Causing Correlation

One of the biggest misconceptions with data is that a relationship implies a meaningful relationship.  We are quick to assume that two seemingly related (i.e. increase in temperature shows an increase in murder rate) means that one causes the other.  This is all too common!

Often times this relationship is merely coincidental or random; if you look at the relationships between enough variable combinations, eventually (by chance) you will find a couple instances where they happen to correlate.  Other times, it may be that these two variables indeed have a relationship but it is a “confounding” variable that is the true “cause”.  

An example (made up) is perhaps you may find a negative relationship between more years of education and life expectancy... implying that if you attend more schooling you will die younger - when infact the confounding factors may be that those with more education, such as doctors, tend to work longer hours and carry more stress in their career positions.

Although my favorite is #10, this list brings together a multitude of examples demonstrating why you should never conclude a meaningful relationship from a graph or suggested relationship in general!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/kjh2110/the-10-most-bizarre-correlations

P.S. Make sure to Google the “flying spaghetti monster”

Anyone have any good examples of implied causation by correlation?

Advantages

Advantages I Have Had

By opting to study math/statistics, I felt that I have had a few advantages against a “stereotypical” statistics student.

• Being among a minority (in this case a female) seemed to be advantageous towards acceptance into graduate school (and towards scholarship opportunities).
• My native English tongue combined with my (semi-) outgoing personality also seemed to put me as a front runner when job searching (being a Statistician requires good communication skills to successfully collaborate with a variety of researchers).

A leader

Imagine the excitement when my friend emailed me the link to the news of the first female Fields Medal (like a Nobel Prize for math) recipient!   The medal is only awarded to young mathematicians (<40) and it is said that although there have been outstanding female mathematicians in the past, their greatest work was after 40.  

This is a promising move in the right direction to inspire and provide hope to other female mathematicians as well as ideally building more appeal to young girls that are still exploring options for their futures.

My female inspiration

Some of the greatest math/statistics teachers that I had were female.  One of the women that inspired me in my early math career was the professor that I had for Calculus I and II.  I took the courses at a nearby college while still in high school after taking their college math placement test.  I didn’t want to be looked down upon since I was the lone high schooler in the class so I worked really hard to do well and took the time to use my professor’s office hours if I had any struggles.  

Granted, I lucked out having someone with such a passion for math and students (and humor) but this is the type of teaching that should be more widespread so that more students can thrive in math!

For more references, there is a whole association that provides a membership for women in math: https://sites.google.com/site/awmmath/home

and specifically for “girls in math and science”: https://sites.google.com/site/awmmath/home/girls-in-science-math

Source: http://time.com/3105056/math-prize-woman/



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Inspiration

Classroom methods are changing; many of these changes in which, in my opinion, are not good.  

Now note that I am not a teacher and do not have any formal training in education besides a tutor certification course... so my awareness about this is only through word of mouth, examples brought in from students through my tutoring experiences, and a few that I have read online in passing by a short article catching my eye.  I know I could research more about this topic but also am aware of the bias that tends to go into articles about this (or really any) topic.

The Common Core was created with good intention to create a learning standard for students to help them prepare for their future.  One of the items on the agenda for mathematics was to have “greater focus on fewer topics”.  This limits their exposure to all of the math topics that I learned in school.  The larger problem from this, again based off of what I have seen, is that it further complicates the topics they ARE teaching.  

I have seen a few examples but one is the new method for teaching multiplication of larger numbers drawn out with a grid of boxes divided in half (“lattice multiplication”).  I spent about 5 minutes Googling how to use the method and was still a bit confused.  What happened to lining up the numbers to multiply and carry the tens digit - why add complicated steps?

      

Like I said, I think the intentions were good - to help provide a more visual way of learning for those that aren’t as natural learners with numbers.  However, I don’t think that’s the main problem - I think that there is one thing that could change the hatred towards math and that is an understanding of the methods to the real world.  Students constantly complain about never using the material they are learning, and although I can still make the argument that learning math is a brain-training process as well and through solving math problems you increase your ability to problem-solve in life….students don’t buy this explanation.  

They need understanding and connection from each topic to their own lives (or future lives).


source: http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards/development-process/

Fun with STATS videos!

In perusing YouTube in hopes of finding helpful clips for a statistics course that I’m putting together for work, or just a late night search for fun and entertaining videos about math and/or statistics, I have a couple videos that I’d like to share [hopefully for your enjoyment].  

For you non-math/stat people, I hope that this may shed some light on the idea that we can be fun and silly - not boring and serious like math people are often assumed to be.  Our career, for many of us, is a culture and yes, we [I’ll speak for myself] enjoy related jokes and humor.  (See pic below)

For the people reading that are involved in math-related careers, hopefully you will appreciate these videos, too.

1) The Statistics Song - Fun with song writing about introductory statistics!  It brings a smile to my face when I see students making videos (having fun) for their classes.

2) Through the eyes of a Statistician.  Now...as a Statistician I will mention that I never noticed this kind of thing before seeing this video but now I see normal curves everywhere!  It makes it interesting to think of basic day-to-day things in terms of a distribution (door handles!)

3) Statistician’s Blues - A great song spoof on statistics - and a peak into the misuse of and incorrect interpretations of statistics and data.  Still funny.

Lastly - to share our introductory promo video just released on YouTube! Note it’s sadly not a humorous one…. just a small clip to help you understand our motivation for notAprodigy.