Stats

      As our group finished our projects for the week it was interesting to see what is out there for places to get data for a statistics project.  It is actually very easy to find a government webpage which carries statistics that can be manipulated into graphs or tables as the user wishes.  I did assume that because these are government webpages that the facts on them would be true and unbiased.  Lets just hope that that is true.

     I also really enjoyed looking at Google trends and the correlation of certain terms.  Our group chose to look at Special Education.  The time of the year where there were valleys and peeks seemed to match with many school calendars.  There is a low period that comes with the summer months and deep spiking valleys at the end of the year.  To expand this and find another term that matched with the SE term, we looked at ADHD.  This almost perfectly matched with the peaks and valleys.  We then added Autism to the mix.  This term had a much higher traffic volume than the other two terms.  This made the data for the pervious terms seem obsolete.  

      Overall finding these trends was actually educational not just for the Stats class.  The information can be used when discussing SE in schools.  This week was full of projects that seemed to take much longer than I expected they would.  We as a group did get it all done, but as it turns out Stats seem to be much more in-depth and involved than I thought they would be!