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5.1
Data Generation
P
urpose
The role this topic plays in quantitative reasoning
Data is being generated at great speed and with wide variety in most areas of human activity. The
availability and sophistication of computing technology plays a significant role in the generation and
collection of data. Data can be obtained from transactions, observations, surveys, and experiments. All
credit card transactions are recorded for example, leading to potentially huge databases of customer and
transaction data. On a much simpler level, bird watchers record information by observing the behavior
of individual birds. And most of us have been approached by someone with a survey (and we often walk
away). Data is usually collected in a specific format, and for a specific purpose.
We are in the golden era of data collection when it comes to experiments. As you might expect,
experiments abound in the sciences. Take the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), for example. It is the
world’s largest and most powerful particle collider, built by the European Organization for Nuclear
Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008. Built in collaboration with more than 10,000 scientists and
engineers from more than 100 different countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories
around the globe, the collider itself occupies a tunnel 17 miles in circumference, as deep as 574 ft
beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC collects enormous quantity of
data that keeps thousands of physicists employed exploring that data. But that’s just one facility. Think
about all the researchers routinely performing experiments in the fields of astronomy, health sciences,
social sciences, and practically every branch of human knowledge. There’s a lot of data being generated.
The tools and methods used in this activity can help you appreciate the measurable aspects of the real
world. You will be more comfortable in understanding where you can collect and use data and in targeting
the future generation of data based upon what is missing in the current data.
L
earning Goals
What you should learn while completing this activity
1. Become familiar with data from transactions, observations, surveys and experiments.
2. Identify the issues in recording data.
3. Determine how data is stored and maintained in variables and tables
4. Know the difference between raw and cleaned data
D
iscovery
Finding out for yourself
Find an interesting data set on the Internet (one that really piques your interest) and answer the following
questions.
How was the data set created?
What technology was used?
How accurate is the data?
How is the data stored?
How is the data retrieved?
How is the data preserved over time?
How is the data updated?