Completed Projects

HOME Line-https://homelinemn.org

HOME Line provides free and low-cost legal, organizing, education, and advocacy services so that tenants throughout Minnesota can solve their own rental housing problems. We work to improve public and private policies relating to rental housing by involving affected tenants in the process.

  • Project 1-Analysis of Bedbug Calls (completed!)

Bedbugs are a relatively new problem that tenants have begun to face over the last ten years. Bedbugs are insects which suck human blood and can infest a tenants house. Bedbugs cause problems that range from merely annoying to threatening a tenant’s health and well being. Minnesota law requires a landlord, in most cases, to exterminate the bedbugs at the landlord’s expense. However, this does not always happen. Many tenants call our hotline and ask for legal advice when their landlords do not exterminate bedbugs. When they call us, they go through an intake process where we ask them a number of questions which include a few questions about demographics such as their race or ethnicity. A preliminary look at our calls seems to indicate that tenants who are from a racial or ethnic minority receive a bill for bedbug treatments more often than white tenants.

HOME Line would like help preparing and designing a follow up survey for those tenants who called our hotline about bedbugs, and HOME Line would like help analyzing the results of the survey. (HOME Line would perform the survey unless STATCOM suggested differently.) Generally, we would like to know two things:

    1. Is a tenant able to get a landlord to exterminate bedbugs at the landlord’s expense?
    2. Are non-white tenants more likely to be billed for bedbug extermination by their landlord?

Team:
Tony Theis  theis369@umn.edu


 

Sustainable Farming Association-

http://www.sfa-mn.org/

The Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota (SFA) is a nonprofit organization that supports the development and enhancement of sustainable farming systems through farmer-to-farmer networking, innovation, demonstration, and education. 

  • Project 1-Survey Data Analysis

SFA wants to use post-event surveys to assess the effectiveness of their programs. These programs are aimed at educating the audience about sustainable farming as well as providing an opportunity for the attendants to network. Particularly, SFA has collected post-event survey from their recent on-farm soil health events. The analysis will help SFA design more accessible and attractive programs. In addition to survey data analysis, SFA is looking for suggestions to improve the survey design and to collect the post-event feedbacks more efficiently for their Annual Conference in Feb. 2017 and the Midwest Soil Health Summit. Since SFA also uses pre-event surveys to gauge the interest of the attendants, analysis for these survey data could be incorporated into the project as well.

The deadline is flexible yet preferred to be the end of December of 2016.

Team:
Zhuozhi(Georgia) Huang  huan1108@umn.edu
Enoch Kan  kanxx030@umn.edu


Nice Ride MN  – https://www.niceridemn.org

Nice Ride Minnesota is a non-profit organization that provides public bike sharing to the Twin Cities. Nice Ride’s mission is to enhance the quality of our urban life by providing a convenient, easy-to-use bike sharing program that will provide residents and visitors a healthy, fun, different way to get around town. There is two project that Nice Ride would like Statcom to help with:

  • Project 1

An intercept survey of walk up users. Generally speaking all large scale bike sharing systems have two primary groups of users, regular members, about which a lot is known, and walk up users about which almost nothing is known. The bike share industry is interested in learning more about these walk up users. There have been a few attempts at an intercept survey, the most notable was done by Virginia Tech for the Washington D.C. Capital Bike share system.

Team:
Danning Zhang  zhan4451@umn.edu
Xinpeng Shen  shenx582@umn.edu
Yi Liu  liux3545@umn.edu

 

  • Project 2 

A predictive tool for managing the supply of bike and docking points. We’ve been thinking for some time about developing a tool that would help manage the supply of bikes and dock points by trying to predict the likelihood that a station is going to become full or empty in the near future, say the next 30 minutes. Currently I’m not aware of any cities using such a tool but it think there’s some real potential to improve the efficiency of bike redistribution if we were to build something.

Team:
Yang Yang  yang4123@umn.edu
Xin Yang  yang4055@umn.edu

 


Compassionate Action for Animals – https://www.exploreveg.org

Compassionate Action for Animals (CAA) is a Minneapolis non-profit that exists to educate the public about farm animal suffering and build an animal-friendly community in the Twin Cities region. CAA has asked Statcom to help design and analyze a survey to evaluate the efficacy of Veg Fest, CAA’s annual festival.

Team:
Sakshi Arya  aryax010@umn.edu
Yang Yang  yang4123@umn.edu
Brandon Whited  white942@umn.edu


United Way of Washington County-East – http://www.uwwce.org

The United Way of Washington County-East is looking for a statistician to analyze donation trends data. They would like to figure out what variables are associated with donation trends so they can better focus their effort. The client said that this project is time sensitive and needs the results within a month. This is a good chance to show that you can perform under a deadline and for Statcom to gain rapport with a large non-profit organization.

Team:
Yun You (Team Leader)  youxx143@umn.edu   official_logo_linkedin_1
Jingxiang Li lixx3899@umn.edu
Yin-Ting Chou  choux130@umn.edu   official_logo_linkedin_1
Xin Yang  yang4055@umn.edu   official_logo_linkedin_1
Christine Storing stori007@umn.edu


De LaSalle high school – http://delasalle.com

De LaSalle (DLS) is a local Catholic high school whose mission is to serve students from Minneapolis and surrounding communities who seek a high-quality, values-based, academic preparation for life.

 DLS has experienced a tremendous amount of growth over the last few years and they want to better understand the key factors associated to their success.

Team:
Drew Anderson
Tri Nguyen
Patrick Daly
Jackie Yao


Fulton Neighborhood Association – http://fultonneighborhood.org

The Fulton Neighborhood Association (FNA) is the nonprofit neighborhood organization that was created in 1990 to represent the interests of residents, property owners and business owners in the Fulton neighborhood.

 FNA has collected surveys from 618 individuals who live in the neighborhood which contained roughly 50 questions.  Their goals are to understand and quantify community sentiment towards enhancing the walkway along the Minnehaha creek in southwest Minneapolis, summarize community opinion based on various factors like neighborhood of origin and common uses of the creek path, and figure out the representativeness of the survey responses. We will also be overlaying US census data,  look for other patterns between responses and available civic data.

Team:
Lei Shi ( Team leader )  shixx449@umn.edu
Brandon Whited white942@umn.edu
Zixing Su  suxxx313@umn.edu
Weikang Duan
Pu Ke
Shaoxuan Wang  sxwang@ucdavis.edu


U of M statistics dept – http://www.stat.umn.edu

The U of M statistics dept. has asked us to look at admissions and student data to summarize any relevant trends and identify significant variables when predicting matriculation, student success, and effective advertising.

*Statcom would not have been possible without the support from the statistics department and this project is a sign of our appreciation. Thank you!

We would like to note that Statcom’s mission is to help improve the local community through statistics. Henceforth we will not be offering our services to any departments and research labs/ programs within the University of Minnesota unless there is a clear benefit to the community and we have received approval from the statistics dept. and the statistical consulting clinic.  If you are within the U of M and need statistical analysis, please contact Aaron Rendahl at the consulting clinic: http://www.stat.umn.edu/consulting/ .

Team:
Sijia Liang ( Team leader )  liang155@umn.edu
Zixing Su  suxxx313@umn.edu
Tao Xu
Wenjing Yang  yang2987@umn.edu
Chunlei Li  lixx2788@umn.edu


Mano a Mano – manoamano.org

Mano a Mano international partners is a non-profit in Saint Paul whose mission is to create partnerships with impoverished Bolivian communities to improve health and increase economic well being. Mano a Mano has helped build several clinics and would like to analyze data the clinics have generated. They have collected data over the past five years and would like to have descriptive analysis of what happens in their clinics, and how that changes over time.  Some of the specific questions they would like to answer are:

1. Can we describe clinic population (demographic information)?

2. Why did the person come in to the clinic (presenting problem)?

3. What service did the person get?

Team:
Logan Sullivan ( Team leader)  sulli999@umn.edu
Xu Guo  guoxx334@umn.edu
Adam Seivert  seive020@umn.edu


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