The unemployment situation has gotten better since Obama took presidency.

This should be pretty easy. For me to win the debate, I need to prove that the trend of the unemployment numbers are better in the overall Obama administration than they were at the time Obama was signed in as 44th president of the United States of America. The following is a screenshot of the data taken from the United States Department of Labor website, and my opponent has already seen this data, and indeed blogged about it on their own website. Since I assume this means he agrees that the source is credible and unbiased, this will be my main source. [1] (Apologies to those who are innumerate) In math terminology, a linear function is an equation that is solvable, meaning that it only has 1 y coordinate for every x. In laymans terms, its a line that doesn't go completely vertical at any point in time. The line on the graph above can be expressed as a linear function, since there is only 1 data point for each value of x. In popular statistics, trend estimation is the simplification of a series of data in order to more accurately interpret the data. [2] The data can be downloaded into Microsoft Excel and a scatter plot can be relatively easily made to show the data on a scatter plot. After doing this, a second order (parabolic) binomial trendline is very easily added, and the equation of that trendline can be shown on the graph with (literally) the click of a button. Below is the scatter plot, with added trendline and binomial equation, all generated from the above data, for the duration of the Obama administration (from Jan 2009 to Mar 2012). Note: the x-axis is the number of months elapsed since Obama's inauguration and the y-axis is the unemployment rate in %. In mathematical terms, the equation y=-0.0038x^2+0.1333x+8.5186 can tell us a lot about the expected direction of things to come. As is, you can substitute a number (in months) for x and simply solve the equation to get a value for y (% unemployed). This could help, simply by substituting in a number greater than 40 for x, you will find that the unemployment rate is likely to decline in the future, if no other variables change.Instead of resting at this, I'm going to directly prove that the trend of the unemployment numbers are better in the overall Obama administration than they were at the time Obama was signed in as 44th president of the United States of America. To do this, I need to incorporate calculus.In calculus (ugh...I know, don't worry I'll keep it simple) one of the more powerful applications I found is the ability to find the rate that something is changing at, or in other words what direction it is going at any given time. [3] For this equation, I'm going to take the derivative of y to find an equation for the rate of change at any given point in the line. y=-0.0038x^2+0.1333x+8.5186y'=(2)(-0.0038x)+(1)(0.1333)y'=-0.0076x+0.1333The equation is a lot simpler, because there are no exponents. I'm going to show that when Obama came into office (hehehe) the rate of change (direction) that the unemployment rate was heading, was INCREASING. Simply enter 0 in for x, and voila! You get y=0.1333, meaning when Obama took office, the unemployment rate was increasing at the rate of 0.1333% per month (or 1.6% per year). During March 2012, the last month we have data for, substituting 39 (the total number of months Obama has been president for) for x gives the equationy'=(39)(-0.0038x)+(1)(0.1333)y'=-0.1482+0.1333y'=-0.0149SINCE f'(0)>f'(39) (the unemployment rate was increasing more in Jan 2009 than in Mar 2012)THEREFORE, the unemployment situation has gotten better since Obama took presidency.Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.