1. Reminder: Semester-long data-collection project¶
Think about what you'd like to do, and let me know by Thursday.
I recommend identify a website related to your interests and then scrape it.
Data repositories: Kaggle, SNAP, ...
2. Homework (due Saturday, Feb 10 by midnight)¶
Report 1 will be entail extracting something interesting from this data.¶
Consider the National dataset for names given to babies in the US from 1890 through 2015, which is available at the US Social Security Administration page,
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html
Report Guidelines¶
Format¶
You will use the Jupyter Notebook format for your reports. You will upload your ".ipynb" file to UBLearns.
Description¶
Every report you write this semester should be a well-constructed well-written document containing text and code, and often tables and/or figures. Points will be deducted for sloppiness of any kind, including ungrammatical sentences, incorrect spelling, or inconsistent formatting.
The report should be structured under a logical set of headings (and possibly subheadings).
The first should always be an Introduction to the topic. This should provide the background to the topic and in broad terms what you are trying to do. From this, the reader should understand what it's about and be motivated to read the body of the report. Some students may want to summarize very briefly here what was accomplished; others may prefer to keep that a "secret" until later in the report.
The Introduction should be followed by one or more sections whose headings may be specific to the topic. For example, here are the headings of an article in the current issue of Phys. Rev. A.
Other mandatory sections are a Conclusions section where you will summarize and reflect on what you have discovered or accomplished, and a References section where all sources should be properly cited.
Furthermore, since reproducibility is essential in all scientific and mathematical endeavors, I want to be able to run your code to verify that it does what you claim. Your code must therefore appear somewhere in the report in a form that can be simply run - without further editing. If you choose to present your code in the body of your report as short fragments interspersed by explanatory text, that is fine (in fact, I quite like this style of presentation), but then you should also include it as a single runnable cell, or a small number of contiguous cells, in an Appendix called "Code" at the end.
Aside from the mandatory sections discussed above, I am perfectly happy for you to try your own ideas for arranging the body of the report, and I will give you prompt feedback on whether I find your structure effective or on how I think it could be improved. I will say in advance, however, that I do not like structures that force the reader to flip back and forth repeatedly between widely separated parts of the report: I much prefer a report that can be read and appreciated linearly from start to finish.
Target reader: the reader you should have in mind as you write is a smart classmate who missed class when the current topic was introduced, explored and discussed.
3. Exercise 3¶
Analyze the first Presidential debate between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump¶
Again, the file is at http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~danet/Sp18/MTH448/class2/class2_files/political_transcript.txt
Some questions to answer:
- How much did each of them speak?
- How big is the vocabulary of each?
- Which words did each use most frequently?
- How do the words they used least frequently compare?
- What are the words used most unequally?
Note: Might want to remove punctuation first.
4. Exercise 4: History of first names in the US¶
Consider the National dataset for names given to babies in the US from 1890 through 2015, which is available at the US Social Security Administration page,