A
white paper on quantitative literacy from the forum on quantitative literacy (QL)
held at the National Research Council
http://www.woodrow.org/nced/QLwhitepaper.html
National
Numeracy Network (NNN)
http://www.woodrow.org/nced/national_numeracy_network.html
Information
about the NCED initiative in quantitative literacy
http://www.woodrow.org/nced/quantitative_literacy.html
Math
in Daily Life: How do numbers
affect every day decisions? http://www.learner.org/exhibits/dailymath/
Statistics Every Writer Should Know, by Robert Niles.
A Journalist's Guide to Finding Data on the Internet,
The Mathematical Association of
America (MAA) Subcommittee on Quantitative Literacy. http://www.valpo.edu/home/faculty/rgillman/ql/
The
Mathematical Association of American Recommendations for Quantitative Literacy:
http://www.maa.org/past/ql/ql_toc.html
Bibliographic
references and links to internet resources for
topics relating to Ethnomathematics.
http://home1.gte.net/ericjw1/ethnomathematics.html
A
Web site devoted to Quantitative Literacy (QL) and Quantitative Reasoning (QR).
http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~wbriggs/qr/qrtop.html
Integrating
Quantitative Reasoning into the Freshman Inquiry Curricula http://www.mth.pdx.edu/~paul/frinqmath/
Teaching
math resource site (including Ethnomathematics resources)
http://people.clarityconnect.com/webpages/terri/terri.html
Links to Ethnomathematics
in the classroom
http://www.rpi.edu/~eglash/isgem.dir/links.dir/classrm.htm
The
American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges Website, Crossroads
in Mathematics.
http://www.imacc.org/standards/
National
Council of Teachers of Mathematics:
Project
Links: Mathematics and its Applications in Engineering and Science Website:
Washington
Center for Improving Undergraduate Education:
http://www.evergreen.edu/washcenter
Washington
State Board for Community and Technical Colleges Assessment:
http://www.sbctc.ctc.edu/Board/Educ/Outcomes/outcomes.htm
Dartmouth
College's MATC Web page
http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~matc/index.html
The
Electronic Bookshelf (from Dartmouth College)
http://hilbert.dartmouth.edu/~matc/eBookshelf/index.html
The
University of Nevada, Reno Mathematics Across the Curriculum
http://www.unr.edu/mathcenter/mac/index.html
Bowdoin
College Quantitative Skills Program
http://academic.bowdoin.edu/qskills/
Stockton
College New Jersey Quantitative Reasoning Across the Disciplines (QUAD)
http://loki.stockton.edu/~quinnj/gs/quad/quad.htm
Trinity
College, in Hartford, Connecticut, Quantitative Literacy Program
http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/mcenter/mcql.htm
Wellesley
College, Massachusetts, Quantitative Reasoning Program
http://www.wellesley.edu/QR/home.html
Mount
Holyoke Website for Quantitative Reasoning Case Studies
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/math/st/qr.htm
Macmatc:
Middle Atlantic Consortium for Mathematics and its Application throughout
the Curriculum Website
http://www.math.upenn.edu/~ugrad/macmatc.html
Quantitative
Reasoning Across the Curriculum Brooklyn College of the City University of New
York
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/quant/
Whatcom
Community College Online Math Center
http://www.geom.umn.edu/software/tilings
Computer Software for Tiling lists programs for various platforms that allow the user to create designs featuring the rosette, strip, and wallpaper patterns.
http://www.geom.umn.edu/java/Kali
Kali interactive Web program that lets the user draw pictures under the action of rosette, strip, or wallpaper groups. Versions for various platforms can be downloaded.
http://www.mcs.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fib.html
This site has information about Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio, including many examples of the occurrence of these numbers in nature.
Describe some of the ways the Fibonacci numbers are found in nature, adding your own examples. Next, visit the "Easier Fibonacci Puzzles" page and select one of the puzzles. Describe your solution and explain how Fibonacci numbers were used in the puzzle.
http://comp.uark.edu/~cgstraus/symmetry.unit/index.html
The "Symmetry and the Shape of Space" page has information and examples of symmetry and strip patterns.
Scroll down to "Part 2" and follow the link marked "Frieze!" Look at the worksheet and use the flowchart in figure 17.12 of your text to identify the strip patterns. Which ones are actually the same strip pattern?
http://www-sphys.unil.ch/escher/
Escher Web Sketch. Interactive Web program that allows the user to design repeating patterns. Choose a wallpaper pattern using crystallographic notation and draw on the screen a colored design for the motif, and the program then reproduces the motif using the pattern. The software (for Windows, Macintosh, and Unix) can also be downloaded.
Use the software to create a wallpaper design. Describe all forms of symmetry found in your design, such as reflection, translation or rotation symmetry.
ftp://ftp.uni-bielefeld.de/pub/math/tiling/reptiles/RepTiles2.0.1.sea.hqx
RepTiles interactive Macintosh application for designing wallpaper patterns, plus systematically generating all possible periodic tilings of the plane by applying "topological transformations" and "symmetry."
If you are a Macintosh user, you can download this software and create a wallpaper pattern. Apply the transformations and symmetries to generate different tilings based on your design. How many of these different tilings can you find?
http://fsmat.htu.tuwien.ac.at/~zahi/wahl.html
"The Voting Page," this site contains additional topics from the theory of voting, including yes–no voting and power indices (as discussed in Chapter 14).
In your own words, describe yes-no voting systems. What is an example of this type of voting system? How does this compare to the "social choice procedures" described in section 3 of this article?
http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/approvalvote/goodsoc.html
An article entitled "Approval Voting and the Good Society," by Steven J. Brams.
Describe approval voting. What are some of the advantages of approval voting? What are some disadvantages?
http://www.sci.wsu.edu/math/Lessons/Voting/
An interactive voting lesson site that explains several voting methods.
Read through the website and work the examples. In the section "A more challenging Borda example" ("Cola Wars" in Lesson 3), find a solution to the problem that is different than the one shown if you "give up."
The Center for Voting and Democracy has an online library of articles about different voting systems.
Read the article on "Instant Runoff Voting" and write a few paragraphs comparing it to the voting methods in your text. Include information about the advantages and disadvantages of each method as compared to Instant Runoff.
Several of the most important sample surveys in the United States are conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Select the "Mission, Management & Jobs" section and read about the "BLS Strategic Plan." What challenges face the bureau in its attempts to collect and report data?
The Gallup Organization conducts the Gallup poll; this site has excellent material on how polls are conducted.
Visit the Gallup or Harris sites and select a poll that interests you. Identify the population and sample for this poll. How many people were surveyed? Is this sample truly random and representative of the population of interest? Explain what factors, if any, might influence the outcome of this poll.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/ (Journal of the American Medical Association)
www.nejm.org (New England Journal of Medicine)
Important medical studies -- many based on randomized comparative experiments -- often appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association or the New England Journal of Medicine.
Search through the Journal of the American Medical Association or the New England Journal of Medicine to find information about a medical study that is based on randomized comparative experiments. Describe what you have found. How was the experiment designed? Is the sample truly random?
http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/DASL/Datafiles/Calcium.html
This site lists the results of a randomized comparative experiment to investigate the effect of calcium on blood pressure.
Identify the population and the sample in this experiment. Look at the results of the experiment. Do you think the researchers have shown that calcium reduces blood pressure in African-American men? What more might you want to know about the design of this experiment to determine if it is likely to represent the population?
Web sites don't feature how to make histograms or scatterplots. They do provide lots of interesting sets of real data. The Data and Story Library has both data and the background needed to use them.
Visit the The Data and Story Library and find a set of data that interests you. Create two or three graphical representations (such as histograms or scatterplots) to summarize the data. Describe what you have discovered about the data. Are there any outliers?
The Chance Web site features current news items that involve statistics and also an archive of data.
Follow the link for "Chance News" and find a current news article using probability or statistics. Summarize the article and answer the discussion questions at the end of the article.
The electronic Journal of Statistics Education has articles both about teaching statistics and a data archive. You can find JSE on the American Statistical Association's Web site.
The link to "Publications" will take you to a link for the Journal of Statistics Education (JSE). Visit the Data Archive and find a set of data that interests you. Create two or three graphical representations (such as histograms or scatterplots) to summarize the data. Describe what you have discovered about the data. Are there any outliers?
http://neyman.stat.uiuc.edu:80/~stat100/cuwu/Games.html
The “Correlations” game in this applet provides practice in matching correlation coefficients to scatter plots.
Click on the “Correlations” button and then “New Plots” to view four different scatterplots. Identify which graph matches the given correlations. Explain what evidence you use to make your decisions.
http://neyman.stat.uiuc.edu:80/~stat100/cuwu/datalist.html
This applet allows you to practice analyzing data. You can choose from many different data sets, including sports data, stock prices, and census data. The chosen data can then be displayed as a histogram or scatter plot, and information such as mean and median are available.
Hit the “Choose Data” button and highlight “Brain size.” Hit “Accept Data Set” and then “Display Data.” Describe what you would expect the histogram for “Full Scale IQ” to look like based on the data shown. Check your answer by clicking “Histogram,” selecting “FullScaleIQ” from the variables list, and hitting the “Update” button. Experiment with other options. How would you use this applet to determine if brain size affects IQ?
The Bureau of the Census is a great source of data for exploration.
Choose a set of numerical data from the Census website and make a histogram of the data. Describe the overall pattern and any noticeable deviations from the pattern.
http://www.stat.sc.edu/~west/javahtml/Histogram.html
This applet allows you to explore the effects of different bin widths on a histogram.
The applet starts with the bin width set around 0.5. Look at the original histogram, and then set the bin width to its highest setting. Why is this new histogram misleading based on what was shown in the previous histogram? Experiment with the bin width. Which one do you think represents the data most clearly?