Today's journal is intended help us start choosing topics for our final projects. Tell me two things that interested you (things like warthogs, baseball, marshmallows, politics, Christmas,keno...) and then attempt come up with a statistical or probabilistic question about these topics that you'd like to know. After asking your questions remark on what methods might be involved in answering the questions.
Warthog Example:
My feeling has always been that smarter people like warthogs more, and I would very much enjoy the opportunity to test this hypothesis. To do so I might ask the following questions "What is you IQ"? and then "What is the warthog's maximum running speed?". I suspect a that the absolute value of the difference between the number given in response to the second question and 55 MPH (the warthog's true maximum running speed) would anti-correlated with IQ. I would enjoy the opportunity to explain why I feel this is in fact a casual relationship, and not the obvious one that "smarter people just know more". To argue statistically that this correlation is not for the obvious reason I might make up a second and similar trivia type question like "What is the average life span of a giraffe?" whose answer I suspect will not correlate to intelligence (see this giraffe for the answer). In order to explore this I could use tools like scatter plots, ways of measuring correlation and perhaps some other hypothesis test (though currently I'm a little unclear about what this might mean in practice). To make this implementable I think that I would gather the data among Dartmouth students. Of course Dartmouth student are quite smart to start with and the I would expect that there is a rather small standard deviation in their IQ's. This will affect my results and I would certainly need come to grips with this fact.