Monday morning started today with a presentation from Bethany Gross, who is a Senior Analyst and Research Director for the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). This presentation was really cool! They were focused on research that was trying to explore how giving all high school students in the Denver area would allow different students better options for what schools they would be able to attend. As it is, students from families of certain backgrounds are more likely to live considerably farther away from the better schools, and therefore they are often limited in which high schools they can go to because some of the better schools are prohibitively distant from their homes. It was interesting to think about all the different factors that would come into play when looking at transit data and where Denver students end up going to school in relation to their homes. For example, what might be prohibitively distant for one student from a certain family, might not be too distant for another student who comes from a family that can drive them to school, or that lives in a safer neighborhood. A good portion of their presentation was filled with the DSSG interns asking more probing questions about other factors that might come into play with this data, and I really liked this discussion because to me it showed how much more inquisitive and critical thinking the DSSG program has helped us become.
Since I got caught up in the presentation, I ended up being pretty late to the TCAT weekly meeting, and I got there right as Anat had just left. Zhitao told me he thought they had gone to her office, but after making the trip downstairs she wasn't there either, and I realized my whole trip to CSE had been a waste. After emailing Anat to let her know, we set up another meeting in the afternoon instead. At that meeting we talked about what else I need to get done before the end of my research, since there are only nine days left! Also, Anat will be out of town next week, so my last day with her will be this Friday. With this in mind, we decided to meet Friday morning to make sure everything was good. I need to have a draft of the technical paper that DREU requires I write about my research, and she wants me to have the code for the projections (the ones I was doing at the beginning of the summer) all packaged up so I could give them to her and she can make sure that she could run them on her own computer.
This afternoon we also had our last reading group. My group was pretty excited for it because the topic was transit and transit data. We talked about passive data sets versus designed data sets (a reoccurring topic from some other reading group discussions), how this affects and creates problems with selection and representation, what privacy concerns arise with these data sets, and how researchers with sometimes little or no background in the given domain try to use these data sets to analyze the situation. It was an interesting talk, and I thought it was a good last reading group because it brought up a lot of the issues with data that we had touched on in other talks previously.
Since I got caught up in the presentation, I ended up being pretty late to the TCAT weekly meeting, and I got there right as Anat had just left. Zhitao told me he thought they had gone to her office, but after making the trip downstairs she wasn't there either, and I realized my whole trip to CSE had been a waste. After emailing Anat to let her know, we set up another meeting in the afternoon instead. At that meeting we talked about what else I need to get done before the end of my research, since there are only nine days left! Also, Anat will be out of town next week, so my last day with her will be this Friday. With this in mind, we decided to meet Friday morning to make sure everything was good. I need to have a draft of the technical paper that DREU requires I write about my research, and she wants me to have the code for the projections (the ones I was doing at the beginning of the summer) all packaged up so I could give them to her and she can make sure that she could run them on her own computer.
This afternoon we also had our last reading group. My group was pretty excited for it because the topic was transit and transit data. We talked about passive data sets versus designed data sets (a reoccurring topic from some other reading group discussions), how this affects and creates problems with selection and representation, what privacy concerns arise with these data sets, and how researchers with sometimes little or no background in the given domain try to use these data sets to analyze the situation. It was an interesting talk, and I thought it was a good last reading group because it brought up a lot of the issues with data that we had touched on in other talks previously.