- Did anyone attend?
CINSAM Seminar Series
Thusday, 12:30-1:30 p.m., Griffin Hall 250
CINSAM Seminar Series presents "Exploring soil contamination in Newport, KY: Environmental Science & Journalism students dig deep to uncover the source." Interested in environmental science? Journalism? Science communication? Local issues? Come hear about how NKU faculty and students from different departments have worked together to learn more about the soil contamination problems in Newport, and what've been doing to inform the community.
- Nine of you submitted proposals for the survey. Your homework for next Wednesday: pick your two favorite proposals (citing them by name and author). Describe what you like about them. Synthesize your own final proposal for the complete survey, based on them (and perhaps others that you liked).
Question of the Day (cont.):
-
The graph of Newport census tracts is a simple graph, and just
one of many with seven vertices (one for each of the tracts
501, 504, 505, 506, 532, 524, and 525).
Here's the adjacency matrix (rook) that I get using my maps, and these 7 tracts of Newport:
501 504 505 506 524 525 532 501 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 504 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 505 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 506 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 524 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 525 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 532 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 - Today we're going to continue talking spatial statistics,
and how they are used and defined. Last time you played my
"spatial autocorrelation game".
- A more extensive exploration of the Woburn situation is at this
website. I'd like to start with a few things from that today.
The New York Times yesterday had an article on Lead poisoning in Flint, MI.
If you got deep into the on-line resource, you might have gone to the EPA website to see contaminant levels and action levels (e.g. lead, action level of .015). Also the health consequences: "Infants and children: Delays in physical or mental development; children could show slight deficits in attention span and learning abilities
Adults: Kidney problems; high blood pressureIn another page, "the key question about whether 12 leukemia cases in a 15-year period was unusual remained unanswered."
- Some spatial statistics are used to measure
clustering: Spatial
Autocorrelation game
- What is Moran's I (we can get there via the Stat Advisor)?
- The objective of Moran's I is to detect departures from spatial randomness.
- From the example: "In the absence of more detailed knowledge areas are often connected based on geographic adjacency. Two areas, i and j, are assigned a weight of 1 when they share a common border. Otherwise they are assigned a weight of 0. The alternative spatial model under this simple scheme states that rates in spatially contiguous areas are correlated. This is a reasonable model to use when you are interested in detecting contiguous areas with similar disease rates."
- If the populations of the census tracts are considerably different, we might consider using Ipop, which is Moran's I fine-tuned for a case where the population sizes are vastly different.
- Let's do the sample calculation:
- Now I want to spend a little time talking about what's next:
- We calculate some statistics (Moran's I), for different measures of poverty or well-being or ....
- We need to decide if these are unusual, or the result of randomness
- We compare against a distribution, obtained by simulation. Let me describe what that will entail, using an example from our class: What's the chance that we have an honors class of 12 signed up of all women?