Thursday, October 8, 2009

Survey of the Day - # of languages Spoken V. How you know the time throughout the day

# of languages SpokenHow do you get the time of day through out the day
1Cell Phone
1Cell Phone
2The sun
2phone
2watch
1Cell Phone
2Cell Phone
1Cell Phone
1Cell Phone
2Cell Phone
3Cell Phone
100Sun
0Learning my 1st language
3watch
6Cell Phone


Well Again, we are producing some wonderful scientific data! Never before have we seen such data that is so inaccurate and skewed. We defiantly have some joke'sters in the class. First let's take a step back. Sitting in a lawn chair, sipping a margarita and looking at this data we can see that there is great diversity within the class. These classmates would be considered "very fluent". I am very impressed to see 2 and 3 languages, not to mention 100. 100 languages this is craziness!! Maybe they thought "languages" meant "English words". We may never know.
Moving on, we see that the majority of surveyed participants use their cell phone for the time of day. I prefer this method, as it is very efficient and does not take too much extra time to take the phone out and check it for the time of day. We can also see people using the sun for the time through out the day. I think this is great, after all, you never know when you are going to be stranded in a desert and have to use a stick in the sand as a sundial. I would like to point out, that I was a little surprised to find that nobody purely relies on other people for their time. However, I find it consequential that when a stranger does ask for the time of day, that they are told the exact time, down to the minute (or second if available).
I would like to lastly comment on the surveyor who put down 0 "languages spoken". Considering they did put down a number, and then wrote "learning my 1st language" it seams they did understand the survey and could have participated, however they decided not to due to lack of creativity or attention span. Notice also that this very same person wrote about their lack of languages known, in the column asking about how they receive their time of day. This does give them credit for not knowing a single language, but I feel it's rather complete disrespect to write of such on the survey and treat it like a complete random survey of no importance.