Bio Lab: HR and RR after Exercise

 Posted on November 3, 2021  |  Mike Ching

Introduction Students in Biology classes at Iolani School collected data on heart rate and respiratory rate before, during, and after exercise. We describe the results below. Methods library("tidyverse") # Software library used for data cleaning and analysis. ## ── Attaching packages ─────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse 1.3.1 ── ## ✓ ggplot2 3.3.5 ✓ purrr 0.3.4 ## ✓ tibble 3.1.4 ✓ dplyr 1.0.7 ## ✓ tidyr 1.1.3 ✓ stringr 1.4.0 ## ✓ readr 2. [Read More]

Hundred Game Division Winners

 Posted on September 30, 2021  |  Mike Ching

As we get closer to the end of the baseball season, the San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers both have over 100 wins. A friend asked if there had been situations where two 100 win teams had been in the same division AND there had been no other 100 win teams in other divisions. It’s kind of a weird question, but it inspired me to look at the Lahman database to find an answer. [Read More]

Set Simulation

 Posted on September 7, 2021  |  Mike Ching

My son and I were playing the card game “Set” this weekend. It’s a fun pattern matching game, and if you don’t know the rules, they’re available online here. Basically you deal out 12 cards and look for a set of 3 cards that fit a certain pattern. Each time a set is removed, 3 more cards are dealt to return the number of face up cards to 12. [Read More]

Dirichlet Rational Approximation

 Posted on August 13, 2021  |  Mike Ching

I’m reading this fantastic book Shape by Joshua Ellenberg, and in one of the chapters it talks about rational approximations of irrational numbers. That is, like how 335/113 is very close to pi. He shows a technique for figuring out rational approximations that proves that it is possible to find an approximation that is better than dividing by a power of 10 (like 31415/10000). In other words, you can find a denominator that is smaller than 10000 that will lead to an error that is less than 1/10000. [Read More]

Implementing Elo Ratings for Spikeball

 Posted on May 23, 2021  |  Mike Ching

My son’s friends began a spikeball tournament and wanted to determine who would be the best spikeball team. The traditional choice would be a round robin format and/or a tournament. With a few teams, neither would take very long, but my son wanted to know if they could use the chess rating Elo system to determine what team was the best. First we had to learn about how the Elo system works. [Read More]

Advocacy Survey

 Posted on May 22, 2021  |  Mike Ching

(Updated 2021-09-01) Our pediatric chapter’s advocacy committee asked the chapter members what their priorities are for advocacy issues. We gave them a list of topics to rate as 1-10 and I needed to calculate the mean score then rank them. This is probably doable as a pivot table within the spreadsheet software, but why pivot table when I can practice some data manipulation skills? First load tidyverse package and advocacy dataset. [Read More]

COVID-19 School Indicators Update 2021-02-27

 Posted on February 27, 2021  |  Mike Ching

Since the DOH does not publish data on how Hawaii fares compares to the CDC school reopening criteria, and since Maui is getting out of control, I figured I would update my graphs from last week. See that post for more context on where these numbers come from. I again downloaded the data from the “How is Hawaii Doing at Flattening the Epidemic Curve?” Tableau figure on the Hawaii DOH COVID-19 data site. [Read More]

New COVID-19 School Indicators

 Posted on February 21, 2021  |  Mike Ching

The CDC recently updated its school opening indicators. It’s really just a judgment call on how much transmission is happening in the communities. Since the data presented on the Hawaii DOH website isn’t easy to compare directly to the CDC numbers, I calculated the numbers myself. I downloaded the data from the “How is Hawaii Doing at Flattening the Epidemic Curve?” Tableau figure on the Hawaii DOH COVID-19 data site. [Read More]

Bean Sprout Respiration Update

 Posted on February 7, 2021  |  Mike Ching

Four years ago, my wife’s Biology class did a bean sprout respiration lab and she asked me to plot the data for her. Or maybe I just saw her data and decided I wanted to play with it. Anyway, they do this lab every year and this year I thought I would go back and look at the data again. library(tidyverse) ## ── Attaching packages ────────────────────────────── tidyverse 1.3.0 ── ## ✓ ggplot2 3. [Read More]

COVID-19 and Party Affiliation in US Congress

 Posted on January 14, 2021  |  Mike Ching

This week the New York Times published a simple infographic showing how many members of Congress have tested positive for COVID-19. According to their reporting there have been 44 Republicans and 17 Democrats who have tested positive (as of January 14, 2021). They further break it down by Senate and House. In the Senate, there have been 8 out of 51 Republicans and 2 out of 48 Democrats. In the House, it is 36/213 to 15/226. [Read More]