Dotmpotter - Dot Potter

Citizen Maths: free/open adult math education for practical real-world numeracy

Without scientific understanding, we don’t run the government, the government runs us” -Carl Sagan, in his final interview.

Last week we released a big batch of new CC-BY licensed content for Citizen Maths a free online course for adults who want to improve their grasp of maths at what in the UK is known as Level 2 (the level that 16 year old school leavers are expected to reach, though many do not).

(Image: Jonathan Worth, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The new course content covers the powerful ideas in maths of “uncertainty” and “representation”. It sits alongside the content for “proportion” which was published last year.

Learning about each idea is supported by a mix of short video tutorials, practical exercises, and quizzes. The practical exercises use a range of approaches including:

* tools like spreadsheets;

* purpose-built self-standing “apps” of various kinds;

* coding in Scratch.

Each powerful idea is shown in action in several different contexts. For example, “uncertainty” involves the following situations:

* Making decisions — value of insurance, risk comparisons;

* Judging — the meaning of cancer screening results;

* Gaming — appreciating odds in roulette, dice, horse-racing;

* Modelling — the uncertain prediction of the weather.

The powerful ideas and the situations in which they are shown in action have been selected in consultation with maths teachers, and with organisations familiar with the learning needs of adults.

http://boingboing.net/2015/11/03/citizen-maths-freeopen-math.html

Bra Fit Science: Why Sampling Methods for Lingerie Research Matter

by Catherine of Kiss Me Deadly

As a psychologist, particularly one of a therapeutic bent, I never felt much like a scientist. I mean, we’re fluffy bunnies in the world of “proper” science, no matter how much we talk about epistemological theory or Feyerabend’s ideas or squeeze gratuitous Greek letters and geometry style diagrams into our work.

As a lingerie professional, however, I’m sometimes quite scared about how little the industry seems to know about what it means to be scientific.

Villagers to Refugees: Please Don't Fear Krampus

Officials in the village of Virgen worried about how new arrivals from the Middle East would react to the local tradition of meeting so-called "Christmas Devils" who pretend to abduct kids.

Fearing the spectacle would be misunderstood, community representatives last week visited the 22 migrants — including 12 children — who have been housed in the Alpine village since the end of October.

They were shown the frightening masks and given insight into the event’s history with the help of an Arabic translator. The verdict? The newcomers had “lots of fun,” according to social worker Nicole Kranebitter.

The migrants “will now know what to expect when St. Nicholas and the Krampus creatures knock on their door,” Kranebitter added.

She said the next event planned for the families who fled war-torn homelands will be traditional cookie baking.

sometimes the world is okay

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Is Able to Drill Holes Into Rocks Again

“The team used tremendous ingenuity to devise a new drilling technique and implement it on another planet,” said Steve Lee, Curiosity Deputy Project Manager of JPL, in a statement. “Those are two vital inches of innovation from 60 million miles away. We’re thrilled that the result was so successful.”

That’s one small hole for a probe, but one giant leap for NASA. This past weekend, the space agency jerry-rigged Curiosity’s malfunctioning drill, allowing the rover to bore into Martian rock for the first time in over a year.

Continue Reading.

Of the 24 MacArthur genius grant recipients, 11 of them were women. Here’s a look at who they are, what they do and why you should pay attention to them. 

MacArthur’s genius women (The Daily Beast) 

Biologists at the University of Rhode Island were studying the nitrogen content of streams and noticed something odd: whenever there were beaver ponds upstream, nitrogen levels dropped. Beaver ponds slow down river water, and they mix it with organic matter, which must have an effect on river chemistry, but scientists didn’t know exactly what was happening in that murky water. So they made soda-bottle-sized “ponds” that let them study variations on the conditions the beavers set up in their real-life ponds. And they found a kind of reverse nitrogen fixation process was occurring — call it “denitrification.” Bacteria in the dirt and the plant debris turned nitrates into nitrogen gas. The gas bubbled up to the surface and mixed with the atmosphere once more. In some cases, the level of nitrogen in the water dropped 45%.

(via Scientists Acquire More Proof That Only Beavers Can Save the World)

You're only an "economic migrant" if you're poor and brown

Ned Richardson-Little is a Canadian academic who went to the US “in search of a better life,” did research in Germany and settled in the UK, something he was able to do thanks to his economic migrant grandfather who happened to have been born in Scotland.

Richardson contemplates the vilified category of “economic migrant” – “the greedy, dark other to those virtuously fleeing conflict” – and wonders how it is that no one has ever vilified him, given that he, too, is so obviously an “economic migrant.”

My grandparents (and father) were displaced people – Red Army deserters who destroyed their papers so that they could escape Europe via the DP boats to Canada – and I left Canada for the USA to found a company, then moved to the UK to represent an NGO and became a citizen, and have now moved back to the USA to write novels and campaign for better information policy. No one has ever called me an economic migrant.

https://boingboing.net/2015/11/29/youre-only-an-economic-mig.html

Check in: The Tokyo hotel where guests can curl up with 1,700 good books

Book and Bed, a new Tokyo hotel, has created the sort of space that is impossible to leave. It is a cheap and cheerful dorm with a difference: guests’ bunk beds are hidden behind library shelves filled with hundreds of books in Japanese and English. | Read more

Both were filled at the same time with the same water, only one had oysters.