Salary Dots

From Flowing Data, an interactive dotplot showing the distribution of annual salaries in various fields. Selections can be made for the 1960s (above), the 1980s, 2000s, and 2014. As a time range is selected, the dots representing the annual salaries of 50 randomly selected people, dynamically redistributed themselves to reflect the times salary frequency distribution. Compare the dramatic change in spread from 1960s above to the 2000s below.

Data Literacy: It's Elementary

The Washington Post has an article this morning (17 November, 2014): "In elementary schools, lessons on data literacy," by IT reporter Mohana Ravindranath. She describes a "growing movement of educators creating lesson plans to teach students to collect and analyze data." One goal is "to derive opinions from measurable, real-world data." Another, is to address the shortage of "managers and analysts who can make decisions based on big data analysis," according to management researcher Michael Chui. The Washington Post article goes on to quote Chui:

“It makes sense for us to be thinking about education, starting in early childhood, about concepts such as the difference between correlation and causation, what it means to have a bias as you think about data, conditional probability. These are things we as humans don’t naturally do . . . these are learned [concepts],” Chui said in an interview. He added that curricula should teach students about the realistic limitations of data sets — extraneous information, or sampling error, for instance.

The article describes students collecting their own data. Third-grade students collect daily temperature data, fifth-grade students record the hours of daylight and relate them to the earth's motions, and even kindergarten children "recording predictions for whether it will be sunny outside the next day, or which foods will decompose fastest, along with the results."

Says one science coordinator at an elementary school, evaluating the effectiveness of these lessons is "ultimately if the kid’s able to have a conversation about it and ask questions about it.”

A great goal for students of all ages. That this is taught and expected of even elementary school students is inspiring.

(On a very minor display note: the introductory graphic to this story is an image of a computer monitor showing results from a school's Science Festival using software from Tuva Labs. Dot plots are displayed showing the arm spans by gender. I wonder about the zoom-in that is shown for one data point. It seems only to extract the same dot plot that's on the screen. That's something to ask a question about!)

Quantifying Selfies

Selfiecity.net is a project that quantifies many aspects of selfie portraits in five cities around the world in plots of various frequency distributions. The image above shows a dot plot of the estimated age of selfie subjects. In this image 61.6% of the selfies analyzed are from women and 36.7% are from men. The average estimated age of the women is 23.3 years and for men 26.7 years. Scrolling over the dots in this plot show the actual selfie that is measured.

This image assesses the mood of the selfies and plots them on a smile scale from frowning to smiling. Another plot shows the smiles ratings across the cities.

There are even plots that assess the tilt of the subjects head in the selfie, showing that on average women tilt their heads more than men. This is a fun project. Perhaps some of the participants could use the Selfie Help Book!

Age of the Oldest Person You Know

From a Prudential TV commercial that has people place large, round stickers on a number line to represent the age of the oldest person they know. This forms a histogram or dotplot. The message is to have Prudential prepare you to have adequate money for all these years. You can add your own sticker at the Prudential website. Here is a video behind the scenes.