Author: John Quintanilla

I'm a Professor of Mathematics and a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of North Texas. For eight years, I was co-director of Teach North Texas, UNT's program for preparing secondary teachers of mathematics and science.

Issues when conducting political polls (Part 2)

The classic application of confidence intervals is political polling: the science of sampling relatively few people to predict the opinions of a large population. However, in the 2010s, the art of political polling — constructing representative samples from a large population — has become more and more difficult.

The Washington Post recently ran a feature about how the prevalence of cellphones was once feared as a potential cause of bias when conducting a political poll… and what’s happened ever since: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/11/03/pollsters-used-to-worry-that-cellphone-users-would-skew-results-these-days-not-so-much/.

Previous post: Issues when conducting political polls.

How to Call Out Mistakes without Trampling the Mistaken

Math With Bad Drawings had a nice post about strategies teachers can use to address a student who volunteers an incorrect answer. This is a natural dilemma for teachers who want to encourage class participation but who don’t want to deflate students who make mistakes. I recommend this essay highly: http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2014/11/05/wrong-but-not-stupid-or-how-to-call-out-mistakes-without-trampling-the-mistaken/

One recent strategy that I’ve employed is quoting the trolls from Frozen: https://meangreenmath.com/2014/06/14/a-bit-of-a-fixer-upper/

Optimally Dancing to “Shout”

From the dual categories of “Someone Had To Figure This Out” and “Applied Mathematics At Work,” FiveThirtyEight.com has used a little algebra to answer one of our generation’s most vexing questions:

What’s the proper rate of descent during the “a little bit softer now” portion of the song “Shout?”

Here’s the link to the article: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/shout-isley-brothers/

And, in case you haven’t been to a wedding reception recently, here’s the song: