When Science Can Be Funny!

From Denny: Sometimes science and graphs are not all about the dry stuff. These folks over at GraphJam have a great sense of humor, enjoy!


see more Funny Graphs

Brain: The Essential Guide to Effective Decision Making

Cover via Amazon

From Denny: It's been a while since I've linked you to the wonderful and interesting LiteMind site. They haven't been posting every week. This is their latest article. They always write about more efficient and innovative ways to better use our minds. LiteMind has quite a following on Twitter too; you might want to follow them there as well.


From blog owner Luciano Passuello (Brazil) an excerpt from his post:

"The PrOACT Approach to Decision Making

The PrOACT approach (outlined in the book Smart Choices) is by far the best model for decision making that I have seen. It helps you see both the tangible and intangible aspects of your situation more clearly and to translate all pertinent facts, feelings, opinions, beliefs and advice into the best possible decision.

‘PrOACT’ is a mnemonic that stands for five key elements in the model:

Problem statement

Objectives

Alternatives

Consequences

Tradeoffs

The method consists of examining each of these core elements separately, using them to clarify and organize your thoughts as you go."

For the rest of this informative article just click on the title link.

Math: Comparison helps children grasp math concepts

Image via Wikipedia

From Denny: This is a great follow-up article to Saturday's.
Do you want your child to become a flexible problem-solver? According to this study the most effective way to achieve that goal is to teach a child to compare various ways to solve that math problem by comparing various drawbacks or benefits. Learning to solve a problem in more than just one way as is traditionally taught causes a mind to become more flexible.

They also found out that the children in the study were also more accurate in their solutions when they practised comparison solving, even when the problem involved estimation.

For more details in the article, just click on the title link.

Math: Explaining basic concepts behind math problems improves children's learning

Image via Wikipedia

From Denny: Whew! Well, it's about time to do the obvious if you want kids to really learn what's going on and why! What took the educators so long to figure out kids are capable of learning concepts?

Following is an excerpt. Just click on the title link for more of this very interesting study.

"New research from Vanderbilt University has found students benefit more from being taught the concepts behind math problems rather than the exact procedures to solve the problems. The findings offer teachers new insights on how best to shape math instruction to have the greatest impact on student learning...

In math class, teachers typically demonstrate a procedure for solving a problem and then have children practice solving related problems, often with minimal explanation for why things work."

Celebrate Pi Day!

Photo by d3 Dan @ flickr

From: piday.org

"Pi, Greek letter ( ), is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi = 3.1415926535... Pi Day is celebrated by math enthusiasts around the world on March 14th.

The Number Pi

Pi represents the relationship between a circle’s diameter (its width) and its circumference (the distance around the circle).

Learn About Pi

With the use of computers, Pi has been calculated to over 1 trillion digits past the decimal. Pi is an irrational number meaning it will continue infinitely without repeating. The symbol for pi was first used in 1706 by William Jones, but was popular after it was adopted by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1737."

From Denny: Go to the site for funny pi comments and the like. What will they think of next?

Happy Square Root Day!

03/03/2009

Happy Square Root Day! Get this: "Square root day occurs on dates where the day and month are both the square root of the last two digits of the year.

Square root day only happens nine times a century and won’t happen again until April 4, 2016, so if you need a reason to celebrate the day - well here you go."

From Denny: And here I thought only physicists were the science party animals! :)

This comes from a delightful blog known as:
Tom's Astronomy Blog.

Check it out for yourself and read the comments after his post.

Photo by d3 Dan @ flickr