Textbook 00 Preface

Preface

We all walk in an almost invisible sea of data. I walked into a school fair and noticed a jump rope contest. The number of jumps for each jumper until they fouled out was being recorded on the wall. Numbers. With a mode, median, mean, and standard deviation. Then I noticed that faster jumpers attained higher jump counts than slower jumpers. I saw that I could begin to predict jump counts based on the starting rhythm of the jumper. I used my stopwatch to record the time and total jump count. I later find that a linear correlation does exist, and I am able to show by a t-test that the faster jumpers have statistically significantly higher jump counts. I later incorporated this data into the fall 2007 final.

I walked into a store back in 2003 and noticed that Yamasa™ soy sauce appeared to cost more than Kikkoman™ soy sauce. I recorded Yamasa and Kikkoman soy sauce prices and volumes, working out the cost per milliliter. I eventually showed that the mean price per milliliter for Yamasa was significantly higher than Kikkoman. I also ran a survey of students and determined that the college students prefer Kikkoman to Yamasa.

As a child my son liked articulated mining dump trucks. I found pictures of Terex™ dump trucks on the Internet. I wrote to Terex in Scotland and asked them about how the prices vary for the dump trucks, explaining that I teach statistics and thought that I might be able to use the data in class. "Funny you should ask," a Terex sales representative replied in writing. "The dump trucks are basically priced by a linear relationship between horsepower and price." The representative included a complete list of horsepower and price Terex articulated dump trucks.

One term I learned that a new Cascading Style Sheets level 3 color specification for hue, luminosity, and luminance had been released for HyperText Markup Language web pages. The hues were based on a color wheel with cyan at the 180° middle of the wheel. I knew that Newton had put green in the middle of the red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet rainbow, but green is at 120° on a hue color wheel. Green is not the middle of the hue color wheel. And there is no cyan in Newton's rainbow. Could the middle of the rainbow actually be at 180° cyan, or was Newton correct to say the middle of the rainbow is at 120° green? I used a hue analysis tool to analyze the image of an actual rainbow taken by a digital camera here on Pohnpei. This allowed an analysis of the hue angle at the center of the rainbow.

While researching sakau consumption in markets here on Pohnpei I found differences in means between markets, and I found a variation with distance from Kolonia. This implied a relationship between the strength of sakau and the distance from the centrally located town of Kolonia. I asked some of the markets to share their cup tally sheets with me, and a number of the markets obliged. The sakau data suggested that sakau strength was related to the distance from Kolonia.

The point is that we are surrounded by data. You might not go into statistics professionally, yet you will always live in a world filled with data. During this course my hope is that you experience an awareness of the data around you. 

Data flows all around you.
A sea of data pours past your senses daily.
A world of data and numbers.
Watch for numbers to happen around you.
See the matrix.