DISTANCE TO MANHATTAN

            I hoped that distance to Manhattan would correlate because I thought that there was a possibility that the closer a community was to the city, which has very high AIDS rates, the greater the chance they would encounter the risk factors involved in big city lifestyle. This was untrue at 95% confidence, as the correlation was -0.24 . By looking at the scatterplot, it is clear that the outliers are Dover at 32 miles, Montclair at 27 miles, and Parsippany at 25 miles, as these communities are farthest in miles from the city.  Dover and Parsippany have fairly low AIDS rates at 174 and 384 respectively, which corresponds with my hypothesis that the farther away a town is from Manhattan, the lower the AIDS rate. Montclair which is 13 miles from Manhattan, however, has a high (though not the highest by any means) AIDS rate of 824.  When these three data points are removed, the correlation then becomes 0.533, which is significant at 95% confidence. 

next