Math Links for Week Ending Jan 25th, 2013

Math in the News is a website that puts out a slideshow on a semi regular basis. The slideshows indicate instances where math shows up in the news and includes ideas of where to incorporate them in math curriculum. The most recent one is from November of 2012 and of course includes info about the election. Currently there are 67 of these slideshows so there is quite a back catalog to get caught up with
http://www.slideshare.net/Media4Math/
Curriculum Tags: All

I know that I have already mentioned the Wild About Math blog but they have just uploaded another Inspired by Math interview. This time with Keith Devlin (The Math Guy -among other things). In this almost 2hour interview Keith talks extensively about teaching his MOOC (massively open online course) Introduction to Mathematical Thinking to over 64,000 students. I have blogged a bit about the concept here but this was really interesting to hear some of the logistical aspects. For example, he talked bit about the validity and method for students grading each other.
He also said a couple of things that really resonated with me. I will paraphrase here "Learning math is like learning to ride a bike. You can't learn by just having it explained to you. You have to try it and fail at it and try it and fail at it and then finally you will learn to ride a bike and you will never forget how to do it again" and "In high school I aced my calculus courses but didn't understand calculus until I was a graduate student TAing a calculus course"
Look for his new Math gaming app which should be coming out in about 3 weeks.
http://wildaboutmath.com/2013/01/22/keith-devlin-%E2%80%93-inspired-by-math-17/
Curriculum Tags: All

Here is a great site to get some sinusoidal (and maybe some linear) data for analysis. In fact, I got the sunrise sunset data for Windsor, massaged it into a spreadsheet and then created a Fathom file for you here to use. Have fun. Sundata.csv, Sundata.ftm
http://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U, MCF3M, MHF4U




With the Superbowl coming up, I thought I would share a slideshow I made for the 2008 Superbowl on all the different ways the money is spent on that one weekend.

Are you ready for some fooseball2008 from d2thep

Curriculum Tags: MDM4U


I am not completely sure how this could be used in a math class but I was fascinated by the connection of math and economics to show that LeBron James is actually severely underpaid at $17M per year. I am pretty sure you could tie this into statistics. Listen to NPR's Planet Money story here:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/01/25/170176590/at-17-5-million-a-year-lebron-james-is-underpaid
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U

Dan Meyer did a nice montage of disparaging marks against math in the movies. One of the neat things about this clip was the website Subzin. On that site you can enter any words or phrases and it will search out where and when that appeared in their movie database.
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=16222
Curriculum Tags: All

Another nice video from The Art of the Problem. This time on using tree diagrams with conditional probability.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxm4Xxvzohk

Curriculum Tags: MDM4U