Book Discussion (Introduction- chapter 3)

Posted by Ananda Knight in Statistics - Miles - B on

  • Group members present during the discussion?

  • Taylor Ximines, Tsion Habtamu, Tyikenyua Anthony, Ananda Knight

  • What your club discussed?

  • Our club the introduction of the book up until chapter 3.

  • How you discussed it?

  • We started out discussing what each chapter was about and what we got from it. We were able to make connections with the book and our personal lives as well as school assignments that we could relate to what we read. Each of us took turns stating our opinions of what we read, using quotes from the book to support our understandings.  

  • Any points of conflict/disagreement in discussion?

  • No. For the most part every part of the book that we have read thus far we have all agreed on what the book was saying and how we interpreted it.

  • Questions that came up as a result of the discussion?

  • After reading the first three chapters we all are wondering what other statistical tools can be used to deceive people. So for the next few podcast the question of ways to not lie with statistics will be present.

Podcast :

Comments (2)

Mark Miles (Teacher)
Mark Miles

When discussing chapters 3, 5, or 6, incorporate the following article into your discussion:

http://gizmodo.com/how-to-lie-with-data-visualization-1563576606

Also, each member of your group should find an article online containing a misleading graph and discuss it during the podcast (be sure to talk about why it’s misleading!). Be sure to include a link to all articles in the text of your post of the podcast that corresponds to chapters 3, 5, or 6.

Mark Miles (Teacher)
Mark Miles

Please make sure to update this post with your podcast in the near future. You had a lot of interesting things to say in your discussion, but it didn't sound like a natural discussion. It sounded like most of you were reading from a script and not really listening/responding to one another (and sometimes not really understanding what you yourselves were saying/reading). Still, there was a lot of good comments. For your next podcast, please respond to the following prompts:

  1. Choose one of the quotations inside the front cover and discuss how it relates to the Introduction.
  2. Put the second paragraph on Page 18 (“A river cannot….”) into your own words.
  3. What is the advantage of a stratified random sample and what difficulties does it pose, according to chapter 1?
  4. Which kind of “average” (statisticians call all three “measures of central tendency”) would give me the best way to compare the performance of two classes of a required math course? Why?