MSA Share:20 gives students the opportunity to share information about a relevant or interesting topic with their classmates. MSA Share:20s are done during the lunch hour. The speaker prepares and delivers a 20-minute presentation or interactive tutorial or walk through. Then, students have time to ask questions and discuss the topic.
Think mini TED-like talks meet Lunch-and-Learns: The audience learns something, and the speaker gets more presentation practice.
November 2018
- Social Network Analysis: A Visual Tool for Decision Making
Jeremy Smith provided an overview of social network analysis (SNA). SNA is the application of graph theory to understand, categorize, and quantify relationships in a social network. This tool can improve analytical capability in data science.Jeremy showed SNA applications in customer churn predictions. - You Should Have (More) Kids
Evan Wimpey discussed why most people overestimate the costs and underestimate the benefits of having children. Most people, whether implicitly or explicitly, evaluate some cost (both monetary and non-monetary) of having and raising children. Evan shared twin and adoption data, parenting impact, and the social impact of your potential children. His actual aim was not to convince you to have more children, but he will try to outline why it is probably less costly than you think.
October 2018
- Wells Are Swell
Steven Powell provided a brief intro to groundwater wells. The objective of the talk was to increase the students’ domain-specific understanding of groundwater for the upcoming time series assignments and the visualization project. Steven discussed the typical well design, considerations for their data, statistical approaches, and common visualizations.