Math Links for Week Ending May 16th, 2014

I am a big fan of collecting data. I also like when the data is dirty and imperfect. This activity from Slam Dunk Math has all of that an more. Here is the Reader's Digest version. Get a box and some playing cards. Have each person throw one card at time into the box from a fixed distance for 30 s (or so). Repeat and get an average rate of cards in the box per second for each student. Then compare your's (hopefully its better) to the students and have a conversation about who would win, giving head starts etc. There is a lot of stuff here: rates, averages, direct & partial variation, intersection of lines. Perfect for any grade 9 class. Thanks to @MaryBourassa for pointing this one out to me.
Curriculum Tags: MPM1D, MFM1P, MFM2P
http://slamdunkmath.blogspot.ca/2014/05/card-tossing.html

The confusion between correlation and causation is actually a big issue. So often the two are use synonymously. What better way to help distinguish the two then by showing how easy it is to get two related things to correlate. Enter Spurious Correlations. A blog that shows a new questionable correlation each day. So far I think this might be my favourite "The age of Miss America correlates with the number of murders by steam, hot vapours and hot objects" (correlation = 0.87). Thanks to Mike Lieff for this one.
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U, MAP4C
http://www.tylervigen.com/

So this article was in our local paper about the number of Sex Offenders that are residing in the area. I think its a perfect example of scare tactics because without any information on the population sizes and the average rate of residence for sex offenders its hard to tell if these numbers are high or low. So I did a quick study of the populations of the communities listed and came up with these results (comparing to Windsor). I also included the proportional rate of SOs for each town if their population was scaled up to the size of Windsor
City/Town      Population    #SOs   #SOs if the same size of Windsor

Windsor          216000          176     176

LaSalle              29000              2       15

Amherstburg     22000              5       50

Kingsville          21000            12     120

Essex                 19600              4       44

Leamington       50000            20       86

Lakeshore          35000            20     123

Tilbury                 5000            37   1598

Chatham          108000             70     140

So I think this could be a good lesson in proportional reasoning (obviously if you don't give them the last column)
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P
http://windsor.ctvnews.ca/report-details-how-many-sex-offenders-lived-in-windsor-essex-chatham-kent-1.1823627

Some more data here about what sports people are playing. Maybe I like this one because triathlon is almost number one.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/more-people-are-running-fewer-are-playing-bar-sports/

Another proportional reasoning type link relating to data. One of the issues with the, so called, debate on climate change is that often when there is a public debate, there is usually one person on each side of the fence. This gives an impression that there is a 50/50 split between the two groups. When, in fact, there is about 97% of the scientific community that believe its happening. So John Oliver tried to remedy that on his new show. Thanks to Mark Esping for this one. Keep in mind there is language in this so you may want to show this from about 2 minutes in.
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjuGCJJUGsg

I really like this display of the popularity of various majors over the years. And if you go to the site, it's interactive. Thanks to Mark Esping for this one.
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/05/09/310114739/whats-your-major-four-decades-of-college-degrees-in-1-graph

Using Google Maps when talking about parallel line theorems.
Curriculum Tags: Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P
https://twitter.com/schoolfy/status/463495401530593280/photo/1

There is some "funny" math going on in this ad. Can you spot it?

curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8

https://twitter.com/myleneabizeid/status/465325178243661824/photo/1

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

Math Links for Week Ending June 21st, 2013

Geez that Dan Meyer knows how to maximize his Klout score. This is a really great use of twitter. Here is his tweet:

Then what follows is a barrage of tweets with great real examples of something that is conceptually hard to find examples for. Well done Dan (and Twitter). See the discussion here:

http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=17227

Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8

Might as well stick with Dan Meyer some more with this really nice real world metric/imperial conversion task. Nice rework of this basic textbook question. Once again, Twitter to the rescue. It is interesting how minor tweaks can spice a question up to be more problem solving.
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=17230
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM2P



Chance News is a semi regular Wiki all about statistics and probability. Quotes, real data from all over the place. Probably most appropriate for MDM4U. Be sure to subscribe to the feed.
http://test.causeweb.org/wiki/chance/index.php/Chance_93
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U





The massive numbers that surround UPS (and any courier service). How about this for a Big number. $30 Million: how much extra it
would cost if every driver went just one extra mile per day. This could be used to talk about the ide of big numbers or about combinatorics.
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/06/ups-astronomical-math/
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U




How about an activity about the longest NHL hockey matches. Yummy Math has it. Good for data and ratio and proportion. The activity is ready to go. Just download the PDF.
http://www.yummymath.com/2013/longest-nhl-matches-in-history/
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MFM1P



Forty resources that deal with dice. Need some ideas for probability, try here first.
http://kbkonnected.tumblr.com/post/12928926198/40-resources-for-dice-and-everything-dice
Curriculum Tags:Gr7, Gr8, MAT1L, MBF3C, MDM4U

This is actually from a year ago but its a neat visual representation of equivalent fractions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5z-OEIfw3s
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8

Last week I mentioned the heat map of the most popular birthdays. This week Data Viz revisits the data with a new visualization
http://thedailyviz.com/2013/06/08/birthday-heatmap-born-again/
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U

Why not end on some humor. Some real bad math here in a bunch of visual examples. For example, see if you can spot the error in the quadratic formula (its actually hard to see but its there):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/work-math-fails_n_3442834.html
Curriculum Tags: All