Data Progress.

Data collection--stress central. With a project such as mine, the data collection process is quite tedious and requires much thought. After much consideration, I decided not to pre-make a list of restaurants, but rather to visit the French Quarter, Kenner, and Metairie and collect data from as many restaurants as humanly possible in the time allotted. My plan is to enter each restaurant and estimate to the best of my ability the amount of patrons in the establishment. If this seems to be difficult, I will attempt to ask the hostess the number of people at each table and add up the total. The next task, which is almost more difficult than the first, is deciding what to do with the data after I have collected it. In the beginning, I had decided to only produce a scatter plot to display my data, but then realized that this would not work because that is used to show correlation--something that is not necessary with this activity. I then decided to make a box plot of each set of data to show the five number summary of each, just to give an overview of the data. I also decided to make an o-give (describes the probability distribution of real valued random variables) and histograms (graphical display of tabulated frequencies) for each data set. By performing each of these displays, I am giving my audience a chance to see the data in different settings--one in which they see the pattern of number of customers in each restaurant, and the probability of each number. By viewing the box plots of the data, it can be shown which setting receives more business, which can be helpful in many ways (refer to previous blog entry entitled "How is this useful?") I would really like helpful feedback on my process, both pre and post data collection. So please, tell me what you think!!