Wednesday, February 13, 2013

GIS3015 Cartographic Skills Student Spotlight- Statistical Foundation

GIS3015 Cartographic Skills, Instructor, Mrs. Trisha Holtzclaw

Statistical Foundation


In this lab, we used Excel to perform some basic statistical functions with population data like: Standard Statistics, Histograms, and Graphing of statistics.  Deliverables include posting one histogram or scatterplot graph created during this lab to the blog.

Student Learning Outcomes:

  • Demonstrate the basic concepts of statistical software and analysis.
  • Calculate standard statistics such as: mean, median, mode, variance, and standard deviation
  • Diagram the distribution and skewness of data utilizing histograms
  • Determine linear and polynomial trendlines for data arrays.

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT AWARDS

The following student has been chosen for her exceptional work on the Statistical Foundation assignment:

Ellen Markin 


My Photo
About Ellen Markin: Ho'omaika'i 'ana  (Congratulations) Ellen! Ellen works as a GIS Specialist with a cultural resource management firm in Reno, Nevada. She has a BA in Anthropology from the University of Hawaii-Hilo and completed graduate courses in GIS and Geography from the University of Montana. Ellen spends a lot of her time working in GIS and feels very lucky to have a job that combines her interest in archaeology and GIS.  Welcome to the spotlight, Ellen - job well done!

What we like: We liked that ALL of Ms. Markin's values were correct. The level of detail she exhibited with her graphs and process summary were also superb!




"This is one of the histogram from the Cartography week 2 lab. In this version Excel set the default bin size of 19.25. The results are very similar to the histogram I created with a bin of 20".

"When calculating the polynomial trendlines Excel returned two of the equations with numbers in scientific notation. This caused me some confusion. When I calculated the populations for 2050 the numbers came out strange, one ended up being negative. It turns out that by keeping the scientific notation Excel was rounding the numbers. I changed the formula on the chart to number format to get the correct numbers and used those in my calculations. They returned much more reasonable population estimates".



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