NBA Allstars I

This exercise examines the distribution of heights (in inches and centimeters) of 10 famous basketball players. Click on Data under Chapter 1 in the left panel and then select Open remote ... under the File menu in the right panel. Select allstars.xml from the Open File Dialog and click OK. Note that both Inches and Centimeters are assigned the Y role by default, whereas Starnames is assigned the Label role.

1. Create a new variable by selecting Transform... from the Columns menu. Define the new variable by the expression Inches/Centimeters. What value do you get? Why is this value always the same? What does the value represent?
2. Select y|z from the Graph menu (conditioning z variables are not assigned here). Click on the histogram window displaying the Inches variable for the players' heights to bring it to the front if needed. Click on the right bar button until each bar spans about 4.5 in. Likewise, click on the right bar button of the Centimeters histogram until each bar spans 12.5 cm. Do the two histograms for Inches and Centimeters look similar. Explain.
3. What player is the shortest player? Click on the State (S) variable for the shortest player in the data table and look at the linked histograms.