iNZight Insights
in the beginning…
Whangarei PD Day
May 6th 2013
Jim Hogan
My Goals Today
 Have you gain confidence to explore this software
 Make you aware of where to find resources
 Help you appreciate when to use iNZight
 Become an iNZight user
 Have fun being a learner again.
What are your goals?
Plan of Nec Slides
 Downloading and installing on Mac or PC
 Basic history, ownership and use
 Starting it up
 Data and variables
 Graphs (dots, bars and boxes)
 PPDAC and Inference
 Discussion of when to use (and when not to use)
 PPDAC and “on the second day…”
Downloading and Installing
 Download http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~wild/iNZight/,
unzip and notice where you put it all.
 To begin find the “START_INZIGHT.command”
 Double click the ICON and way we go
 Investigate this website!
iNZight History…
 iNZight has been primarily supported by The
University of Auckland, Department of Statistics
 with additional support from Statistics New Zealand
and the NZ Ministry of Education via Census at
School NZwebsite
 Useless info…it is written in R, which is a subset of S a global
used computer language for statistics. oh…
…designed for our schools
 Initially designed for New Zealand high schools,
iNZight now extends to multivariable graphics, time
series and linear models.
 A simple data analysis system which encourages
exploring what data is saying without the
distractions of driving complex software
Getting data
 I suggest that you import .csv files
 After
 “conditioning” the data in Excel
 Taking a sample
 Getting rid of nonsense
 Tidying and ordering
 And so on.
 Develop a system that works for you… .csv
Making a .csv file
 In Excel select the file type you want.
Data and Variables
 Categorical data are things like words. One does not
add words. Telephone numbers are categorical data.
The sum of two telephone numbers does not mean a
lot.
 Numerical data can be added and multiplied.
Numerical data can be converted to categorical data.
Why might we do this?
Dot Plots and Boxes
 Rather easy to make
 Drag some numerical data into the variable.
Bar graph
 Drag some categorical data into the variable
PPDAC
 Ask a sensible question
 “I wonder if the weight of female trout in the Lake
Taupo 1993 are heavier than the males?”
 Why would I want to know this? Hmmmm…
ppdAc
 We see…
ppdaC
 And by any measure, especially the eyes, the answer is
…
Conclusion
 The female trout in the 1993 Lake Taupo are not
heavier than the males.
 The answer is not NO
 The answer is not that there is no difference
 The answer is not the males are heavier
 ATFQ
 The answer is as above.
A better question?
 I wonder if the trout caught by FF are bigger than the
trout caught by any other method.
 Reason…I want to catch a big trout
 Task, you answer this.
When to use iNZight
 Discussion time…
When to use iNZight…
 My view is
 not before students are ready
 that means
 when they tell you how to
 draw a dot plot and bar graph
 draw a box and whisker and tell you everything about it
 not before and can describe distributions using their eyes.
REASON
----------------
Reason
 Reason
This is very powerful software and they will
take the short cut and use it before
understanding what it all means. So if you
want to create a rod for your own back then
show them how to use it.
 Year 7/8 – never
 Year 9/10 – only when they are
multiplicative, know fractions and can
explain that 25% of the data is in each of
box parts. What min, LQ, med, UQ, IQR,
max all mean.
 Year 11 – Use deeply.
Use any time as a
teaching tool for visual
stuff.
Let’s play and discover more
questions
 Hands on, get dirty!
 Are there two species of dolphins in NZ waters?
 What is your best approach to catching a big trout?
 Time series?