Three parts to today’s class.

Really just two – the first was reneging on my promise to go over Exercise 7.13 (Lahey Clinic heart care statistics).

Next – continued Excel work from the last class, computing mode, mean and median from the data used to build a histogram. The details, step by step, are in the book. The exercise has two goals. The first, and less important one, is to understand how to do the computations. That’s a good way to know that you understand those kinds of averages. The second, more important goal is to understand and appreciate the power of Excel’s ability to guess what you want to do when you copy a formula from one cell to another, namely, to change the cell references.

Then – data visualization. That’s switching from the production to the consumption of visual interpretations of data. The corresponding section in the book is just a stub. I spent some time on the web, looking for good examples:  first the billion dollar-o-gram. Then I googled data visualization and visited 50 Great Examples, which turned out to be less useful than I’d hoped. I finished with a quick trip to junk charts.

For homework I’ve asked them to find and write about one good and one bad data visualization example. I’ll use the results to help me write that section of the book.

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