Math Links for Week Ending May 2nd, 2014

More than 30,000 people were surveyed and asked what their favourite number was. Spoiler alert, it was 7. Or more specifically, of all the numbers that people suggested as their favourite (there were over 1100), 7 came up the most (9.7% of people chose it) and 3 came up 2nd (7.5% of people chose it). This is what Alex Bellos found and you can download the entire Excel spreadsheet here (I do love data sets). Perfect for any data management class. It really is interesting what numbers people chose and how many chose each. And don't forget to check out Alex's books Alex Through the Looking Glass (called the Grapes of Math in NA) & Alex's Adventures in Numberland
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://pages.bloomsbury.com/favouritenumber

A couple from Nate Silver. The first is about what the statistics tell us about the flipped diversity between owners of professional teams and their players. Any data we can get about sports can help us capture the interest of some of our sport minded students.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/diversity-in-the-nba-the-nfl-and-mlb/

The second link from Nate Silver really hits at the heart of using proper sampling. Here a poll tried to gauge the interest of the US population that were interested in the World Cup. However, they only conducted the poll in english and so it suffered from Non response bias from the large Hispanic population that may only speak Spanish. You can see why this is significant when you see the results of the Hispanics that did answer the poll and how they outnumber every other ethnic group.
Read about all the details here.
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/to-gauge-americans-interest-in-the-world-cup-ask-some-people-in-spanish/

I really like this calculus app. In it you are given a particular function and then asked to trace out the derivative. A really neat concept. I also like how it scores your attempt (yay for me, I got 95% accuracy on my last attempt). My biggest complaint is that its flashed based. So iPads are out. But if you have a flash ready tablet, then you are good to go. I think this is important because I think any "tracing" app is hard to actually do with a mouse so a tablet is really helpful. Thanks to Mark Esping for this one.
Curriculum Tags: MCV4U
http://www.flashandmath.com/mathlets/calc/derdraw/DerivativeDraw.html

I hesitated to include this one because its about a celebrity complaining about math curriculum. Stick to acting. This is not as bad as Jenny McCarthy's campaign against autism but still. Also because I actually like Louis CK's comedy stylings. Thanks to Michele Cooper for this one.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/05/louis-ck-against-the-common-core.html

A new video from Numberphile about ordering cards. Something you can tie into permutations in data management. 

Curriculum Tags: MDM4U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwIAfkuXc5A

I like watching Sunday Morning on CBS but last week they revealed their math chops. Here is something you can bring up when talking about polls or even when you are trying to teach the fact that if you are trying to measure percents of a whole, those percents should add up to no more than 100. I thought maybe there was a venn diagram in there somewhere that made those numbers make sense but I don't think there is.

Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MDM4U

https://twitter.com/17cagey/status/460417513973489665/photo/1