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Some Project Ideas

The following is a list of ideas to get the group-project-dialogue flowing. They're in no particular order except that in which I have either thought of or found them. Also, they're not always exactly complete ideas, so you may have a lot of work on your hands if you decide to flesh one of them out. But your project is going to be a lot of work anyway, so if something really grabs you, don't be afraid to jump in and get your hands dirty! And remember, I'm always ready to help.

Ideas in red have already been worked into projects: so they are not available. However, you may adapt an idea to make it into a unique project (with my approval, of course).

How to Fake Data Badly Certain kinds of data (tax return amounts, for example) exhibit a very non-intuitive property: the first digits DO NOT follow a uniform distribution. That is, we would expect about 10% of first digits of such data to be 1, 10% of the first digits to be 2, 10% of the first digits to be 3, and so on. However, this is not the case! Benford's Law states that about 30% of first digits will be 1, about 18% of the first digits to be 2, about 13% of the first digits to 3, and so on with decreasing probability.

Try collecting a certain kind of data and see if Benford's law seem to hold. For example, Benford's law is one (of many) ways that governements use to catch faked tax returns!

Stop Sign Shenanigans Is there a difference in the proportion of complete stops between the stop signs leading out of the student lots and the staff lot at Columbia College?

Nickel Slam You may feel that it is obvious that the probability of a head in tossing a coin is about 1/2 because the coin has two faces. Such opinions are not always correct. Stand a nickel on edge on a hard, flat surface. Pound the surface with your hand so that the nickel falls over. What is the probability that it falls with heads upward? Is it different from 1/2?

Getting to Philosophy An internet meme, originally discovered by a user of Reddit.com named pixelcrak on April 13, 2011 and further popularized by xkcd , says that if you go to a random article on Wikipedia and keep clicking the first non-parenthesized link in the body text of each successive article, you'll eventually end up at the article on Philosophy. This isn't entirely true. Rather, there is a certain probability of this happening. Can you estimate this probability?

Water Snobs Can an SRS of Columbia College students tell the difference between bottled water and tap water by taste alone?
More generally, can people distinguish between generic and brand-name food products?

Popping Proportions Is there a statistically significant difference between generic and brand name popcorn in terms of the proportion of popped kernels?

Double Stuff Do Oreo Double-Stuff cookies really have double the filling?


Categorical Fishing Is there a relationship between any two of the following categorical variables?
Political Affiliation (Republican, Democrat, Independent, etc.)
Vehicle Type (Big Truck, Sedan, Foreign/Domestic, etc.)
Gender
Smokes/ Doesn't Smoke, Drinks/Doesn't drink, Gambles/Doesn't Gamble
Agrees/Disagrees/Undecided about a particular issue.
Insert Your Own Categorical Variable of Interest Here: _____________________

M&Ms Color Distribution A pack of Milk Chocolate M&M’s should contain about 24% blue, 14% brown, 16% green, 20% orange, 13% red, and 14% yellow M&M’s, but this project found otherwise. Do you get similar results?

Cunning Linguistics There are many quantifiable aspects to writing which researchers use to understand pieces of writing. In addition to usual text statistics such as average word and sentence lengths, there are more advanced measures including text complexity (which assesses the grade level of a piece of writing) and lexical density (which assesses how informative and/or descriptive a text is). If you love language, the following links contain quantitative text analysis projects which may interest you.
Mini-Projects involving Lexical Density and Text Complexity
Everything in Its Right Place: Visualization and Content Analysis of Radiohead Lyrics

A Grave Matter There's plenty of interesting data that one could collect from a cemetery. There are plenty of interesting questions that arise as well:
How much do life expectancies differ between past and present?
How has life expectancy changed through time? For example, compare birth year with life expectancy. The overall trend should be obvious (UP!), but the exact details aren't obvious.
Are the models which describe the life expectancy of women different from those of men? (Likely answer: yes. But how are they different?)
Does your data suggest that life expectancy for men or women growing faster than the other?
Are life expectancies different between different kinds of cemeteries? (Public, Religious, Masonic, Veterans', Ethnic, etc.)
Is there a relationship between monument size an life expectancy?

Buttered Bread Buffoonery The pessimist might believe that it's obvious that when you drop a piece of buttered bread that it will most likely fall on the buttered side. Perhaps this is simply selective memory at work and there really is no difference. But maybe the the butter changes the physics of bread enough to affect the probability of which side it lands on. Hmmmm..... this is a situation which requires the cold, unflinching eye of reason. Let's gather some data!

A Penny For Your Thoughts Estimate the proportion of the new "shield pennies" in circulation. You could also estimate the number of pennies made from copper (pre-1982) rather than zinc (post-1982). What is the most common year in circulation?