Skip to main content

Thursday 9/17/15

Here is my lesson plan from today. Feel free to skip to the bottom of this post where the homework is!
September 16 2015
Thoughts
  • On what we are doing:
    • We are a team
    • We have a project
    • I am the project manager for this team
  • On rules:
    • I don’t think we should start with rules. Let’s all keep in mind that we should respect each other, ourselves, and the space we are in, and maybe we will all act in such a way that we don’t need rules. If we do need rules, we’ll figure them out as needed.
      • How to ask to eat or go to the bathroom in such a way that it will make a teacher like you more (hint: respectfully).
Goals
For each team member to:
  • Become more comfortable and confident with the idea of themselves as “someone who does math”
  • Develop their problem solving skills
  • Practice thinking rationally
  • Translate math words and symbols into plain language
  • Feel comfortable communicating about numbers
    • Especially big groups of numbers
Skills to acquire
  • Be able to talk about collections of numbers
  • Be able to gather data
  • Be able to identify “biased” data (we will define that later)
  • Be able to understand and create common graphs to communicate information
  • Be able to use math to help discuss the likelihood of an event
Why spend your time doing this?
  • It gives you power
    • We are learning statistics. “Big Data” and “Machine Learning” are very hot fields right now, and they are based on statistics
    • It allow you to figure out things that know one knows
  • It can give you security
    • People who can do statistics have job security and the freedom that comes with having enough money
  • It really is fun and interesting
      • “Could we predict whether a Kickstarter project would meet its funding goal before it was even published?
To find out, we wrote software to analyze the text of every Kickstarter project ever in existence. We were looking for patterns that distinguished the most successful projects. Did they have celebrity endorsements? Did they have pop culture appeal? Did they propose brilliant new innovations?
To our surprise, none of these things had much bearing on fundraising success. What mattered instead? The words used in the listing, the fonts that were chosen, how the images got placed, and how many verbs were included. In fact, the specific project idea was mostly irrelevant to its funding outcome. Using machine learning and linguistic analysis, we were able to predict Kickstarter project success with almost 90% accuracy.
    • What does this mean? Does it matter?


chart (2).pngPenultimately
Tell me about the interactive visualization you played with for homework. Understand that the fancy math symbols don’t say anything but what you said... they just say it differently.
HOMEWORK

For Homework, find a chart/graph, anywhere on the internet. Send it to me with an explanation via the form. Don't use the one in the example above. Here are places to look for interesting charts/graphs/data visualizations: r/DataIsBeautiful

DadaViz

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marvin Minsky, AI, Math Education

The audio is too good to make this a gif. So, to be clear, this is the blog post for THURSDAY, 1/28. If you are looking for Tuesday's post, go back a post. I wanted to mention to you all that a mathematician and artificial intelligence researched named Marvin Minsky died on Sunday. Among lots of amazing things he did in his life, he wrote about math education for the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. Here is that article ; I'd like you to read it for homework. Speaking of death, check out this amazing visualization ! Finally, for classwork, I would like you to go back to Tuesday's blog post, and comment on other people's homework. Specifically do you like the charts they chose? Are they interesting? Any feedback? Homework IMPORTANT: Pick which 5 (or more) variables that you will track for the Feltron project. Think about how you will keep track of them - pen and and notebook? The Reporter App? A pedometer? Also, that Marvin Minsky article is really
10 comments
Read more

Statistical Studies - Tuesday 2/2/2016

Ok, today didn't go exactly as planned. If you saw the blog post I had up planned for today... we will get to that, but I incorrectly estimated how long some work would take you. Not your fault. You guys just move so fast through most material! You are working on the  Statistical Studies topic  on Khan Academy. It is not easy. That is okay. You don't have to get frustrated, or discouraged, or stressed. If it takes longer than I thought it would, I'll give you more time. Some good insights from the classwork: Go straight to the exercises, but go back to the videos if you are stuck If the videos feel too long, you can speed up playback (in the options menu, click the gear button). 1.25x isn't even noticeable. 1.5x is, but if you listen for a while you get used to it and can switch to 2x An "experiment" involves splitting a subset of the population you are looking at into two groups: one called the "control", who don't do anything diff
5 comments
Read more

Monday 9/28

9/28/15 Monday Check in: Friday class & Homework Classwork: As long as we’re talking climate change... If someone tells you they don’t believe humans are causing it, you might want to ask them if smoking is bad for you. Why? There is as much evidence that humans are causing global warming as there is evidence that smoking causes cancer (you don’t have to click that link, I just like to put it up). Anyway, here’s a chart: It is entitled “Breakdown of the anthropic greenhouse gas emissions by gas, in billion tons carbon equivalent, in 2004” - it is a breakdown of the greenhouse gases emitted in 2004 that humans are responsible for. What’s the biggest greenhouse gas? What’s all that CO2 doing, and where does it go? A lot of it goes into the ocean, which seems better than the air, and it is... up to a point. The more CO2 in the ocean, the more acidic it gets (And the more acidic it gets, the lower its ph gets). That is fine... until it’s not. At some
4 comments
Read more