Good for quick use on the interactive white board to establish the main and sub-headings in a piece of writing or similar

Qualitative research plug in for R

"When it was explained to us that the problems had no solutions, I thought to myself, 'well, there's no harm in trying,'" he said.

That lad will go far

looks sparse and useful

Contains the essential magick spell library(ggplot2) note lack of speechmarks

"CLV equals the product of ARPU, gross margin, and average customer lifetime."

Simple enough for the business students...

This works with the version of R that is installed with Ubuntu 12.04, but asks to make a local library as it can't write to /usr/ from the R session. At least not from the R session in R-Studio

Who is doing what with data and software

There is a maths lesson in here somewhere: the idea of how you compare the costs of things between different countries.

"The "test everything" mantra sounds good, but in practice, you generally have only so much data you can afford (in impressions per day, or whatever), and when your CTRs are often 0.1% or lower, you need quite a lot of data to get narrow confidence intervals around your CTRs. Using the basic binomial model, if you have two test conditions, one of which actually does 20-25% better than the other, (say, 0.11% versus 0.09%), your confidence intervals will keep overlapping until you have OOM 1M impressions. This is all just to say that running a whole lot of tests can quickly become expensive an impractical."

Sampling stats applied to the testing of adverts. The discussion below this comment gives a nice illustration of quantitative versus anecdotal/gut feel

Works fine in Firefox on Linux and does most of the basic graphs I need. WolframAlpha basic can run on a mobile phone browser so still recommending that

"Through it all, Noether was a highly prolific mathematician, publishing groundbreaking papers, sometimes under a man’s name, in rarefied fields of abstract algebra and ring theory. And when she applied her equations to the universe around her, she discovered some of its basic rules, like how time and energy are related, and why it is, as the physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute put it, “that riding a bicycle is safe.” "

I always thought it was Jordan who spotted the application to physics?

"For instance, an average-sized cat with its limbs extended achieves a terminal velocity of about 60mph (97km/h), while an average-sized man reaches a terminal velocity of about 120mph (193km/h), according to the 1987 study by veterinarians Wayne Whitney and Cheryl Mehlhaff."

I'd have thought it was a simple surface area to mass ratio thing. Human about 10 cat lengths, so 100 cat surface areas but 1000 cat masses...

A PDF file with four A6 size flashcards; quadrilaterals in general, trapezium, parallelogram and the kite. Just the facts.

They can scale up for IW use.

Ace! Via Hacker News. Just in time for teaching bearings.

I used these in a revision workshop on the Tuesday before the Unit 2 GCSE Maths exam for the AQA Modular syllabus.

(Everyone wants to put 4 down as the answer to 1)

Algebra and percentages/fractions and number/factor/multiple/squares/cubes questions with answer. All rapid fire 'headline' questions. I have longer 'starred' questions from the AQA ExamPro service ready as backup.

I used these on Monday am for a quick last minute revision workshop over lunch to get the brains working. Mostly ok and feelings positive after the exam.

Data handling and calculator percentages with answers. Just the short sharp questions. No pictograms.

Q5 catches everyone, they all want to divide 32 by 3. I draw a fraction wall like graphic with a line divided into 3 and ask for labels...

Q8, they have to measure the angle for Cars.

Visual presentation that uses the Monty Hall problem as an example, makes a change from cancer survival rates. Looks useful.

"Bottled water is 3000 times more expensive than water from a tap"

Bit of a maths lesson coming along there...

There are about 45000 social workers (qualified) in England as of 2008. Allow the usual 9% turnover figure and you need around 4000 new entrants each year.

One for the Business Studies students, a good reason to get interested in statistics.

You write an equation with a tablet or whiteboard pen. The application recognises the formula and renders it as LaTeX markup with a visual rendition. Needs saving as image.

Via HN

Looks fun, need to compile on Linux

Two sides of A4 with some formulas to plot and an exercise about the characteristics of a set of lines deduced from their formulas alone. Students need squared (0.5cm) paper for this one and will need to draw axes.

Two sided A4 handout with some ready drawn plots. Students have to 'test' their formula by substituting in for an X value and then checking that the resulting Y value does fall on the line when plotted.

Two sided A4 designed for use in class. Plots provided and students have to find the gradient and intercept.

These vertical and horizontal lines specified by an X or a Y value always confuse students. A two sided handout for use during a whole class discussion of what it means to 'fix' (say) the coordinate of a point so that it is always X = 1...

First in a sequence of 5. Points to plot, shapes to complete and midpoints to find. These handouts are designed to be used in a lesson with pair work and tutor input. Just three sides of A4.

"Nevertheless, the resulting calculation is still a monster. The Dublin team say it took 7.1 million core-hours of processing time on a machine with 640 Intel Xeon hex-core processors. They started in January 2011 and finished in December."

That's a few shillings in the meter

"The R language is the scripting language for the R environment, just as VBA is the scripting language for Microsoft Excel. Some of the more unusual features of the R language begin to make sense when viewed from this perspective."

Seems a sensible way of looking at it

The computer programming aspects of discrete probability

Nice idea

Gnarly coodinate transformations coded in rpn syntax. Amazing. Directly code mathematical illustrations in PostScript. Could be useful to motivate the creation of functions in Python to draw basic types of chart, symbol & and export them as .eps files

Can I use any of these to help my students to spend more time doing maths, which we all know is the only way to understand maths and therefore pass the exams?

Caution from Weiten, quoted in an e-mail to the author...

"Perhaps I am overly cynical, but I suspect that empirical tests are nonexistent because the authors of self-help and time-management titles are not at all confident that the results would be favorable. Hence, they have no incentive to pursue such research because it is likely to undermine their sales and their ability to write their next book."

"The study does not prove that vitamin D is the cause of the effects seen -- other factors, like disease, could be responsible both for the differences in health and the differences in vitamin D levels, for instance."

Correlation != causality

Useful teaching case

Evaporation cooling in the Sudan.

2560 dice, and the back of the portrait is a negative image.

Just some words - crossword and shorter definitions

Old page about lecturing in University and other mathematical career reflections. Worth it for mention of Von Neumann's characterisation of the 50 minute lecture as a 'microcentury'. A microcentury is actually a tad under 53 minutes if you take a mean year as 365.2466 days.

Exploring R and python-with-libraries right now

Just the basic facts on two sides of A4. No problems and just a basic example of each fact. Its really a summary to guide revision and problem solving and to help with the vocabulary found in textbooks.

Very interesting, complete with test, mark scheme and rationale. I might try this one out. a = b will strike many as a statement whose truth needs to be decided rather than as an assignment. I may reword the test using words like 'set a = b'

A series of exercises in coding but this first one could form the basis of a nice activity for maths students when we look at 'best buy' problems.

Description of the basics with some of the maths

Irresistible. We shall have to try the game (with physical mini-whiteboards)

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Nice application of graph theory to the links between large Trans National Corporations.

Via Stephen Downes: Half an Hour blog

Big gallery of R graph types with data and script files.

What it says on the packet. Short sections on the main commands.

"They are both teachers but, asked to explain something mathematical to O Level Emma, Carola will explain it as algebra, Sophia as co-ordinate geometry; each reaches for her own most natural way of expressing the same concepts."

Used as an example to cast light on the writing of novels, but true literally.

Box and whisker plots on MS Excel. I use Gnumeric under Linux for these types of graphs.

A two sided handout on cumulative frequency curves and the box and whisker plot. This topic is a 'grade b' topic in the new AQA syllabus so I needed to differentiate for students on an evening class who may wish to take Unit 1 and Unit 2 at higher level. Worked ok with mymaths 'lesson' as backup.

The cupboard was bare, so I used the eps version of the vector drawing of measuring instruments mentioned below to isolate a 180 degree protractor scale. I used inkscape to remove the delicate gradients (which just confused my laser printer) and then copied the grouped drawing so I have 6 protractors per A4 page. Laminated 3 pages of them in assorted colours and cut them out.

Accuracy ok for drawing a pie chart given a pre-drawn reference circle.

Free vector drawings of a selection of rulers, set squares and a couple of 180 degree protractors. Loads into Inkscape. The large image can be ungrouped, then the smaller 180 degree protractor re-grouped and copied to a new file. I used the eps format. The post-it notes and pins look nice as well. My Atom netbook with 1 Gb is just about able to manipulate the 16Mb eps file in Inkscape...

Teachers upload and students put ratings on resources. Nice idea. I've used a couple for stats

The program is an ascii art mirror of the images it produces. I'll play with this, something around A4 size would be about right.

Covers a little revision on metric conversion and finding the HCF of two numbers to motivate cancelling down (section A, B). Then finding value of a fraction using a calculator (C) and writing one quantity as a fraction of another (D). Moves into finding the value of a percentage (E) and then writing one quantity as a percentage of another (F). Brief look at percentage increase and decrease (G) and Index numbers, new on the GCSE syllabus (H). This handout is used to focus a lesson delivered in a community centre with a small flip-chart. There are card sorting activities and worksheets to go with it.

Really brings home the way inflation has dropped over the last 30 years or so. Index numbers have popped up on the syllabus again for GCSE.

Handy when you need a worksheet for one student who has a thing about rounding...

This looks extremely useful as a guide for L2 students before starting their short course: that spiky profile thing.

Nice data visualisation with code available, but uses jquery so needs server side stuff

This search query produces links from which you can download the diagnostic tests for L2, L1 and the three entry levels for Skills for Life Numeracy. These pdfs are not on the archive site, so the links from readwriteplus archived pages won't work

Current location of the Improving Learning in Mathematics materials pdf. Its moved since a teachers meeting in July, so I have blagged my own copy just in case

"Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers" by Allen B. Downey. In HTML and pdf at no cost and dead tree at cost. Via Hacker News. Nice selection of advanced topics.

The Maths ones are old chestnuts but nice to have them drawn in a funny style. I'll block off the 'reason' on the 2 = 3 proof and see who notices.

Fantastic and quirky resource this, ace, wish I had thought of it. There is even a podcast of each one. Must have taken ages.

"Meier’s advocacy of – insistence upon – randomised clinical trials was one part of his legacy. The Kaplan-Meier estimator was another. It has many other uses – it can plot anything whose time of survival is of interest, for example fruit before it blemishes, or mechanisms before they break down - but in particular it gives medical statisticians a simple way of comparing patients’ survival rates after different treatments."

"The satisfactions of teaching interacting with lively and energetic young people all day every day are different from the impersonal abstract patterns that are the stuff of mathematics and the physical sciences," it said.

I understand the logic: honey and mumford learing styles coordinates for Maths people are Theorist-Reflector and those for teachers are Activist-Pragmatist. However, I wonder if the report's authors have ever attended a physics conference or Maths department seminar? Plenty of interaction there!

"The sort of person drawn to one may not be comfortable with the other."

Looks ok, but wondering where it fits with Wolfram Alpha

"Ms Vorderman said pupils were being taught trigonometry and algebra when "they can't even calculate a percentage"."

What is Maths? What makes Maths important? What makes Maths transferable to different contexts? Why is it only English speaking countries that have 'numeracy'?

A series of videos about basic number methods from the mysterious chap with the Manchester accent. Useful stuff.

"My father, who was trained in engineering at M.I.T. in the slide-rule era, often lamented the way the pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation’s math skills."

To which my standard reply takes the form of two questions:

1) How do we decide what 'math(s) skills' are for our current mode of production?

2) When did you last analyse a situation, set up a set of linked equations to describe the variables, and then solve them analytically?

Link via stuntbox.com

Drawn notes about calculus within the US framework (very high level of algebra understanding assumed). He is producing these using a tablet with stylus and One Note. Nice idea.
Via Hacker News

Here we go again. Well, I'd suggest that the Adult Numeracy Certificate is an excellent preparation for taking this kind of test, and they (or is that They) won't be monitoring that test.

"But the NUT said candidates who needed several resits to pass the tests were dyslexic, had English as an additional language, or were less familiar with the on-line testing system."

Again, I'd argue that the Adult Numeracy and Adult Literacy certificate courses and tests can give candidates experience of computer based tests and skills for life tutors will pick up any dyslexia or similar issues quickly,

Just something to use the lesson before the second GOLA computer based test for my Friday morning level 1 numeracy group. I try to teach through understanding most of the course, but some specific targeted exam prep is needed.

Just something to use the lesson before the first GOLA computer based test for my Friday morning level 1 numeracy group. Almost everyone passed.

These questions were written to go with a set of revision flashcards downloaded from TES net. I selected the flashcards relevant to Module 5 of the AQA GCSE (most of them apart from the data handling ones).

The questions on this worksheet are designed to mix some of the 'tricky' questions that are found on the Module 5 with the more straightforward calculation questions.

"My daughter realised there was a mistake and moved on, so didn't put a lot of working into the question."

Sir, your daughter did well, excellent insight into the underlying maths. Her ability to 'smell a rat' says much for her problem solving skills.

We have generated a situation where so much depends on very high marks for some candidates. Why can't we bring back S levels? S levels were extra papers set on the same syllabus as the A levels, just devilishly hard (but solvable) questions.

As below, 6 questions about angle properties just for a quick quiz.

As below printed 6 up on two sides of A4 as a PDF for use as a handout. Students have to add certain basic facts as they go along.

18 flashcards about angle properties including naming the angles (acute, obtuse &c) and angles at a point, line, two lines crossing, and on parallel lines. Also triangles, quadrilaterals and (other) polygons. With 6 slides with questions aimed at gcse Foundation at the end.