This two week assignment asks students to interpret and analyze the 1974 Arecibo Message sent by Drake and Sagan. Week 1 introduces the concepts behind the construction of the message and engages with a critical analysis of the architecture and the contents of the message. Week 2 asks students to develop software in a Jupyter Notebook (available for free from the Anaconda Python Distribution) to interpret messages that were similar to those produced by Drake and Sagan.

Living in a big city like New York can be very challenging. City planning is an interdisciplinary enterprise where social scientists, humanists, psychologists, scientists, statisticians, citizens, politicians, etc. come together to offer solutions to improve quality of life in the city. To find such solutions, these people need clear and reliable (qualitative and quantitative) information about specific challenges that residents and visitors face For the variety of stakeholders in the city, many different things might be considered worthy of study, depending on their interests and needs regarding, e.g., employment, financial status, family size, healthcare, mobility, and education.
For example, do you know whether your neighborhood issufficiently protected from a fire? What about other neighborhoods in the city? To what extent does a CUNY degree help a person gain employment in the City? In which ways do race or gender or sexual preference play a role in how people experience city life? Can these be quantified in dollar terms? Once you have identified a problem, write an essay that describes a question
about city life that you believe is worthy of a statistical study.

This is an in class activity created for Organic Chemistry I at LaGuardia Community College.

These materials include background for the instructor and a lab that engages student in an analysis of global inequality while learning and using the R language (a programming language for statistics). Students obtain data on the US and two other countries (one more developed and one less developed).

These materials include background for the instructor and a lab that engages student in an analysis of global inequality while learning and using the R language (a programming language for statistics). Students ultimately write a function to access country level data from the CIA World Factbook.