Zillow

Discuss these issues: 1. You had to read an article about Zillow in Week 2. Have you ever used Zillow to look up house prices? If not, use it (Zillow.com) to look up a house you now live in or one you used to live in. Discuss your experience. Why is the median error rate a poor indicator of accuracy based on the sample taken by the author of the article? If you were buying a house, what additional steps should you take to see if the Z-Estimate is accurate or not? A large University has healthy enrollments in its MPA program which it has offered since 1995. Students do well in the structured classes. However the thesis class at the end of the program has been challenging. Forty-two % of all thesis class enrollees have not completed their thesis in the allotted 16 weeks – this number has been mostly constant since 1995. You have been assigned to investigate the issue and you plan to conduct a survey. Discuss the following: 2. What is your target population and what type of sample do you think you will use. Specifically, which students will be surveyed and why? 3. How would you select the survey participants and why? 4. When you collect data from the students will you be collecting any of the following data types? Explain and give examples: Nominal, Ordinal, Interval, and Ratio (NOIR). 5. One of your survey questions focuses on gender – there is a box to check for male respondents and one to check for female respondents. You now know, after reading Chapter 2 that you cannot run statistical procedures on non-numeric data even though you coded the data as M or F. How would you go about creating a dummy variable for gender in your Excel spreadsheet so that you can analyze the gender using statistics? 6. Measures of Central Tendency: Most of us are familiar with the concept of Mean (average). How and when would you use the concepts of median and mode? Give examples. 7. Measures of Variability: The text discusses measures including range, inter-quartile range (IRQ) and variance. The most common variance measure is standard deviation. If someone describes another person as being more than 2 standard deviations below the mean, is that a good thing? Explain? 8. In reviewing Figure 2.11 – Calculating Variance and Standard Deviation, what is meant by the authors when they say that “Variability is the Enemy” in the narrative just below Figure 2.11?