Exploring Data

 Milestone

For this milestone, we've taken a random sample from the year 2000 US census of individuals who filled out the long-form and live in a city near you. Or so we hope. In any case, most of those in the INSPIRE course have their own city or a nearby city (or at least the State) represented in this database.

What do the data tell us about these people selected from the 2000 census?

You may want to focus on one variable, such as, age, total personal income, or travel time and then compare 2 or more groups with respect to that variable or attribute.

For example, do woman live longer than men? Do the proportion of school age students (ages 5 to 18) differ for selected states or cities? Is income related to marital status? Is income related to location? Do men spend more time traveling to work than women? Is travel time related to location?

Remember when you describe a distribution, you want to discuss its shape, center, spread, and any unusual features. You want to support your observations with appropriate plots and summary tables. It is more important to focus on one interesting aspect of the data’s story than a long laundry list of summarized variables.

You can download the data by:

1) make sure you are connected to the internet

2) Start Fathom

3) Under the menu, choose File --> Import from URL

4) Type http://inspire.stat.ucla.edu/unit_01/milestone1.txt into the dialog box.

Note that there is an underscore "_" between "unit" and "01".

Once the data have been uploaded into Fathom, we recommend that you save the file so that you will not have to download it again.

Write up your summary in a Word file (or other word processor). Name it ms1yourlastname.doc and drop it in the Digital Drop Box.

Have fun!