Jeff Sapp

There is a lot of bullshit out there - but how much exactly, and of what form?

The purpose of our culminating assignment is for you to explore this question by taking a “bullshit inventory” of all of the bullshit you encounter during the course of one week.  The idea is to make note of each bit of bullshit that you see or hear, and to record some information about it.  While the assignment is open-ended and I want you to be creative, you might consider keeping track of:

1.  Bullshit that you are exposed to

2.  Bullshit that  you produce yourself

3.  Bullshit that you debunk or try to debunk

Many people try to be carbon-neutral in their daily living, and I admire that, but are you bullshit neutral as well?  That is, do you debunk as much bullshit as you produce?  It’s not so easy to do.  Are you at least bullshit-average, creating no more bullshit than you are exposed to?

To do this assignment, you’ll have to figure out a few things, including:

*  What constitutes bullshit, in your mind?  Does a deliberate lie count, for example?  Does the bullshitter have to be aware that he or she is bullshitting?  And so on.

*  How are you going to measure this bullshit?  Are all instances of bullshit - say a 10-page term paper or a 140-character tweet - equivalent?  Should we measure bullshit in terms of the amount of time that one spends dealing with it?  Are some kinds of bullshit more significant than others?

*  How are you going to track your daily encounters with bullshit?  There’s so much bullshit out there that you may or may not want to sit down and try to remember it all each evening.  Maybe it would work better to have some way of recording your observations as you go through your day.

*  How much information do you feel comfortable providing?  Personally, I’m not really looking for the kind of detail like, “9:15 AM.  Ran into Dr. So-and-So in the elevator and had to listen to him brag about his recent appointment as vice chair of the university’s Interdepartmental Committee for the Reduction of Unnecessary Administration.”  Why?  Because you never know how these things might get out!  So how will you anonymize the data enough that it won’t get you in trouble down the road?

You can report or visualize the data however you see fit.  Here is an example:

For further inspiration, you might take a look at the Dear Data Project.  This site has a number of cool examples of visualizations of data about everyday life.  I like these, but feel free to be creative and display your data however you like, with an interactive app, using data visualization software, in PowerPoint, with a stack of 3x5 cards, in song, or in any way that catches your fancy.

Come on.  Have some fun with this.

This Blog’s life begins on Sunday June 4th and its life ends on Sunday June 11th at midnight.

What did you learn from reading the case study?

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After reading the article by Matthews AND the correlation PowerPoint, what do you now understand about correlation?

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Visual representations can sometimes be MORE powerful than the data itself.  What new caution do you have, though, about data visualization? 

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After reading about publication bias in academia, how will you approach reading professional articles about your teaching profession differently than before you took this class?  What has changed for you?