#what is Data Analysis

[descendant-of-truth]

While I'm of the opinion that the Re:Coded movie that's in all the collections generally does a better job at giving you all the relevant cutscenes than the Days movie, after playing through the DS game myself, I still think it's a shame how much they left out. Notably, the Castle Oblivion section is... extremely nerfed in the movie.

See, when Roxas tells Sora that he can do whatever he wants when talking to the illusions from his past, he means it. You, the player, are presented with different tasks that come with multiple dialogue options, and there are three possible endings for every "world" you enter. You get a different Ending Card depending on how you act; a Normal Card, an Alternate Card, and an Extra Card.

In the movie, instead of providing you with any kind of choose-your-own-adventure routes that lead to different cutscenes, they just. vaguely animate everyone talking silently to each other, and then have the illusions fade away. Which I think loses a lot of the intrigue, but it also means that relatively few people in the fanbase have even seen any of these routes.

I won't go over every single one because that can easily be done by looking them up on YouTube, but I do want to bring up one route in specific because it's really stuck with me ever since - Wonderland's Extra Ending.

So, in Wonderland, you're presented with a series of dilemmas:

Alice can't remember her name

The White Rabbit drops his pocket watch

The Cheshire cat gives you a riddle that requires you to choose the correct box or else fight a Heartless waiting in the wrong ones

One card soldier asks you to deliver a potion to a second card soldier for him

A third card soldier is weakened and woozy

You get the Normal Ending by doing at least one of these tasks correctly, the Alternate Ending by doing all of them correctly, and the Extra Ending by doing everything wrong.

In order to get the Extra Ending, you must:

Tell Alice that she's the Queen of Hearts

Pick up the White Rabbit's watch (causing Sora to lose sight of him, unable to return it; you're supposed to just tell him where it is)

Give up on the Cheshire Cat's riddle

Give the potion to the third, weakened card soldier, instead of its intended recipient (it turns out he was just hungry, not injured, so you didn't help him. the second card soldier would have given you a sandwich)

No matter what you do, at the end of each route, the Queen of Hearts will grab your attention and accuse you of being the thief who stole her memory. She'll try to back it up with proof, and even when you've done everything right (which she acknowledges), she still concludes with an "off with your head!" which Sora implicitly runs away from, ending the world's story.

Except for in the Extra Ending.

After she recaps everything you've done wrong up to that point, she drops this dialogue that I haven't been able to stop thinking about:

Queen of Hearts: "Don't tell me you were trying to be NICE? Cheering that girl up by telling her she was important? Giving things away because you thought someone else needed them more? Trying to... to own up to your failures!? Bah! Go on! Off with you!" Data Sora: "Not 'off with my head'?" Queen of Hearts: The punishment must match the crime! See how YOU like having something NICE done to you!"

It's hard to describe what it was about this that's still so striking to me months later, but it's just... kind of off-putting, in a way?

Having the Queen of Hearts choose to spare you as a "more fitting punishment" is out of character enough already, but the fact that it's the consequence to you actually doing everything wrong makes it feel all the more pointed. This is somehow supposed to be worse than being beheaded, and it kind of works, because it feels so much more personal than her usual schtick.

And it exists in such an isolated incident, too. The level is completed immediately after this dialogue, and nothing else is changed by getting it, it's just. there.

At the same time, everything about it feels so deliberate that I can't help but feel like it either is or will be relevant elsewhere somehow. It could just be overanalyzing on my part, but the first thing that comes to mind is actually that the Queen's final line could parallel the consequence of Sora misusing the Power of Waking?

He did so for a good cause, after all, but it wasn't what he was supposed to do. He broke a taboo of nature in the process. But his punishment isn't a straightforward death; he's just put somewhere else, somewhere he can't see his friends. "Off with you," the universe says, "see how you like having something nice done to you!"

...but that doesn't really feel like it's getting to the heart of the matter, which is that Data Sora did not need to do any of this. He could have told Alice her real name, on account of it being the default dialogue option, and he could have tried to figure out what was wrong with that card soldier before giving away stuff that wasn't his. He could have tried a little harder at the riddle. These were all fairly low-stakes situations - in particular, he really didn't need to lie to Alice.

The original Sora didn't have much of a choice in what he did. It was either lose his powers and vanish, or leave Kairi shattered and functionally dead. You can't really say he made the wrong decision, or did something immoral for a superficial reason.

So then... will this line remain an isolated slap in the face to completionist DS players, or will there be more to it? Is there already more to it that I'm missing? Where's our parallel to Data Sora "cheering that girl up by telling her she was important"? What are we supposed to make of "see how you like having something nice done to you"?

What does it all mean???

(In conclusion: go check out the DS versions of these cutscenes, they're great)

[bookwyrminspiration]

sisyphus moanin about that boulder when he doesn't even have to write a research essay with three strangers

[rlyehtaxidermist]

vote in your primaries.

Americans: Check your state's primary date here.

Pro-Palestinian activist groups are already calling for an "uncommitted" vote in the Democratic primary in Michigan specifically as a protest against the atrocities in Gaza and more broadly the lack of any real challenge to Biden's candidacy.

This is something that every data analyst in the parties will see and have to deal with. If "Uncommitted" gets enough votes, party delegates can even officially be listed as "uncommitted", which is very visible.

"But Orange Man-" This isn't the "if you don't support us you support them" of FPTP general elections. This is the Democratic Primaries. Harm reduction rhetoric is irrelevant here; Biden has no serious primary opponents.

1500 voters in New Hampshire voted in "Ceasefire", which was enough that the Biden campaign had to acknowledge it - even though their response was "see, only 1500 people cared?" And for one primary - yeah, that would be the response. Let's not make it one primary.

let's make number get bigger people

[lapdogchase]

i have officially set up the substances spreadsheet for 2025. which is a normal thing to do

[perilegs]

[romanticize-until-you-drop]

So I just won a competition for my research project…

MOM DAD IM A REAL SCIENTIST!!

[hoplaventon]

life is UNFAIR ! ! >:(

[aguineapigcouldntdothis]

I'm tagging this as jumblr bc i trust the jews to help me with my jewish polls! im currently stuck on analyzing the data on these polls because i need to compare the two and they have wildly different sample sizes. I am not explaining what i was doing here until i have all my data analysis done bc i would like to know if the results are significant or not first.

anyway if anyone has a good method of comparing 2 surveys with different sample sizes and determining if results are statistically significant please let me know! i have a few ideas but i definitely need second opinions bc i have not done stats in a hot fucking minute. the main problems I have are 1) different sample sizes and 2) most methods i find are for experimental data, not nonexperimental.

in short i want to compare the data from each individual poll button (which all correlate with each other) while also factoring in the differing sample sizes. it would also be helpful if the method was good with percentages. i really really fucking hate stats however i refuse to just treat 2 different sample sizes the same bc that would probably kill me.

i also have limited tools at my disposal. i have a shitty old laptop and an even shittier older ti-84. they can do a lot bc i bully them into submission regularly but these things are not fancy whatsoever and they have limits and they express those limits frequently

[otaku553]

can I ask what ur summer research was about?!!! :0 (u absolutely don't have to answer if ur not comfortable, I'm just a giant nerd and loves to hear about research dhdnfjdmdjfng)

Of course!!! I’d be glad to talk about it!!

In short, my research over the summer was putting mice in mazes and looking at how well they remember mazes, how quickly they learn the maze, and how learning one maze can help them learn other mazes faster. More detailed under the read more!

Previous maze studies with mice have shown that mice can actually learn very quickly when they’re learning behaviors that are in line with their own evolutionary advantages rather than arbitrary associations. It’s the difference between telling a mouse “go around these tunnels and try to find water to survive” vs telling it “do these very specific and completely useless 5 things and then you’ll get water”. Maze navigation for mice is already a natural complex behavior: mice are burrowing rodents and already have the predisposition for running around tunnels. We set up a maze and cameras and infrared lights around it to record it doing its thing, so that we can look at its natural behaviors with no human interference.

The unique thing about this project is less the behavior and rapid learning of the mouse and more the maze that we use for the study, called the Manhattan Maze. I think my mentor created it but I’m not too certain? But the basic concept of it, as shown in the figure above, is that there are two boxes of parallel tunnels and one layer of acrylic in the middle. Through holes in the acrylic, the mouse can climb between the two layers and make a “turn”. Essentially, this maze is the most reconfigurable setup for studying mouse behavior in mazes possible, because the middle layer of acrylic, which we call a mask, can be changed 2^(n^2) ways (n being the number of channels in a layer) to make completely different mazes. For the figure above, a 4x4 Manhattan maze, we have 2^16 possible different configurations, but we were actually running it on an 11x11 maze, so there were 2^121 different possible configurations! This way, we can look at the mouse in tons of different mazes without actually having to make a new maze altogether and transfer the mouse every time.

And they learn extremely fast! The mazes we used were pretty much linear paths with small dead ends that weren’t far off from the main path, and required 9 turning decisions to get from starting point to end point. There were 3 of these different masks, and after training for one day on one of them, the next day, almost all mice that completed the training managed to learn completely new 9-decision masks in 3 hours or less!

[eldersoonglore]

It's early into the morning shortly after the night to day shift change on the bridge occurred on the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D. The dull hum of the ship vibrates through the bustling corridors and quarters, including the living space of Lt. Commander Data.

Within Commander Data's quarters sits his workstation, hundreds of little green dots on the screen blinking intermittently all across the screen. To human eyes, the pattern would appear imperceptibly fast. However to an android, it became an code written in a process similar to complex form of morse.

The encrypted message remained repeating, waiting for its intended receptor to find it. It masked a frequency number that lead to a proxied connection, providing an "address" to return messages to, and one simple message:

H E L L O B R O T H E R .

<< @data-dominant >>

[willowcrowned]

leading myself to the altar as the sacrificial lamb (person that dies during finals so all exams are cancelled)

[satoshihiwatari]

hewwo a recruiter just emailed me about a job that looks soooo good (it's only for 4 months but would be such good experience). Wish me luck lads!!

[consumeroflemoans]

Yeah, reddit's good to and does seem more analyze-able

Would love to hear the findings when you're done

Yeah, so much of reddit is actively archived by its users in datasets it's so much easier to analyze

Some of the more fun subreddits to look at are ones like r/AmITheAsshole or r/TrueOffMyChest because you can pull together a good text analysis of what words/topics make people more likely to vote asshole or you can see what people tend to confess to on the internet.

One of my professor's students just presented an analysis of AITA at my college so I wanted to go the confession route for mine. I found a really good dataset online that combed all the data from r/confession in 2022. Istg cleanest dataset I've worked it I want to kiss that redditor

I started off doing a text analysis to challenge myself bc I've mostly been working with numbers and timelines in this class and haven't done a text analysis yet. I looked at the titles and the bodies of the posts to see what's most posted about.

I made some cute lil word clouds (:

This one is for the body of the post

And this one is for the title

I drew the conclusion that the majority of people that post in r/confession tend to post anecdotes from their childhood rather than current events in their lives. Also for some reason so many people want to confess to stealing stuff. It makes sense, that is a crime I feel is often dismissed and even encouraged by many people online. People could be looking for validation from redditors for stealing.

This wasn't enough for a proper analysis so I started looking at the timeline to see if there's a certain time of year people tend to post confessions. There's a significant spike in both Januarys, around August, and a big one around November but really nothing significant to note.

So instead of looking at year, I instead started looking at time of day. What I found was the two most common posting times are 2am and 5am. I was like, 'wow, ok, none of these people are sleeping' so I found a fitbit sleep tracking dataset and compared the two of them to test my hypothesis

Fucking jackpot you have no idea how giddy I was when I saw how perfectly these graphs line up. (the minutes # is combining all the people recorded btw, that's why it's so high)

Anyway this brought me to the conclusion that people are more likely to confess or reminisce when they're lacking sleep

This is probably something that could be a full on thesis but I skimped a little bit on the study because I have other stuff to do <3

[faaun]

a little bit sad @ myself :(

[bright-and-burning]

self eval time at work and i have no clue how to fill this out at ALL

[sickfreaksirkay]

to be fair considering the fact that i didn't actually attend the lab that i just wrote a 2000 word report on i did a pretty good job bullshitting