Due to unforeseen circumstances, class was canceled today.  Everyone should have received an email to this effect yesterday.  Monday is Memorial Day, and the University will be closed.  So our next class will be on Tuesday, June 1.

Our first test will be postponed until Wednesday, June 2.  I will provide a lot of review of the material before th

Your homework for Tuesday is to duplicate what we did in class in finding and starting to analyze data from the internet.

In other words, you will find another dataset to copy into Excel and do a bit of analysis on it.

The steps of the assignment are the same as what we did in class.  Don't send me your Excel spreadsheet -- just bring it to class saved on your USB flash drive on Tuesday. 

Use the form linked here to complete the assignment.  If you encounter difficulties, feel free to email me.  Try your best to complete all of the steps.  If you have difficulties that you can't resolve, we can resolve them on Tuesday.

Make sure the data follow the criteria that I have specified: cases in the rows, and variables in the columns.  Your dataset should contain at least three variables.  The dataset should contain at least two types of variables among the three that we have discussed: nominal, ordinal and interval.

When you're ready, click the link above to get started. 

Today, you will become more familiar with your data by answering these questions, and then writing up a brief summary report about your data.  Ultimately, the goal is to use your data to tell a story. 

Once you have answered the questions, you can see your answers as well as the answers of your classmates here.

Your report should be written in a separate sheet in the same Excel spreadsheet where you saved your data. The report should include:

1. Central tendencies.  A summary of two your variables, using mean, median or mode.  Justify your choice of one of those three measures of central tendency.  Write a sentence summarizing what you found.  Write another sentence that interprets the finding.

2. Frequency distributions.  Create a frequency distribution for two variables of your choice.  Use the book and my help to do this. 

3. Create bar charts based on the frequency distributions.  For each, write a several sentence description of the distribution.  We'll talk about this.

Today we are going to work on an assignment that will help familiarize you with data formats, variables and a few basic statistics.

We are going to do some internet research.  There is a tremendous amount of data available on the internet. Pick a topic of interest to you. You can pick any topic, as long as it is interesting to you. 

 Now, I would like you to find a data set related to your chosen topic on the internet.  You must pick a data set that includes at least the following:

* 30 cases
* one nominal-level variable
* one ordinal-level variable
* one interval-level variable

I will show you how to copy and paste this data into Excel.  From there, you will obtain sums, means, medians and modes.  After that, I will show you how to import the data into SPSS and obtain the same numbers in that program.

Check this website for all information about the course.  By tomorrow, everyone should have a copy of the textbook for the course, Statistics for People Who (Think They) hate Statistics.  In addition, I require to have a USB flash drive that you bring with you to class everyday.  We will be using data sets in this class that you will need to store.