011, Table S1401
Today we'll do an exercise designed to get you thinking about how to carry out our mission. It's kind of a silly analogue, but let's think about breakfast cereals.
Given five different cereals: how do we decide which is worst? or best?
Steps:
1. Define terms
2. Weight variables
3. Normalize
4. Define measure (consider deviations from mean, say)
For next time: read the article What's the Matter With Eastern Kentucky?, which was one of Mark's inspirations for this project.

Links:

Tract 505 ACS 2006-2010 census Profiles
Map showing Census Tract 505
Google Earth map of the tracts of Kentucky (505 is number 27302)

Website maintained by Andy Long. Comments appreciated.