Topic 215

Data search, collection, processing and analysis by Joseph

When you have a question, whether it is for science or just any question in life, you need to do a series of steps to answer it. These include the scientific method of data search, collection, processing, and analysis. First you got to find data by searching for them, and then you collect some data to experiment or use on, process and record information, and finally analyze the answers you receive.

How can you search for data? This is relatively simple ever since the Internet came out. There are tons of information and ideas over the Internet, in which you can receive quick and easy information. You can also search for data yourself, by going outside and looking for stuff. By getting the data you would then go advance to the next step, collection.

Collecting data, like searching is very simple, it actually is basically the same. Like when you go outside to find the data, you would bring in something useful to your topic. On the Internet, you can find certain items you need and buy them from a shop, or look for it. You can even make it, which leads to the actual doing, data processing.

To data process is to use the data you collected and process it. There are many ways to do this. You can make an experiment like in science or so. But in computer terms, this is a series of operations performed on data to receive information. You can input the data into the computer, which would process it and give you information.

But the information is not answers yet; it is just a bundle of facts. To get them to be answers, you must analyze the information received from processing and work them out in a way that it can answer your question. For example you can receive the information one plus one is two when your question is how many apples would you have if you pick one from one farmer than one from another. The information one plus one is two tells you a broad answer that is not clear. By analyzing, you can realize that there is one apple from one farmer plus one apple from another farmer which makes it two apples.


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Data search, collection, processing and analysis by Chaan

Recently I had a great experience of working at this hotel. The job had to do something me giving out brochures while my friends were compiling data about people. The data had information like why the people were there (for the fair), their age, what universities they attended etc. The people wrote all this info on application forms and since I wanted more money, I took the responsibility of entering all that data onto an excel spreadsheet. Now, one may wonder why I got paid so much for a job that doesn’t look that challenging.

This is where the topic of the paper comes in. Data search and collection are two very important things in today’s world. Data collection had already been done at the hotel by my friends and by the people who had filled up the forms. Now data search was for the people who were paying me to do this work. The fair wanted to know what kind of people, from what age group and other kinds of information like that. In order to find this, they made me enter all the data in an excel spreadsheet because it becomes easy to search for information through computers. They also thanked me for organizing all the data in the way I did because it made it easier for people to search through the document!

Data processing refers to the process of converting data into information. It’s usually automated and ran on a computer. Data is only useful when it’s presented clearly and organized in a clear way. So the act of entering data into excel was “data processing.” I processed all the data in a nice way so that the people can easily view it and access it, which brings us to data analysis. It can also refer to the converting of data back into information. You may want to know why one would do that. One of the reasons could be that the way data was processed is not acceptable by the company and thus they would want to do it their own way or simply because it could be done in a better way.

According to wikipedia, data analysis refers to data analysis is the act of transforming data with the aim of extracting useful information and facilitating conclusions. Unlike data mining, data analysis is usually more narrowly intended as not aiming to the discovery of unforeseen patterns hidden in the data, but to the verification or disproval of an existing model, or to the extraction of parameters necessary to adapt a theoretical model to (experimental) reality.