Author: demirmcrae

When I think about this class, I find it ironic because it is supposed to be about the Sciences of the New York, but the projects we did only applied to New York in that it was data that was collected in New York. I feel that there are aspects to science unique to New York that can be explored to make the class more New York centric.

I enjoyed the labs. It wasn’t the first time I was in a lab. I had to do labs in high school as well, but something made it different. Also, the lab reports were made easy to do by the instructions given to us and that made the workload bearable in comparison to other classes.

An issue I had with the class was doing two projects at the same time. I understand that the class was structured that way so that we have options, but when we chose which one we wanted to do, we should’ve worked 100% on that project instead of splitting the work between two projects. One thing about the way the main project of the class was structured was that there were several things we had to submit before the final project was due. Having those small things due in between the day the project was assigned and the day the project was due helped out my time management skills.

This class was an interesting experience for me. It originally felt like an obligation and it still feels that way, but that doesn’t mean that there were things I was able to take advantage of while I was in the class. This class was less “traditional science” than normal and more “data science” than normal. That made it a better experience than if it was a traditional science class and scientific jargon was used the whole semester. The class allowed me to work muscles that I haven’t worked in a very long time. It also showed me how data science and data analytics can be widely used for basically most things in life.

I went into the lab thinking it was not going to be a good experience. In high school, I thought going to lab once a week was boring and I didn’t like it. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it. Although we didn’t get the result that was intended, it was an enjoyable experience. Experiments fascinate me, maybe because I’m a Statistics major. I enjoy asking a question and then being able to put together an experiment in hopes that it would be able to answer your question. I think that’s what made me want to major in Statistics and I think that’s what made this whole process fun.There are certain things that need to be in an experiment for it to be considered valid and I was able to see that in the experimental design at the end. This also opened my eyes to what scientists have to go through on a regular basis when developing medicine. Granted, they use machines, but even if you do everything right in terms of putting everything together, there can still be a chance that there is a contamination somewhere. As a result, the medicine that you worked hard on wouldn’t be able to be consumed by people.

If I had to author an article in the New York Times, there are a few elements to make it appeal to a broader audience while still being scientifically sound. One of the things everyone would do is simplify the information from the primary source. I think that sometimes this can be dangerous because the information from the primary source can be oversimplified. This could cause the facts to be distorted which can create some fallacies in the report. Other than simplifying scientific jargon, a good representation of scientific research in a popular report is providing data with visual aides. This is a good way to simplify data, but not distort it.

The whole theme here is oversimplification. I think that is something that authors of popular reports about science need to improve upon. However, I think that has more to do with the authors’ backgrounds than the authors themselves. If the author has a degree in the discipline that they are writing in, they most likely will already know how to simplify the information is the primary source, but authors who don’t have degrees in the discipline they write about may not have a working knowledge of the topic and therefore may dumb down the facts too much.