Week 2: Introduction to Data

Lesson

Lesson document

What is data?
How to data
Basic data representations

New Terms

Analog: Relating to continuous numerical values of infitesimal granularity
Binary: Base-2 numeral system, consisting only of 0 and 1. Counting up from 0, the binary numbers are: 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000...
Boolean: A data type that has two possible values: True and False. These are often used with and associated with the binary values 1 and 0. Boolean values in Python are often used in conditionals and loops (which we'll talk about in the future)
Digital: Relating to discrete numerical systems
Floating Point Number (Float): A number with a decimal point (e.g. 3.0 rather than 3). Because computers use binary numbers internally to represent numbers with decimal points, we often run into very small and unexpected rounding errors when using floats.
Integer: A positive, negative, or zero whole number (e.g. 3 rather than 3.0).
String: Text data. We can think of it as a list of this as a list of characters. For example, "Hazel"[2] is 'z'.

Homework to do before Week 3

Do:

Let's flex our algorithmic thinking muscles some more. Write out in plain English an algorithm to sort a deck of cards.
And: Write out in plain English an algorithm for a cashier to find exact change.

Read:

Posner, Miriam (2015), Humanities Data, a Necessary Contradiction

Horgan, John (2017), Profile of Claude Shannon, Inventor of Information Theory