Plan: Term paper consultations (particularly spreadsheet help). Questions. False positives. Course evaluations.
I showed several students (individually) how they might arrange their data in Excel to support conclusions in the text of their papers – rather than doing the arithmetic on the fly in the text.
We discussed false positives in several instances: terrorist screening, pregnancy tests, plagiarism detection. When asked about a perfect test all said it had to find all the baddies. It was harder to lead them to see that accusing innocents was a less than perfect thing to do. We did some made up numerical examples.
As has been happening more and more often lately, I think more learning happens with these kinds of qualitative arguments than with particular examples, even with real data.
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