When you penalise wrong answers, you build in a sense of shame and failure to being wrong that most people never get over. It leads to cheating, to covering up of mistakes, and to avoiding doing things where being wrong is a possibility.
In March 2024 I shared a survey online to see how covid cautious people are, and whether there's a correlation between levels of caution and number of covid infections. The resulting dataset is rich, complex, and deeply flawed (like all surveys and most real datasets!). There's scope for purely statistical investigations, and deep discussions about the ways in which such a survey is flawed.
I'm now releasing the full dataset (and it's live, so more results may come in) for student projects and any other investigations. Like all material on this site, it is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License, and I would love it if you shared your projects, thoughts, and results back with us, so that we can share them with interested teachers and students.
Folks, I'm running a little survey to evaluate people's attitudes to taking covid precautions, and how that relates to catching covid. As an online survey, it's not exactly gold standard research! But it should still give some interesting insights. Please fill it out (it should be pretty quick!), and please share! https://forms.gle/1f2owXNrijYFsrHZA
Our family has been navigating the world of gender affirming care for some years now, and I am increasingly frustrated with how many of the health care decisions made for (not by!) trans folks are made for political reasons, rather than medical or health focused reasons. I'm going to write about that, but I'm just the parent of trans folks. I'm not trans. So first, I want to platform some trans voices, because I think we could build a vastly more inclusive world if more of us understood what it's like to be trans.
We could easily spend years talking about all the possible problems with data, but that's not helpful when you have a dataset in front of you here and now. So what are some questions you can ask about quantitative data to figure out whether you can trust it?
Look, I'm a writer. I know there are too many superlatives in this piece. But there are not enough superlatives in the world for what @neilhimself and Fourplay did last night.
It's important to remember that there is no moral dimension to food. Nor is there a moral dimension to clothing. Live and let live, eat and let eat, wear and let wear!
This conversation with Grant Ennis was enlightening and enraging. I'm thinking about activism and making change SO differently now. Check it out!
"So like while we would never believe that if we saw a stone rolling down a mountain, that if we all just stared at it and willed it back up the hill, it would do that, we do tend to believe that if we all individually do our part for the environment or ask people to just individually act that because people want that to be so and want that to work, that it just will, we believe that if we give people more information than then somehow just spontaneously they will change their behaviour, which really is quite fanciful."
The most important word there is not data, or coding, or even science. It's Students. The emphasis in this word cloud is not on technical skills, it's on people. And that's what Data Science is about, when you get down to the crux of it. It's about people. About purpose. About meaning.