A good portion of my day today was spent in various different meetings. In the morning, we had Thaissa Way come to present about Urban at UW. She spoke to us about the difference between looking at the micro and macro levels for a social good problem, and how understanding the history of an issue can help illuminate new solutions to addressing the problem today. She spent a good amount of time explaining the history of Gas Works Park, which is here in Seattle, and that was interesting to me because I didn't know anything about its history. However, I had a hard time seeing how her presentation related to our work, and which parts of her talk I could really apply to what we are doing. At the very end she did ask us about our projects and we talked a little bit about what each of us were doing.
In my work time today I was looking at the ugly rides again, and specifically I was targeting the rides that ended up being $0 for a taxi ride, which is obviously a bug of some kind. Working with these anomalies, I noticed that a good number of them were referring to rides that ended up being cancelled or no-shows, which means they should not be counted in our data set anyways. However, there are still rides after that which are basically just messy and seem to have bad data, so I need to figure out how to deal with them. Looking at the specific data though made me reconsider if we are looking at the ugly rides in the correct way, and what will be most helpful to look at moving forward.
I also met with Anat and the TCAT group this afternoon to just give updates with what we're working on and where we are in those. The exciting thing with that is that the high schoolers are coming next week to do the circuit project we created, and I want to go help with that if I can.
After my TCAT meeting, we had reading group discussion. I did read the paper, but it was very wordy and I guess I must have zoned out a bit, because I really did not understand completely what its purpose was entirely. The discussion leader asked us a lot of questions, but I felt that I didn't participate much and I think he thought that most people didn't read at all. I felt bad because I did read, but I guess the material just wasn't as interesting to me. I don't have much background in the Millennium Development Goals, or what health is like in Africa (Tanzania in particular), so that might be why I felt I couldn't or didn't want to contribute as much. I liked the discussion more than last week, but I guess I just thought the content wasn't very relevant to me or our projects.
In my work time today I was looking at the ugly rides again, and specifically I was targeting the rides that ended up being $0 for a taxi ride, which is obviously a bug of some kind. Working with these anomalies, I noticed that a good number of them were referring to rides that ended up being cancelled or no-shows, which means they should not be counted in our data set anyways. However, there are still rides after that which are basically just messy and seem to have bad data, so I need to figure out how to deal with them. Looking at the specific data though made me reconsider if we are looking at the ugly rides in the correct way, and what will be most helpful to look at moving forward.
I also met with Anat and the TCAT group this afternoon to just give updates with what we're working on and where we are in those. The exciting thing with that is that the high schoolers are coming next week to do the circuit project we created, and I want to go help with that if I can.
After my TCAT meeting, we had reading group discussion. I did read the paper, but it was very wordy and I guess I must have zoned out a bit, because I really did not understand completely what its purpose was entirely. The discussion leader asked us a lot of questions, but I felt that I didn't participate much and I think he thought that most people didn't read at all. I felt bad because I did read, but I guess the material just wasn't as interesting to me. I don't have much background in the Millennium Development Goals, or what health is like in Africa (Tanzania in particular), so that might be why I felt I couldn't or didn't want to contribute as much. I liked the discussion more than last week, but I guess I just thought the content wasn't very relevant to me or our projects.