Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label instagram

Can we use Instagram to estimate happiness at universities?

OK. Lotte van Rijswijk, writing for Resume.io,  used Instagram photos to determine the happiest college in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia . Here is the Top 20 list for the US. If you go to the website, you can see similar summaries for the UK and Australian data and an interactive table containing all of the data. Here are some ideas for using it in class: 1. This methodology is pretty interesting. She used smiling recognition software and pictures from Instagram to measure happiness. I think this study would pair well with this study about using software to evaluate smiles: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617734315 https://resume.io/blog/the-happiest-schools-in-the-us-uk-and-australia 2. Ask your student to consider the sampling error that may result from using Instagram data for any research. For example, are photos on Insta representative of human experiences? Is it reasonable to gather a sample of college-aged students using Insta? 3. The ...

u/dat data's "Why medians > averages [OC] "

Unsettling. But I bet your students won't forget this example of why mean isn't always the best measure of central tendency. While the reddit user labeled this as example median's superiority, you could also use this as an example when mode is useful. As statisticians, we often fall back on to mode when we have categories and median when we have outliers, but sometimes either median or mode can be useful when decimal points don't make a lot of sense. Here is the image and commentary from reddit: And this an IG posting about the data from the same user, Mona Chalabi from fivethirtyeight. I included the Instagram because Chalabi expands a bit more upon the original data she used. https://www.instagram.com/p/BIVKJrcgW51/