Day 1
- Set up week 11 notes. Make sure week 9 and 10 notes are shared properly so Mark can grade them (many groups forgot to do this last week).
- Since the rain gauge data is not yet ready to do much with, we want to continue working on the climate data that we looked at briefly last week. The data set in question provides global average temperatures for every month between 1880 and 2006. What have you heard about global temperatures in that time frame? Probably something about temperatures getting warmer -- there's some controversy about that, about whether the apparent temperature changes are real, and if they are real, whether they are significant. And there's a separate controversy about what precisely we should do about it assuming they are real and significant. This data set is about the "Is it real?" question.
The difficulty with large data sets is that it isn't always clear how to get a useful and true story out of them. Lots of data gives you lots of details. Some of those details matter, others don't. Sometimes averages are useful, sometimes they are misleading. Sometimes a graph is what you want, sometimes a graph will be too confusing.
You have to do a lot of back and forth with big data sets to figure out what they are telling you. We're going to start with this data set by asking a simple question: Can you predict whether next year will be warmer or colder than this year? You can get a sense of this by picking years at random from the large sample, then checking whether the following year was warmer or colder.
More questions and background are in the linked Google document -- you should work through these suggestions in your notes.
The data you need is in the linked spreadsheet.
And here's a sample graph:
Day 2
Veteran's Day Holiday
Day 3
Today we continued working on the questions about the 1880 - 2006 global climate data set. Your notes should reflect the topics you were working on today.
Day 4
Quiz6Week11 covering significant digits, interpreting graphs, and using slopes and rates to make predictions. The quiz took the whole class period.
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