Info for Gordon's Quantitative Reasoning Spring 2004

• Links to Online Data Sets:
  
  
  • DASL ('dazzle'): the 'Data And Story Library'
    Famous historical datastets, cataloged by the CMU stat deptartment. Mostly selected to illustrate an intro statistics topic (like for instance handling outliers). All come with an overview 'story' describing the dataset.
    
    
  • A small list of data sets that load directly into Excel
    From the Math Forum at Drexel
    
    
  • 'Exploring Data'
    Several common data sets, downloadable in Excel (and other formats); includes a story about the dataset (click on the dataset name). A really nicely done website as part of an education grant.
    
    
  • 'Oz-DASL'
    Australian Data And Story Library. Some of these data sets are potentially simple enough for an elementary analysis.
    
    CMU Dataset Archive
    A potentially useful collection of datasets in text format, some of them large, most with some description. For instance, the dataset on IQ versus Brain Size is fairly small and potentially quite interesting.
    
    
  • 'The eeps Data Zoo'
    Small data sets pertaining to physical experiments that were actually done (e.g., hanging a slinky; rolling a ball down a wooden ramp), as well as some real-world data (e.g., height and speed of major roller coasters; track times for the Men's 10-m Olympic run).
    
    
  • U.S. Government Database
    Lots of different simple demographic data to select, for the U.S. as well as many other countries. Includes instructions for loading the results into Excel.
    
    
  • NASA weather station data
    Click on the desired map location to be taken to a list of weather stations near that area
    
    
  • NASA rainfall data.
    Select graph type, then click on region of interest on the map.

• Info pertaining to text material:
  
  
  • Logical Fallacies
    This website gives more extensive coverage than our text of the cataloged types of logical fallacies. Includes examples, and Latin terms.
    
    
  • '...straw man attack...'
    A recent debate about nanotechnology in which the 'straw man' fallacy is made reference to.
    
    
  • Pertaining to Exercise # 14, section A1:
    
    
    • Here is a link where you can view a Real Media version of the infamous "Daisy Girl" 1964 campaign ad (now considered the first 'negative campaign ad');
      
      
    • Here is the same 1964 ad, in Quicktime format;
      
      
    • Here is a story about an anti Al Gore redux of the ad (since dubbed "Daisy II") by the Bush campaign during the 2000 election;
      
      
    • and here is a story about the daisy ad being revived yet again ("Daisy III"?) by anti Iraq war protesters this past year.
    
    
    
  • Pertaining to the last exercise of section 1C -- Gauss' formula for the sum of the first n integers, here is a page briefly describing Gauss, the famous anecdote, and some of his accomplishments.