This was an assignment for Advanced Mathematics for Business and Technology, a course taught by Prof. Vincent Ginis at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). It covered series (including Taylor and Fourier), dynamic systems analysis and gave a short introduction into chaos theory.
The assignment consisted of using two different datasets which were supposed to be analyzed and visualized in some way using Wolfram Mathematica. The assignment was very free, and designed to make us familiar with the functionalities of Mathematica. My project contains an exploratory analysis and visualization of a dataset on global immunization coverage, and another on global mean temperatures.
"In a devastating example of critical thinking gone bad, highly educated, deeply caring parents avoid the vaccinations that would protect their children from killer diseases. I love critical thinking and I admire skepticism, but only within a framework that respects evidence. So if you are skeptical about the measles vaccination, I ask you to do two things. First, make sure you know what it looks like when a child dies from measles. Most children who catch measles recover, but there is still no cure and even with the best modern medicine, one or two in every thousand will die of it. Second, ask yourself, "What kind of evidence would convince me to change my mind?" If the answer is "no evidence could ever change my mind about vaccination," then you are putting yourself outside evidence-based rationality, outside the very critical thinking that first brought you to this point. In that case, to be consistent in your skepticism about science, next time you have an operation please ask your surgeon not to bother washing her hands."
Rosling, H., Rosling, O., & Rönnlund, A. R. (2018). Factfulness: Ten reasons we're wrong about the world [Dash] and why things are better than you think. Sceptre.
The vertical red line highlights when the fraudulent paper that launched the modern "anti-vax" movement was published (February, 1998, by Andrew Wakefield), and the vertical green line highlights Brian Deer's investigative report (the first of many) on the Sunday Times which exposed the fraud.
"When you have an established scientific emergent truth, it is true whether or not you believe in it, and the sooner you understand that, the faster we can get on with the political conversations about how to solve the problems that face us. So once you understand that humans are warming the planet, you can then have a political conversation about that." Neil deGrasse Tyson
The dataset contains measurements of the average global temperature in relation to a base period (1951-1980).
