Why?

Some may be wondering “why are you doing this…what is the purpose?” With three questions in mind (Who is this data going to be useful for? How are we going to get the word out? and Why would our topic be interesting to others?) I started my blog for this week to give you an explanation. I hope this gives you a further understanding of what I am trying to accomplish.
Animal welfare is a concern to most people, especially those with a big heart. That leads me to believe that the data will be useful for animal lovers in the state of Louisiana, especially those in the New Orleans area. Some people dedicate their lives to saving animals from shelters and abusive owners/homes and I think that it would be important enough to know whether they need to worry more or if they can rest a little easier at night.
Before this project even started, our teacher had the idea of us presenting our projects to statisticians and some form of media. We spoke of various newspapers and news stations, brainstorming who we may want to invite to our presentations. This blog is another way that I am working towards getting this information out there.
I think that this topic will be very interesting to other people. Very few people dislike/ don’t care about animals. Granted sometimes there are strong opinions towards dogs versus cats, but my project is about the two of them alike, therefore I do not think I will have to worry about a lack of an audience. The best part about animals is that everyone relates to them.

Toolbox Alterations

I altered my toolbox in class (even though I had to redo it because the server lost the original) to add detail and make it more personalized to my topic. I specified on the three animal shelters I have intentions of questioning about their euthanasia/adoption levels amongst dogs and cats (Jefferson Parish Animal Shelter, Louisiana Society for Prevention of the Cruelty to Animals Animal Shelter, and Southern Animal Foundation). I wrote in more complete sentences to get the most detail in my data analysis toolbox as I possibly could to make it easier when I started to do my research. I specified what exactly I was using to show the distribution of my data (A. Five Number Summary- min, max, median, Q1, and Q3. B. Histogram- Bar chart representing frequency distribution. They are used to represent quantitative data. C. Standard Deviation- Shows how far away from the mean a specific value is. D. Mean- The average value of the set of observations. It is found by adding all possible observations and dividing by the total observations present. E. Possible outliers- Values that occur a significant distance from the rest of the data. Can be found using 1.5*IQR. IQR is found by subtracting Q1from Q3. If a value falls 1.5*IQR above the max, it is considered an outlier. Similarly, if a value falls 1.5*IQR below the min it is considered an outlier.)

Real and Unreal Blogs

Granted blogs are used to get YOUR voice across, there are some ways that are not recommended. For example, the Book of Mormon Search blog has some pretty cool things about it, like the way some of the words have hyperlinks that show you where those key words could be found elsewhere within the Bible. With that being said, most of the entries are just parts of the Bible copied and pasted. As aforementioned, the point of a blog is to get your OWN voice out there. If someone wanted to read a Bible, they would not want to go to a blog. I personally think that if they wanted to say something, they should have used excerpts from the Bible to make their statement effective, but the entire blog should not be one big excerpt.

A good blog, (but don’t tell her because it might go to her head) is my teacher’s. It isn’t distracting, irrelevant or unbearably stacked with knowledge that is hard to read. Most of the time, there are only a few sentences with a youtube or teachertube video or pictures taken during a class project. I think that this is a very effective and entertaining way to get a point across.

A screen shot of my teacher's blog.