June 17: Visualization and AI

Visualization

We worked on data visualization over the last 2 class days. Below was the visualization I made to make McDonalds sales make more sense at a glance. Below are the total sales, profit, and number of customers along with sales by country, costumer satisfaction and sales trends. I have found that just looking at the numbers directly usually makes more sense to me then a bunch of fancy pie charts and maps but I can see how they would be useful. It is definitely really helpful for showing off numbers to those who need to get it at a glance or did not work closely with the data.

AI

AI or Artificial intelligence is a really bad name for what is essentially a bunch of statistics. For example we used it to guess who would have survived and who would have died on the Titanic. To do this we got a list of training data which is a bunch of details about people on the ship and whether or not they survived. The code takes that data and uses it to construct trees which it follows to decide who it thinks lives and who it thinks will die. We later ran the model made with the training data on a test set of data which we guess right with a little less then 80 percent accuracy. AI is really interesting in how it works and I really wish this side of it was talked about more.

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June 10: How to make a rock (using Onshape)

3D printing and my experience with it I have a decent amount of experience with 3D printing, I own a printer and have made a bunch of models. I have printed replacement pieces for board games, stencils for D&D battle maps. Whenever there is a problem that requires a small plastic piece of very specific parameters I can make a solution. At one point the band had water bottles whose handles would snap off every other second so I went and made a file for replacement. It is safe to say that in any practical situation I can make something. There is one thing I have no clue how to do, and that is make something completely impractical, so incredibly pointless that it exist for the shear fact that it exist. Today I made a rock. A quick discussion on the concept of rocks Rocks do not have a reason to exist, they did not decide that they wanted to be, they simply are. Rocks are not uniform they do not attempt to be perfect in any way, a rock that is a p...

June 6: Pseudoscience

Is SETI Pseudoscience? Today in stem in society we broke out in to groups to discuss whether or not SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is real Science or Pseudoscience. Our group was composed Roju Miller, Amelia Northam, Elsie Sheumaker, and Me, Austin Newman. We used the following sites to build our discussion This is SETI's description on what they do. https://www.seti.org/primer-seti-seti-institute This is an article from Nasa about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/technosignatures-and-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence/ This article is a debate on whether or not Fermi's paradox is disprovable and why SETI may be useful. https://www.universetoday.com/139467/new-model-predicts-that-were-probably-the-only-advanced-civilization-in-the-observable-universe/#google_vignette An article about a new experiment from SETI https:...

Are CAFOs Ethical

Concentration Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs are a way of farming animals by smushing them in to small spaces where they can barely move as much as turn around. In these horrible operations the animals are fed horribly and are mainly sustained on anti biotics. But are they Ethical???? Yes totally absolutely ethical 100 percent for real (for the record I was forced to take up this position) and here is why: It is efficient. In order to keep the same output we would have to use thousands times more land. Factory farmed cows produce less methane so if you think about it CAFO's are saving the planet. CAFO's cause cancer,... Which is actually a good thing because if more people get cancer then more people will be on the verge of death and resort to experimental treatment. If more people take experimental treatment it will become better until eventually we will have a cure. They are the only way we can get the meat production that we currently have in the US. If we were to shut d...

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