Statistics warning! Continue with caution!

It's is always interesting to see how mathematics and statistics is used in "the real world".

When looking at the latest news item, it is worth questioning all the data and assumptions made. So many of us take claims made by scientist, pressure groups, politicians and educationalists far too seriously without questioning them.

There are daily medical and environmental scare stories in the newspapers, which when examined carefully don't stand up, or if they do not the the extent made by the original articles.

Always be skeptical, so check out some nice sites ...

The Skeptic's Dictionary

Bjorn Lomberg - The Skeptical Environmentalist : interesting how some groups reacted to this book (available at Amazon). Have an open mind and look for yourself, and also have a read of an interesting article by Ronald Bailey at ReasonOnline.

ReasonOnline is the online home of the magazine Reason, a collection of free thinking articles on a variety of subjects.

Bad Science is a regular column in the Guardian by Ben Goldacre, always an interesting read for the latest take on science claims.

Another very interesting site is Responsible Thinking.

Have fun ...

Rich Starting Points for A Level Mathematics

I recently received some information about a new web site http://www.risps.net : (RiSPs = Rich Starting Points - for A Level Mathematics).

This site, run by Jonny Griffiths of Paston College, provides a wide range of mini investigative problems to start of some interesting work in mathematics.

These can be used as start of lesson warm up excercises or as end of lesson extended homework tasks.

The problems provide a very useful way of getting students to use and reinforce the mathematics they develop at A level standard, but without the tasks being too formal or difficult to start.

For example :

Risp 8. Arithmetic Simultaneous Equations

Pick six consecutive terms from an arithmetic sequence,

and place them in order into the spaces below.

__ x + __ y = __

__ x + __ y = __

Now solve this pair of simultaneous equations.

what do you discover ?