Cyclistic Bike-Share Case Study

 

CASE STUDY

Cyclistic Bike Share 

 

- Scenario

Cyclistic is a fictional bike share company from Chicago. Lily Moreno is the Director of marketing who believes that the company's future success resides on the company's abilities to maximize the number of annual memberships. Your team of Data analysts want to understand how casual riders and annual riders use Cyclistic bikes differently. From these insights, your team will design a new marketing strategy to convert casual riders into annual members. But first, Cyclistic executives must approve your recommendations, so they must be backed up with compelling data insights and professional data visualizations.

One approach that helped make these things possible was the flexibility of its pricing plans: single-ride passes, full-day passes, and annual memberships. Customers who purchase single-ride or full-day passes are referred to as casual riders. Customers who purchase annual memberships are Cyclistic members. Cyclistic’s finance analysts have concluded that annual members are much more profitable than casual riders. 

the marketing analyst team needs to better understand how annual members and casual riders differ, why casual riders would buy a membership, and how digital media could affect their marketing tactics. Moreno and her team are interested in analyzing the Cyclistic historical bike trip data to identify trends.

 

-APPROACH-

1- Ask

Moreno has assigned you the first question to answer: How do annual members and casual riders use Cyclistic bikes differently?

At this point we know what management and stakeholders need. What the data analyst should do is deliver a clear statement of the business task. 

 

2- Prepare

The dataset provided for this task will downloaded from https://divvy-tripdata.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

This is a public dataset offered by a motivated international, Inc. The issues of privacy, security, and licensing are addressed ahead of the study. The dataset is securely downloaded and stored safely. The excel files are filtered and cleared. The Reliability, Originality, comprehensiveness, time stamp and the citation is well established. 

 

3- Process

All .CSV files are uploaded to the Excel and the data is ready for cleaning and transformation. The tool of choice in this case is Microsoft excel for data manipulation. First, we unzip all the files. Next step is to check for errors and nulls. Remove rows we don't need such as: ride_id. The columns started _at and ended_at are duplicated in order to separate the time and the date. In both rows, the date is formatted as HH:MM:SS and date is formatted as MM/DD/YYYY. New column is created with the title of "trip_duration_minutes" using the formula

= Table.RenameColumns(#"Removed Columns",{{"tip_abs", "trip_duration_minutes"}, {"ended_hour", "end_your"}, {"ended_date", "end_date"}, {"started_hour", "start_hour"}, {"started_date", "start_date"}})

 

Created a column called “day_of_week,” and calculated the day of the week that each ride started using the “WEEKDAY” command (for example, =WEEKDAY(C2,1)) in each file. Format as General or as a number with no decimals, noting that 1 = Sunday and 7 = Saturday.

 

4- Analyze

In order to understand the data, some calculations and new columns are needed. 

Column mean of "ride_length" = AVG (total _ride length/total ride). Max ride_length= longest  ride. The mode day of the week is the commonly reoccurring value in a dataset.

During the year period, we notice that the MAX ride length by a casual member is 2,924,156 minutes compared to 3,145,444 minutes of use by an annual member. During that same period, the MIN ride length for a casual member is 65,033; compared to 26,439 minutes by an annual member.  

 

This graph shows the numbers and length of rides by both casual and annual members.

Users with annual membership to more rides that those who have a casual membership.  

 

 

Overall the data show also that both annual members and casual members preferred the electric bike over the classic bike. Furthermore, it is very important to take into consideration the number of docked bikes. More bikes on the dock represent a significant loss in revenue for the company.

 

The Third and Fourth quarter were the busiest amongst both types of riders. 

Nevertheless, annual members still had the highest number of rides regardless of quarter.

 

 

5- Share

Considering our previous analysis, the data shows that the annual members took more trips and for a longer duration than casual members. However, casual members took more trips than annual members on the weekends. We also notice the preference in the electric bike compared to the classic bikes. Nevertheless, we have seen the staggering amount of docked bike at any given time of the year.

 

Recommendations

We have seen how casual members and annual members of Cyclistic user bike differently. Because the first quarter of the year is very slow in service for both casual and annual members, Cyclistic could offer promotional discounts and coupons in order to encourage casual members to upgrade to annual members.

The number of docked bikes is a loss of revenue to Cyclistic. A collection of data must be done to identify those starting points that are most used and increase the number of bikes there. Furthermore, studying the routes of those users will be very beneficial to Cyclistic in the future. 

 

 

 

CASE STUDY

by Sinclair Allen

11/04/2022

Final Project

http://sites.google.com/site/alumnimemory/home

Effectively Conveying The Past

Before claiming which sites most conveys the past to a “general” audience, I would like first to agree with Kevin Donovan's plea that: "Simply providing the public with access to data is insufficient to satisfy the goal of public education." Museums and historians need to realize that simply providing objects is not enough. With educational purposes, object-centered approach is not effective compare to the meaning surrounding that object. Especially with the new media, various interpretations, a richer environment and a deep interaction with the object itself is far more important than just the name of the author, creation date...
Speaking of effectively conveying the past to a “general” audience; I thought that on the one hand, the history channel website was best at it. It topics ranged from recreating the far past to telling the near past. Those topic includes people, the environment, events,...By having this limitless openness to the past, the history channel I think reaches and effectively conveys the past to a broader audience. On the other hand, by second choice, I believe that the Julia Child's Kitchen website also effectively conveys the past to a general audience. First the topic is quite practical. Almost everyone cooks on the daily basis. Second, she is herself famous (which means that a large and mixed audience is always hungry of getting to know her).

Digital Scholarship

Just about than decades ago, historians had to fly for miles or spend large amount of time in libraries, going through mountains of archives in order to retrieve a single piece of information. However, today and at this exact moment, a historian or a non-scholar some where sitting on a bed and wearing pajamas can go through an unimaginable amount of historical archives; moreover, interact directly with other people who are sharing the same interest with him/her. Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau.
Through the help of various web-search engines, a historian can get exactly what he/she wants by just typing a key word or sentence of the subject he/she want to get information about. “The way to make progress is to have more data.” Peter Norvig (video lecture). As the years are passing by, technology is getting more and more sophisticated, more and more data are being made available on the web every second. I believe that future historians and other scholars in general will be less likely to make effort in order to get information from primary sources documents. The abundance of data on the web will gradually keep on catching historians and scholars' attention and gradually redefine how future research will be conducted. Although, like Patrick Leary, I believe that digitized material will never replace the value, essence, and significance of actual historical materials. Nonetheless, those primary document will become less and less consulted because of their easy online accessibility. “This basic model for interacting with a text is simple enough, and so long as the number of online Victorian texts has been various but limited, most scholars have found this sort of searching and reading an occasional convenience, but hardly a fundamental challenge to their way of working with the period's primary sources. What will make that difference is not simply the ubiquity of the internet, or our students' (and our own) ingrained reliance upon it, but the sheer scale of what is coming online”(Leary, 2005, p77). Furthermore, “Search engines present, after all, a quite peculiar way of interacting with groups of texts; literal-minded, they bear out the old warning about being careful what you wish for” (Leary, 2005, p80). Historians and others scholars would have to keep in mind that more data could means more garbage. It is the historians' responsibility to deeply scrutinize their online material and strongly vet their sources. “The offline penumbra is that increasingly remote and unvisited shadowland into which even quite important texts fall if they cannot yet be explored, or perhaps even identified, by any electronic means”(Leary, 2005, p82).The new media is and will be the reason why many books and historical materials will go quite for a long time in some building's basement. It doesn't matter whether you advocate for the new media or not, but one reality is that, it changes us, our culture, “The conventional wisdom” , and above, the new media changes reality itself.


References

Leary, Patrick. 2005. "Googling the Victorians."Journal of Victorian Culture 10, no. 1: 72-86. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 3, 2010).
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&hid=8&sid=f271b9a3-896f-42c0-8501-1f087c66858a@sessionmgr12http://www.catonmat.net/blog/theorizing-from-data-by-peter-norvig-video-lecture/

American Council of Learned Societies (2006), Our Cultural Commonwealth.
http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/OurCulturalCommonwealth.pdf

Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig; No Computer Left Behind; Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 24, 2006. http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=38

Digital Preservation

As the new media is becoming more and more accessible to people, more and more documents are being created in digital form: “Born Digital.” One thing that everyone can agree one is that, as the time is passing by, technology is rapidly and constantly changing. Looking at the new media from this prospective, a concern arises among lovers of born digital documents on how to safely preserve their digital creations. But before we all can be concerned about how to lastingly preserved what is in the web or in other digital format, we need to worry about determining what is worth preserving first. I believe that every content has the right to be preserved for the sake of preservation itself, and based in this concept that of one man's trash being another man's treasure. Moreover, the digital storage capacities are getting bigger and more affordable on the daily basis. The down side of this approach is the overload in the amount of material available. Also, this approach destroys the core value of “perceived importance” in the profession of archivists.

“Obviously you have to use some combination of hardware and software to create and serve your website, and it can be difficult to determine where the herd will go.”(Cohen and Rosenzweig, 2005)
Preserving a digital document is more complex than just an ink-paper document. With digital material, the creator should be careful and insightful when it comes to choosing the programing language which will ensure the future of the website's functionality or digital material. The format by which historians should represent their documents. Furthermore, Most digital documents become unreadable just because of the unpopularity in term of the format by which the document were saved under.

“No acceptable methods exist today to preserve complex digital objects that contain combinations of text, data, images, audio, and video and that require specific software applications for reuse.” (Margaret Hedstrom, University of Michigan) . I would agree with her because of the complexity of the new media and the occurrence of constant changes that happen within the new media. However, one thing that all web users and scholars would agree on is the use of back ups and a regular update of those back ups. If we look at preserving the digital past from this prospective, I can say that there is not and there will not be a definitive way of preserving digital material, simply because of all the changes that occur in the technology sector. Backing up data is not enough. The library of congress can back up all their data today and not be able to read it five years from now. I will confidently conclude that preserving digital material is a matter of updating old technologies' material in order to synchronize with future technologies.

Copyrights

After reading Cohen and Rosenzweig (Digital History, 2005, Chapter 7: Owning the Past?), I came to conclude that the this copyright concern among historians and other scholars is not different than the issue of “what is pornography?”.After being unable to describe what is pornography, the United States supreme court judge Potter Stewart said: “I had been a Marines officer; he a Navy officer. We discussed our experiences with material we had seen during our military careers, and discovered we had both seen materials we considered at the time to be pornographic, but this conclusion was arrived at somewhat intuitively. We agreed that “we know it when we see it,” but that further analysis was difficult.”(The Wall Street Journal, 2010). I think that 10 judges will come up with 10 different judgements on this issue of just "what is a copyright for the new media". The copyright is very complex and subjective matter which will remain constantly changing and very partial (either provide more favors to authors and minimize distribution of intellectual materials or provide more to much access to users and de-favorise the rights of authors to be recognized).
With Digital media, historians should be concerned:

First, the nature of copy right laws which is constantly changing. The copyright laws vary not just from one country to another but also a user can be held liable for violating the right of an author while being in another country. With the New Media (Digital Media), there seem to be no jurisdiction based land borders. Historians or scholars in could be using intellectual materials without knowing that those material are copyrighted in a different country.
In the case of GNU General Public License (2007), the Free Software Foundation grants a copyleft license which guarantees the recipient's freedom to share and change all versions of a program, to make sure it remains free software for all its users. Here, the biggest issue historians should worry about is originality. If I create a digital material and pass it on to someone else, does whatever the next person creates is original? http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html Moreover, institutions such as Museums should start worrying about pirate materials (Free Culture, 2004).

Second, the notion of creativity can be fuzzy and blurry to determine. Cohen and Rosenzweig (2005) state that copyrightable works must reflect a minimal degree of creativity and originality.,http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/3.php Now the question is: Who determines that is a minimal degree of creativity? When DJ's mixes songs is it creative? Is it enough for DJ's to comodify those products?
In The MIT Press article: The case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (2006), John Willinsky argues about the place of scholarly work in a world dominated by the new media and about he future of knowledge. He thinks that open access is a public good. He claims that the scholarly work carries with it the responsibility to be widely accessed and circulated. For John Willinsky, the right to know and the right to be known are inextricably mixed. However, I think that John Willinsky is missing the fact not all scholar work is done for the sake of knowledge. There is a lucrative aspect as well. Although Scholars (historians) are less likely to be concerned by the lucrative aspect of their work rather than to their reputation, still the money is a great motivator for scholars to copyright their creations. http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10611

Third and finally, the notion of “fair use” is very open ended. What is fair use? Who should draw the line between fair use and a violation?
In the book Free Culture (2004), when it comes to the issue of Free Use versus Fair Use Lawrence Lessig states that an author can deny the release of a movie to a movie maker even though that is not his/her writing. These “Exclusive Right” given to authors by the congress for “their writings” is just absurd. It gives too much power to authors. http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf

Cohen and Rosenzweig (Digital history,2005): Owning The Past?

Just like Lawrence Lessig (Stanford University law professor), who have promoted the notion of the internet as “Creative Commons.” We all like to think of the web as a place where creators and users meet. And sometimes as creators, we find ourselves becoming users of others intellectual creations. This is where the copyright issue arises.

According to Cohen and Rosenzweig(Digital history,2005) thought that copyright law establishes a balance between the rights of holders and and the rights of users which is a give-and-take that rewards authorship but that also fosters the dissemination of knowledge for educational and academic purposes. Copyright laws change depending on the types intellectual property (digital material, paper written material, web material..), the country, and the philosophies of authorities in office. However, Cohen and Rosenzweig (2005) suggest that as historians, we actively participate in the process of shaping the copyright laws in order to make it more receptive to the sharing of ideas and expressions. http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/1.php
Cohen and Rosenzweig thought that the advantages of digital media: First, flexibility,which allows you to combine sound, moving pictures, and images with text poses a major new challenge to digital historians. The rights for images, sound, and moving images are often more complex and more expensive than for text. Second, manipulability of digital data creates another, less common legal issue. Third, its global accessibility which by an author's intellectual property available to a broader audience or specific audience may easily help web user or historians to violate the rights of other authors. http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/2.php

Cohen and Rosenzweig thought that not Even the most carefully placed or most threateningly worded copyright notice protect an author, if his/her work does not meet the requirement enunciated in the feist case that copyrightable works reflect a minimal degree of creativity and originality. This means that digitizing someone else's work does not grant the copyright protection. In general, historians are often most concerned about someone stealing their ideas, and the copyright law does nothing to protect ideas, only their formal and fixed expression. For this matter, Cohen and Rosenzweig suggest that the authors use license agreement notice and a log-in membership procedure for their websites. When it comes to universities and educational institutions, there is controversy on whether academic materials should be comodified and copyrighted or just be considered as shared intellectual materials. Nevertheless, Creative Commons has primarily encouraged copyright balance by offering free legal advice to those who want to promote an ethic of sharing and mutuality. With the help of some high-priced legal talent, the creative commons have developed a series of licenses packaged under the rubric “Some Rights Reserved.” For example, their “noncommercial license” permits free use and distribution of work only for noncommercial purposes. Other historians, who put a priority on getting their perspectives widely disseminated, might select the “attribution” license, which allows any site to display their work if it gives them credit http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/3.php.

Cohen and Rosenzweig clarifies that not every material is published after 1923 is necessarily copyrighted. For a website or any other material to be copyrighted,it requires a notice of copyright or a proof of registration with the “copyright office”. Additionally, copyright laws even on the web vary depending on the country where the material was created or copyrighted. One difference between U.S. laws related to intellectual property and those of many other countries is that those countries give authors “moral rights” that do not exist in American law. For instance authors, even if they have sold their work’s economic rights, might have the right of “integrity,” which prevents alterations of this work for example, colorizing a film http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/4.php
Furthermore, Cohen and Rosenzweig think that the hardest task for historians will be determine the rightful owner of a material in order to ask permission or determine what is “fair use” of another author's intellectual material http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/5.php