Inferring Meaning

Even after you’ve figured out the type of each column, you still may not know what a column means. Determining what an unlabeled table of numbers describes can be surprisingly difficult. Let’s return to the table that we saw earlier, shown again in Table 2-7.

How much more sense does this table make if we tell you that a) the rows describe individual people, b) the first column is a dummy code indicating whether the person is male (written as a 1) or female (written as 0), c) the second column is the person’s height in inches, and d) the third column is the person’s weight in pounds? The numbers suddenly have meaning when they’re put into proper context, and that will shape how you think about them.