Class 1 Outline

  1. Data and society
  2. Skills
  3. Structure and policies
  4. Semester-long data-collection project
  5. Classroom setup
  6. Getting to know each other
  7. Web scraping
    1. Exercise 1: Split-and-select
    2. Exercise 2: More play with text

Data and society


  • Data collection explosion is transforming society.

  • A tension ...

  • vs. useful tools that make life better: traffic during east-coast storm

  • Data in the news almost every day!

Skills


http://mbs.rutgers.edu/blog/numbers-making-sense-job-titles-analytics

Structure and policies

http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~danet/Sp18/MTH448/Syllabus_MTH448_563_Sp18.pdf

Semester-long data-collection project


  • Find a dataset of interest TO YOU.
  • Wrangle it.
  • Figure out something interesting.
  • Write a report.
  • Tell us all about it!

Classroom setup


  • Every day at the beginning of class we will quietly and quickly arrange the tables and chairs like below. At the end of class we will restore them to their original state.

Getting to know each other


  • Say hello!

Pure Python data wrangling

Exercise 1: Split-and-select

http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~danet/Sp18/MTH448/class1/Exercise1.html

Exercise 2: More play with text


Exercise 2a: Sort words by right-to-left alphabetical order

*Hints:

In [1]:
w = 'drawer'
w[::-1]
Out[1]:
'reward'

Note that set-membership can be tested much faster than list membership.

Exercise 2b: List all the palindromes

Exercise 2c: List all the reversible words

  • Useful Python features:

    • list element access and slicing with stride
    • string replace
    • list sort
    • functions, def and lambdas