Day 3, Mat115H

Announcements:
- Roll
- Back to Sis's (that nice, non-smoking, "greasy spoon" in Census Tract 505, on Monmouth Street): I'll pass around a sheet, asking for your availability MWF -- to see if we could find a time when most of us could meet there.
  Indicate on the sheet if you have any issues, either before or after that we need to consider. I could get there earlier, and stay a little later; maybe we'll have to all overlap around 9:30...
Last time we agreed that "hope" was a particular focus of Mr. Neikirk's objective, and we came to a number of important conclusions/observations:
- There are several things we might like to do: discover
  1. if,
  2. when, and
  3. why
  "hope was lost" in 505;
- Decide how (or if) we should intervene -- do we immerse ourselves in 505, or stand outside as observers, and possibly probe and make suggestions;
- Finally (and perhaps the most important) observation is this: we can't measure hope. "Hope" is too complicated, varies by individual, etc. The best we can do is find and measure a surrogate, or proxy, for hope.
  Simon and Garfunkel have something to say about this.
  We talked about the possibility of using surveys to measure this proxy. We also have Census data we can use, and, as Mr. Neikirk mentioned, we could collect other data for our measure.
  1. If this has been already been done (to our satisfaction) at some time in the past, then we could consider re-evaluating the proxy, to determine if there has been any change over time; if not, then
  2. we might calculate our proxy value(s), to establish a baseline for future studies.
- Any additions/subtractions from last time?
There were a few questions (or concerns) I had left over from Mr. Neikirk's presentation:
- How does NKU's continued intervention impact our mission? (We're studying something that is dynamic, and perhaps even intervening as we go.)
- 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?
The second of these two questions relates to the article I asked you to read for today: What's the Matter With Eastern Kentucky?, which was one of Mark's inspirations for this project. I've marked it up a bit to emphasize some points.
Let's take another look at the info Mr. Neikirk provided. We started last time, by taking a peek at the fast facts; but we didn't check out the Factfinder stuff, and there's an important reason for doing so:
- 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. I'll have you carry this over as a homework assignment for Monday (see the assignment sheet).
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: we need to do some investigative reporting. Please consider which of the NKU interventions you want to dig into, to get more information so that we get further guidance on how to proceed. You might consider these five
- Psychology and the hope metric (see Prof. Rachel Clark)
- Nursing and public health surveys in 505.
- Art and architecture (e.g. sculpture, photography) interventions,
- Construction (and infrastructure rehabilitation), with Habitat for Humanity.
- History: check into the history that has been written so far on Westside.
or any others on the list of NKU "classroom connections" on the handout that I'll give you.

Some Links:

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