Posts

The End of the Beginning.

    This is the last post under STP and it was been quite a ride. Friends has been created, connections has been made, and knowledge has expanded. And all of this is thanks to science.     Looking back at my first post, I described science as a way to understand ourselves and our world. After months of STP, I still stick to that answer, but with a bit more definition. There is a method to understanding ourselves and our world, and that's what we learned during our time in STP. Every experiment we perform in our pursue of understanding relationships between things require a method. To fully understand connections, we have to know all the variables, control the constants, and interpret the data in a way that can help us predict future outcomes.      Does Umbrellaology fall into the category of science? I still think so. Data was properly gathered, variables were thought of and accounted for, and from the data gathered, predictions could be...

Vaccination Investigation.

      One thing that I'm definitely going to be an expert by the end of this STP is reading graphs!  So for this experiment, we had to figure out the best type of model that fit our data. We talked about three different models; linear, proportional, and inverse proportional. A linear model is basically a line graph, where if positive, as the x value goes up, the y value also goes up. These type of models usually have a y-intercept and are mathematically written as y=mx+b. For our experiments, the y value is our dependent variable, the x is our independent variable, m is the slope of the model, and b is the y-intercept. So whenever the independent variable increases, so does the dependent variable plus whatever that initial amount. Sometimes, for our experiments, we really want to only observe the relationship between our dependent and our independent variable, and not worry about that initial amount. That's where a proportional model comes in. A proportional mod...