Can Data be Comical?

What can you say about this sign-board?

• The population of New Cuyama is 562
• The elevation of this place from the sea level is 2150 feet
• And this city is established in 1951

Uh-oh, wait what?? TOTAL?? 😲

How can this be possible?  How to get a total of three incompatible data elements?? 

There is something wrong here…🤔

I will come to that later.

First, let me tell you how I came across this sign-board. 

Hmm… Have I been to Cuyama Valley in California (where this place is located)? 🤷 

No way.. how come is that possible with this lockdown? I can’t even go to some cities in my own country? 🙄

However, I saw this sign-board the day before yesterday at Dr. Kirk Borne's astounding session “A simple lesson in data literacy for data scientists” at DATAcated Linkedin live conference. 

I should mention about the conference also here. 

Let me call it one of the super-perfect live conferences I have ever attended.🙌😍 It was hosted by Kate Strachnyi and DATAcated Academy. Being a newbie to data science I was extremely enthused by the entire conference (unfold for 4 hours). <If interested you too can check the conference recording here>. Well organized, very well presented, and a big shout out to Kate and team DATAcated and all the speakers. Thank you for providing such an interesting space for us to gain knowledge on Data Science.

Well, Dr. Kirk used this simple sign-board to explain the concepts of data science like a piece of cake🙂

If I summarize his explanation;

Data science perhaps starts with something related to data; by his own words “Even though this sign-board is intended to be humorous, we can do something serious using these few data elements”. 

As data scientists, 

1.First you have to admit that “Everything is data” even though the data you have is odd and does not show any relationship among each other (as data you found in this sign-board :D) still it's DATA!

e.g: Population, Elevation, Year

2. Secondly you can look at this data and try to explore what kind of data is that? And what are the properties of this data?

e.g: Population is measured using number of people, elevation is measured using feet, and the period of establishment is presented in years

Likewise, you can inspect the data you have. Dr. Kirk uses a nice analogy for this activity as this is like your first date👫...Your “FIRST DATE WITH DATA!!😍” 

3. Then you need to figure out what you can do with this data, can you make it computable and feed into a model? For that, you can make use of data science techniques such as feature engineering, normalization, distance & similarity measures, clustering, meta-learning, KNN classification..etc.

e.g: (simple example for the use of 0-1 normalization) Get the population and elevation of all the cities in California including New Cuyama and normalize it from min to max, Derive the age of the cities using the year of establishment and normalize the age of the cities from min to max.

So, data science is all about doing something worthwhile with data ❤️

 Let me leave the data science concepts for a moment and go back to the sign-board... 👈🏻

There should be something behind this TOTAL?? 

Apart from all the useful data elements in the sign-board, I know all of you are still curious about the TOTAL🧐, so was I, even after the conference. 

And this is what I found, after a few hours of browsing 😊

Apparently, this sign-board is an example for the concept called “Mathematical Joke”

What is a mathematical joke?

“A Mathematical Joke is a form of humor that relies on the aspects of mathematics or stereotype (according to social psychology over-generalized belief) of mathematicians. 

This mathematical humor can be brought up, 

• from a double meaning of a mathematical term or 
• from laying a person’s misunderstanding of mathematical concepts or 
• from a pun (Words with similar or identical sounds but with different meanings e.g: "The cyclist was two tired to win the race", "This vacuum sucks","The wedding cake had me in tiers" 😄)

These mathematical jokes are used for entertainment as well as to teach maths. <If you want to know more about maths jokes, check this out>

Seems like this sign-board uses a mathematical joke to keep visitors of New Cuyama entertained😉

So, Can Data be Comical? 

Yes, it can be, but it's important to know that Data Science is there to make the maximum use of data to solve problems and add value to businesses, simply anywhere and everywhere which uses data.

In conclusion, hope you have picked up some important facts about data science and most interestingly found out how to crack jokes in maths😄

Cheers! Stay Safe!