Presenter: David Petro
Email: davidpetro314@gmail.com
Twitter: @davidpetro314
Data is everywhere
We are all Data collectors. Understanding how to filter all that data is the hard part. To that end, when we teach about data to students, we need to go beyond the curriculum for two reasons. 1) Most data people deal with does not come in the tabular form 2) There are so many examples of interesting data out there that might pique the interest of different students that we shouldn't ignore it. There is more here than I showed in my presentation but it doesn't look as pretty. Let me know if you need any more info.
Graphing 4 letter words http://toxi.co.uk/p5/base26/
Why Data Matters http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWL312zbEKg&feature=channel
Statistics at UCLA (Seriously, is this the best they can do? My example of how not to teach statistics)
http://academicearth.org/lectures/analyzing-data-in-probability-for-life-sciences
Hans Rosling does it better
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/04/19/sexy.data/index.html?hpt=Mid
After seeing this article Hans tweeted out "CNN got it wrong; Graphics are not about "How to make data look sexy", but to reveal that data is sexy!"
You can use this software to create the motion graphs that Hans used.
Pie Graphs on Acid - Sampling is here to stay whether you like it or not. Girltalk is actually a guy who creates new "songs" called Mashups which are entirely made of other songs. Here is an example of one of his songs exploded as a pie graph
Girltalk http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/pl_music_1609
For a slightly different view of the data, look at the Girl Talk Sample Guide http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKJd0RzmadQ
Here is a different mashup. This time all samples are from the group Daft Punk. But what is neat is the interface
http://daftpunk.themaninblue.com/
Infographics are the bomb - We are deluged with graphics as information. Infographics have become a new hybrid form of information. Here are some examples of some sites that specialize in infographics and some examples from those sites. Some of these are dynamic others are static. There are so many questions that can be asked about these rich amalgamations of data and the topics are wide and varied so you should be able to find something of interest to most students.
http://www.infographicsshowcase.com/
http://awesome.good.is/transparency/web/1010/political-climate-chart/interactive.html
http://blog.infographicworld.com/2010/09/27/the-fatty-truth-about-fast-food/
http://projects.nytimes.com/crime/homicides/map?ref=nyregion
I was able to shrink my Super Size Me clip video down (16 Mb) but its still pretty big
Probability - if more people new about probability, society would be much better off.
Use the following Big Bang Theory to discuss the nature of experimental to theoretical probability (stats on the World Rock, Paper, Scissors sit show that there is a strategie)
Big Bang Theory http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kov2G0GouBw
T-Shirt http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/generic/b597/
Rules http://www.samkass.com/theories/RPSSL.html
These Standard life commercials can be used as a nice intro to probability
Standard Life "Beach" - http://vimeo.com/11813428
Standard Life "Crosswalk" http://vimeo.com/11813515
One thing that you can use the following clip for is to discuss subjective probability. This is because in a contest like this Wendy's is not on the hook for a Million Dollars. They take out an insurance policy and the insurers have to use what they know of the situation to figure out the probability that any one will actually win the million.
Wendy's Kick for the Million http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1026759342116
Here is a long talk about that sort of insurance issue. Its a bit boring but quite informative. Its part of the Chance series. Click on Risky Business:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/ChanceLecture/AudioVideo.html#Videos00
Combinatorics
Here is a link to the Math Guy Keith Devlin's discussion on why no one on any particular flight has paid the same for their tickets
Airline Flights http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1148496
An archive of all of his Math Guy spots can be found here:
http://www.stanford.edu/~kdevlin/MathGuy.html
Static Data - One of the things I do with my students is insist they look at an article and explain what the relevance is to data management and statistics. They can use their own or one fo mine. Here are some examples
Texting http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97700573
Gasoline http://editorial.autos.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=461093
Wealth http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/faculty/hodgson/Courses/so11/stratification/income&wealth.htm
Here is the page I use to list some of the ones they can choose from:
http://cccss-mdm4u.wetpaint.com/page/Activity+Four
Fun Data
RickRolling is something of a phenomenon of late. It is when there is an online voting campaign which is then hi-jacked so that the winner becomes fixed. http://www.mtv.co.uk/artists/rick-astley/news/45511-the-rick-astley-debate
An example of this is explained by Christopher Poole (founder of anonymous chat site 4chan) where his peeps gamed the system so that he was voted to the top of the Time 100 pole as well as making the rest of the list spell something out: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for_anonymity_online.html
The iconic first chord of A Hard Day's Night was figured out using stats http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/10/how-a-professor/
You can get stats on search terms. Try "math fun", then "math, fun" then "math, fun, math fun" for some comparisons
A really cool visual snapshot of the current news cycle based on popular words http://www.tenbyten.org/10x10.html
Word Count has taken millions of volumes of text and then counted up the most used words in the english language. People then started looking for patterns. Look up America and see what follows: http://wordcount.org/main.php
Very cool dynamic (use the slider) graph showing the connection between team standings and salary (if it exists). Baseball vs Salary http://benfry.com/salaryper/index.html
Baby Names http://www.babynamewizard.com/name-mapper
Want to know about the traffic on a particular website? Use http://www.quantcast.com/ . Type in any website and then add others to compare. Try Myspace.com then add Facebook.com and Twitter.com
Fun Fake Graphs http://hubpages.com/hub/What-Statistics-Say
Fun graphs and venn diagrams http://thisisindexed.com/
TED for data. I have never seen a bad TED talk but these ones directly relate to data.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lies_damned_lies_and_statistics_about_tedtalks.html
TEDPAD http://get-tedpad.com/
There are many talks by Hans Rosling (just put his name in the TED search) but I like this one the best:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
Deb Roy talks about collecting data 24/7 about all the goings on in his house. Very cool visuals
http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html
Arthur Benjamin talks about why we should drop calculus in favour of probability:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/arthur_benjamin_s_formula_for_changing_math_education.html
I don't use Twitter as a social networking site. Or to let people know what I am doing. I use it to let people know what cool things I have found on the net. I do follow a few people but mostly I follow words: #math, #mathchat, #statistics, #infographics etc. Note that the number sign is important. Its called a hash tag. When people put them in their tweets, they are saying "what I just said relates to this topic". However, be careful, a lot of people hate math and are happy to say it via twitter.
http://twitter.com/davidpetro314
I actually don't use Twitter's front end. I use a different program called Tweetdeck. This allows me to follow multiple words at the same time.
If you don't want to sign up for Twitter. No problem. Just use http://twitterfall.com/ . Here you can put in any word or phrase and whatever is being tweeted about right then dealing with that phrase will be shown
To keep track of what links I have found, I use Delicious as my social book marking site. Here, in one year, I have amassed hundreds of links having to do with math and they are organized by my own tags. I have made them all public but they can be made private too: http://delicious.com/davidpetro
Podcasts - Two podcasts that I like a lot are the
Freakonomics radio podcast (read the books too) http://www.freakonomics.com/
and the More or less Podcast http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/more_or_less/
These are quite informative and often entertaining (though the more or less one can sometimes be a bit stuffy). Both can be listened to right on their website but I prefer to download them "in my sleep" using iTunes.
Enjoy
David