- Announcements:
- Graphs unit homework returned
- You were supposed to do #30 twice: once using the
word "statistics", and a second time using the word "graphics".
- If you're going to present someone else's work, you'd
better have an attribution. Don't try to pass off someone
else's hard work as your own.
- If all you did is google "Lying with graphs" or the like,
and then reported what you found, you missed the point: the
point is that this sort of lying is going on all around us, and
we should be able to open our eyes and see it. Don't live your
life vicariously through Google!
- Executive
compensation -- notice that the CEO weighs more than three
"ordinary workers" -- only one woman, note -- but we don't know
how many more. Certainly many more, in general! Check out AK
Steel, for example.
- Great
scale issues in the housing bubble.
- BMI
- Body Mass Index (example
chart)
- Schiavo case
- Google
and Yahoo -- is the future of the web free? I don't
particularly have any problems with the two different scales on
the y-axis, and don't like the author's combined graph.
- Misleading
stats from econoclass.com
- U.S.
casualties in different wars. Time from right to left, size
of bars represents time rather than casualties. Couldn't the
author have used a bar for "deaths per year", for example?
- Running
in the rain. Lovely bars, that distract and make the info
muddier.
- Oil
prices related to U.S. and World Affairs. The student
thought that this graph was too busy. I certainly agree that we
don't need to have every year indicated on the x-axis -- we
could have eliminated a lot of ink if we'd just indicated the
years at 5 year intervals, say (avoiding a second layer of
dates, which is certainly unusual).
- Your Fractal/Tree homework is due today.
- Your show-n-tell item will require two aspects:
- A "presentation" (how will you explain your "item" to your peers -- imagine that you have five minutes)
- A two-page, typed, well-written, self-edited, peer-edited, perfect paper, explaining your item.
- "Fractals and Trees"
- A fractal is a graph that possesses "self-similarity":
"Worlds within worlds", reminding me very much of Robert
Graves's Warning to
Children than of fractals.
- A fractal often possesses a simple and recursive (or iterative)
definition.
- Nature must use such simple rules and iteration to produce many things, such as broccoli, trees, shrubs, coastlines, etc.
- We might expect to see fractal behavior in stock values at
different scales (see The Human Social
Experience Forms a Fractal). This would illustrate self-similarity.
- Financial Math (Section 8.3: Money Matters)
- The fractal stock market link mentioned above segues right into our unit on financial math.
- Homework: pp. 678-681, #1, 3, 4, 9, 10, 12; Type up #20. Due
Friday, 12/5
- How
do the credit card companies make so much money?
(compounding interest!)
- Pretty straight forward: #6, p. 678
- Here's a twist: #11, p. 679
- How do
mortgages work?
- A "real-world" example: do you use those balance-transfer
checks? I got
this offer awhile back.
- What are the hidden costs (buried in the fine
print)?
- What would $1000 cost me for a year, if I take it
out May 1, and pay nothing back? (By the way,
the balance transfer APR is 18.99%).
Website maintained by Andy Long.
Comments appreciated.
