Assignment 1: Temperature Project

Randomness is the idea that a single event is not caused by something specific, but rather has a collection of various causes, and therefore cannot be predicted (1). For five days, my partner and I each recorded our temperature every two hours. There are many many factors that can influence a person’s body temperature, and therefore this activity has demonstrated the concept of randomness (1 and 2). Although overall our body temperatures demonstrated a pattern similar to that of a sine wave, with lower temperatures at either end of the day and higher temperatures in the middle of the day, each individual data point was completely random and unpredictable. According to WebMD, factors that influence body temperature can include: exercise, smoking, taking a warm shower, and hormones (4). Other factors that could affect body temperature may be weather, sleep, overall wellness, and alcohol consumption. Although meant to illustrate randomness, there were weaknesses in our data collection. An ideal situation would have been one in which the body temperature was taken in the same place each time so that outside factors would not have made so much of a difference, but that would have been nearly impossible (5). Also, although the temperature was taken during the same time intervals each day, the data would have been more precise had the temperature been taken at the same exact times each day (5).