Mind the Gap Exhibition 2015
My Memorable Moment
The kid stood in front of the game board on top of the table draped in a thick black cloth. The game he was playing was about pure statistical probability, and right now the odds weren't in his favor. He flicked the paper clip spinner, and watched it eagerly as it spun. The paper clip landed on the red side of the pie chart. "Oh no, I dropped out of college!" he said with a frightened look on his face. He eagerly spun the next spinner, which would determine if he would go to prison. This time his spinner barely landed in the blue area. "Yes!" he said, jumping up and down at his achievement. He then looked up at me and said, "Now what?" I looked at the game board and answered him, "Well you graduated from high school, dropped out of college and almost went to prison. You end up living a life in poverty." I say, pointing at the silhouette of a man and two children. "Oh" he said, looking disappointing. "Do I still get candy?" he asked worriedly. "Of course, thanks for playing" I said as I reached into the bag of starbursts and game him two pieces. "Yes!" He cheered, "Thank you". Then he ran off to see a panel.
This was one of the many interactions that I had at my Statisticians booth at the Mind the Gap Symposium exhibition. I was presenting an infographic I made about the US poverty rates of different races as well as leading visitors through my "Game of Life" board game. My board game was generally well receive by parents, community members and kids alike. Everyone seemed interested in seeing where they would end up through statistical probability.
This was one of the many interactions that I had at my Statisticians booth at the Mind the Gap Symposium exhibition. I was presenting an infographic I made about the US poverty rates of different races as well as leading visitors through my "Game of Life" board game. My board game was generally well receive by parents, community members and kids alike. Everyone seemed interested in seeing where they would end up through statistical probability.
Personal Statement
This project helped me to gain a deeper knowledge of the issues that I was studying. I now know more about the effect of race on your chances success, imprisonment, and a life in poverty. This project has reaffirmed my belief that the American Dream is very hard to achieve for poor people of color and helped me to understand the specific laws, decisions and policies that have shaped this reality and need to be changed if we want to make the American Dream accessible to everyone. This project helped me to gain deeper understanding of issues that I already cared about, such as Immigration, Income Inequality and Overrepresentation of people of color in prison as well as open my eyes to issues that I did not know about such as the glass ceiling and the Drug War. I realized how the social issues that we face are intertwined with our economic practices. This project has also really helped me to understand and appreciate the relationship between math and humanities. My biggest takeaway from this project was that data can be used and manipulated to support certain view points. As I tried to visually display large data sets, I learned how different ways of displaying the same data can send different messages to the viewer. Learning how to make visual representations of data has helped me to make more persuasive arguments. Instead of looking for a graph that someone has made to support their argument, I can collect my own data and make my own graph to support my argument.
The Exhibition Experience
1) What happened at the symposium that was unexpected?
I had no idea what the space actually looked like. From the drawings on the white board at school, I thought that the space looked totally different. As a result, I didn't know where to go when I first arrived. I eventually found Ms. GC and my statisticians group. I helped to set up the tables and multiple statisticians displays. Everything was going as planned until it came time to set up my game board. The game board had printed fine and looked great but we had forgotten to bring spinners. As a result, we had to improvise spinners out of paper clips. We managed to turn several paper clips into makeshift spinners. However, if you flicked the paper clips too hard, they would go flying away. We lost about 5 paper clips because people flicked them so hard that they went flying.
2) Was there anything that went just as you though it would?
My role throughout the entire exhibition was to be a statistician/ graphic analyst. My role was to present the various infographics and board game that I had made with my group. The board game that I designed was similar to the game of ¨LIFE¨. You moveThe player spins spinners over several pie chart created using data that my group and I had collected each one of which was create to see could start off from a The board game was definitely a success, despite our trouble with the spinners, people were able to enjoy the game. I brought 2 bags of starbursts to our table. In our game
3) Based on your experience, what could you have done differently? Should you have done differently? Would have done differently?
I feel proud of the work that I did and of the work that I presented. However, I would have liked to have been been more involved with the planning aspect of the project.
This project helped me to gain a deeper knowledge of the issues that I was studying. I now know more about the effect of race on your chances success, imprisonment, and a life in poverty. This project has reaffirmed my belief that the American Dream is very hard to achieve for poor people of color and helped me to understand the specific laws, decisions and policies that have shaped this reality and need to be changed if we want to make the American Dream accessible to everyone. This project helped me to gain deeper understanding of issues that I already cared about, such as Immigration, Income Inequality and Overrepresentation of people of color in prison as well as open my eyes to issues that I did not know about such as the glass ceiling and the Drug War. I realized how the social issues that we face are intertwined with our economic practices. This project has also really helped me to understand and appreciate the relationship between math and humanities. My biggest takeaway from this project was that data can be used and manipulated to support certain view points. As I tried to visually display large data sets, I learned how different ways of displaying the same data can send different messages to the viewer. Learning how to make visual representations of data has helped me to make more persuasive arguments. Instead of looking for a graph that someone has made to support their argument, I can collect my own data and make my own graph to support my argument.
The Exhibition Experience
1) What happened at the symposium that was unexpected?
I had no idea what the space actually looked like. From the drawings on the white board at school, I thought that the space looked totally different. As a result, I didn't know where to go when I first arrived. I eventually found Ms. GC and my statisticians group. I helped to set up the tables and multiple statisticians displays. Everything was going as planned until it came time to set up my game board. The game board had printed fine and looked great but we had forgotten to bring spinners. As a result, we had to improvise spinners out of paper clips. We managed to turn several paper clips into makeshift spinners. However, if you flicked the paper clips too hard, they would go flying away. We lost about 5 paper clips because people flicked them so hard that they went flying.
2) Was there anything that went just as you though it would?
My role throughout the entire exhibition was to be a statistician/ graphic analyst. My role was to present the various infographics and board game that I had made with my group. The board game that I designed was similar to the game of ¨LIFE¨. You moveThe player spins spinners over several pie chart created using data that my group and I had collected each one of which was create to see could start off from a The board game was definitely a success, despite our trouble with the spinners, people were able to enjoy the game. I brought 2 bags of starbursts to our table. In our game
3) Based on your experience, what could you have done differently? Should you have done differently? Would have done differently?
I feel proud of the work that I did and of the work that I presented. However, I would have liked to have been been more involved with the planning aspect of the project.
Humanities Project Reflection 2015
We have been working on this project for many weeks. Look back through your journal and think back to symposium night. What are all of the things you did in this project?
This project has spanned several weeks and provided me the opportunity to explore many different issues. One of the first events that I attended, Women in Mass Incarceration Symposium at UC Irvine, got me thinking about power and privilege in the context of race, gender and socioeconomic status. At the symposium, I learned about the problematic laws and policies that have negatively affected poor people of color, especially women. These issues included the racist motivations behind the Drug War, the influence of bad science on the Drug War and Tough on Crime policies, the poor health care practices in prisons, the cycles of poverty caused by prison related debt, the problems with prosecutors pushing for the harshest sentences and the school to prison pipeline. Attending the symposium was an eye opening experience for me. It got me thinking about many of the issues that we continued to discuss during the project and motivated me to become more passionate about those issues. At the symposium I connected with one of the panelists that I found most interesting, Jack A. Cole, a former Narcotics officer and the co-founder of LEAP. After the symposium I maintained a connection with him and the LEAP organization through emails.
I remember that we watched and discussed several Ted Talks in class. One of the Ted Talks that stood out to me the most was “What Kind of Asian Are You”. The way the speaker exposed the history behind racist slurs against Asians made me think about the history behind everything we say. There are racist terms embedded in our language that we may not even think about or understand their true significance. The Ted Talk made me more aware of how close these issues are to me and everybody else.
We also watched the documentary “Missrepresentation” in class. We learned about the glass ceiling and the negative effect that unrealistic standards for beauty television, movies and media have on women and girls.
Then we started to write our position papers. After many in-class conversations and attending the Women in Mass incarceration study I decided to write my position paper on how prison limits a poor person of color’s chances of achieving the American Dream. I collected data online from government websites and research institutions like the Pew Research Center and used statistics that the panelists gave during the UC Irvine symposium. Using that data, I wrote a first draft. I got feedback from Ms. Mac and my peers to create my second draft and final position paper. In addition to collecting information from websites, I had to create my own graph from the data from one of my sources.
After I wrote my position paper, I shifted my attention to my Symposium group work. I helped brainstorm our groups interactive activity. Originally we came up with the idea of a flow chart but then we revised that idea to be a board game. I created the board game interactive for my statisticians group using data that I had collected with my group members. I displayed the data in the form of pie charts on my game board. I created and revised the game board design on photoshop over the course of several weeks based off of feedback from my group. In addition to the board game, I created, revised and printed an infographic about poverty rates in the United States that I used for the Mind the Gap symposium. I also created a document where panelists could request data and then gave graphs to them. I gave graphs to the Color of Cash group, the School to Prison Pipeline group and the Islamophobia group.
- Review the catalog of your work. Where were the challenges? Write down and describe the challenges.
The second main challenge was understanding how policies that may not affect me are affecting people with a different skin color and different socioeconomic status.
- Consider those challenges more deeply. How did you react to and grow from each challenge?Please emphasize things that challenged you to grow in the areas of empathy, understanding power, privilege & economics.
For my second challenge, the experiences I had in and outside of class heightened my awareness about how the same policies affect different groups of people differently. Through experiences like the Women in Mass Incarceration symposium, I have become aware of how the Drug War disproportionately affects people of color. For example, a poor, Black, inner city woman found with drugs would be put in jail while a rich, White, woman would go to rehab. I learned how the War on Drugs has targeted poor communities of color, despite the fact that they are not the group that consumes the majority of drugs. These experiences have helped me to become more aware of the policies made to hurt people of color and more motivated to speak out against them.
- What things do you now know (either information or experience!) that you didn’t before this project?
I learned the causes of the recession of 2008, the concept of Trickle Down Economics and Walmart welfare. I appreciated learning about these economic practices and ideas because it helped me realize how the social issues that we face are intertwined with our economic practices. A system like trickle down economics is set up in a way that benefits the rich stockholders and CEO’s while hurting the workers and everyday people.
This project has really helped me to understand and appreciate the relationship between math and humanities. My biggest takeaway from this project was that data can be used and manipulated to support certain viewpoints. As I tried to visually display large data sets from the government and other organizations, I learned how different ways of displaying the same data can send different messages to the viewer.
Statistics is a powerful tool but it requires hard work and creativity to make it accessible to everyday people who may not have an in depth understanding of statistics or the issue being discussed. Know that I have good understanding of statistics concepts like Standard Deviation, Z-scores, Shape, Spread and Center, I feel confident in making useful graphs of different kinds of data that can be understood by everyday people. I now know when to use a box plot vs a scatter plot vs a histogram. Learning how to make accurate visual representations of data has helped me to make more persuasive arguments. Instead of looking for a graph that someone has made to support their argument, I can collect my own data and make my own graph to support my argument.
- What things in this project, if any, connect to your real world and the next steps of your life?