About your projects

I've had a couple of folks talk to me about their plans, which are interesting. If you have an idea you'd like to discuss, you can e-mail me or drop by the office hours (Monday and Wednesday 2-4 in the Learning Centre).

You work on your own, but you can of course discuss your project with anyone. You can collect the data yourself, or use publicly available data, for example from the Internet. Happy to help you find data.

Reg Peplow Award

My father passed away last year, and to remember him I have started an award at Kwantlen. The award is for the student in BUQU 1230 who shows the most improvement. This doesn't mean the student with the highest marks. It does mean that someone who (for example) doesn't do very well on the first mid-term but who then starts to really work hard has a good chance of winning. It is worth about $700. Given out at the Kwantlen School of Business award ceremony in March.

Nice bar chart video example

The Economist magazine usually has terrific graphics, and here is an example of a set of bar charts of days off taken in different countries:

http://www.economist.com/node/21256080

This shows how it is possible to make stats really interesting.

Ordinal variable example

Here is a question asking about type of variable (or scale of measurment, same thing)

One of the questions in the survey  is as follows: When did you first start reading the WSJ? High school, college, early career, mid-career, late career, or retirement?

There is an order here: you go to high school, then college and so on. So we know that the variable is at the least ordinal. But is it interval? For it to be interval there would have to be some sort of consistent set of units in the intervals. Here we don't have that. We could describe high school as 1, college as 2 and so on.....but could not do any arithmetic operations on them.

So this variable is ordinal and so is categorical.