Reformatting an infographic about diseases and donations

This infographic seems to be making the rounds. It seems relevant, given how much attention is being given to ALS with the "ice bucket challenge".

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/infographic-shows-differences-between-diseases-we-donate-and-diseases-kill-us

Assuming all of the data is accurate and up to date and adjusted to inflation, etc. here is a quick table showing the dollars raised per death. Note that according to the data in this infographic Prostate Cancer receives the most dollars per death (Just shy of $7,000), even more than Breast Cancer. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and Heart Disease combined (again, according to the data in this chart) kills 739,519 however each disease received ~ $49 and $91per person killed, respectively.  Of course, perhaps they are both very well funded and do not "need" donations as much as the other diseases.

Long story short - if the story is in infographic form... it is probably not well presented. 

EDIT -- Note that many others had similar thoughts and redesigned this infographic.

 http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/2er3zq/redesign_where_we_donate_vs_diseases_that_kill_us/

Some from that thread requested a chart.  See below. 

Click to enlarge

Email to a student who is going to college in the fall

Time management is difficult in the age of the internet.  

Choose one hour of one day sometime in the next week to turn off all devices - phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, gaming system, radio, mp3 player, etc.. everything.

On paper write out what you want to do with your schedule. If you know your college course load then that's great! Plan 1 hr of study time for every time you are in a class or lab each day. (e.g. if you have 3 classes on Monday, plan for 3 hours of study time, minimum. If you have 4 classes Tuesday, plan for 4 hours of study time, minimum, etc... proceed like that for your entire week.) When planning, make sure to eat and wake/sleep consistently, at least during the week. Try to plan in one hour of physical activity (even if it's walking at a brisk pace) each day. Make sure to give your mind and body time to relax as well -- a few hours each week to just do nothing or to relax and unwind doing a sport or activity you find enjoyable (music, athletics, etc.).  Block out how all of that time will fit into your schedule on paper. You'll find that your schedule will rather quickly be filled in.

Now that you have a schedule sticking to it is the hardest part.

It requires turning off all those devices while studying and in class.

Your brain works best when you are 100% focused on the task at hand.  You're naturally smart enough to be above most students even when your brain is at, say 80% or 70% focused, but there is a "wall" that you will reach at some point which will require you to be able to put forth close to 100% focus to succeed (undergrad or graduate studies or advancing beyond a certain point in your career, etc.).  It is easier to develop that habit of 100% focus now than 4 or 5 or 10 years from now. :)

If you can make and keep a schedule you will basically be super(wo)man compared to your peers.

They'll be panicking and cramming before exams, and you'll have it all under control. They'll be rushing to finish a lab report or HW set, and you'll have it already done or need only one or two hours where they will need the entirety of that beautiful Sunday afternoon to finish it.

Books about the history of physics

Books about the history of physics.

Watching Cosmos (2014) has rekindled my interest in physics and the history of physics.

Understanding Physics by Isaac Asimov

The Evolution of Physics by Einstein & Infeld

Six Easy Pieces and Six Not So Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman, also the complete Feynman Lectures on Physics are available online, as are his messenger lectures.

Visual Proofs



Sometimes, a visual proof is more helpful than pages of computations. Here are two interesting math concepts which you might find interesting.

1. "Dual" of polyhedra -- basically take a solid like a cube, find the midpoint of each edge, and rotate each edge about the midpoint until it connects with the other sides. Those two shapes are "dual". http://hyrodium.tumblr.com/post/76098308148/dual-polyhedrons

2. The "Sum of squares" 1 + 2 + 4 + 9 + 16 + ... has an elegant representation. Just think about stacking blocks and count up how many blocks are in the solid rectangle when you're done:
Proof 1 - fantastic animation! (source) Here is a Non animated 2d proof.

Linkdump from today's explorations

Investement simulator
http://www.cfiresim.com/input.php?id=89449

From this thread

187 million taxi rides

2013 taxi data from NYC yields some interesting insights.
https://www.mapbox.com/blog/nyc-taxi/

The discussion on hackernews was interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7926358 and revealed some fascinating insights. The current top comment offers some insights into how this data could be manipulated to find out, say, who is attending what bars and when... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927034

Reddit also picked up some interesting bits of info from the data including what percentage of people tip, and how much: http://www.reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/28ialf/173_million_2013_nyc_taxi_rides_shared_on_bigquery/

89,092,521 (47.57%) left no tip, but... "Cash tips are easier for cab drivers to "forget" to report, so even though data suggests people tip more when paying by card (where the tip presets start at 20%!), drivers still prefer an under-the-table tip."

From the reddit thread, someone linked a detailed yet approachable article about how the data may not be very anonymous: https://medium.com/@vijayp/of-taxis-and-rainbows-f6bc289679a1

> It took a while longer to de-anonymize the entire dataset, but thanks to Yelp’s MRJob, I ran a map-reduce over about 10 computers on EMR and had it done within an hour. 

Interesting stuff!

Properties of 8675309

Aside from being a catchy tune, 8675309 is an integer with some interesting properties. The fact that is is a primitive Pythagorean triple is remarkable!  

A wolframalpha query yields these results:

Snopes article about how this song caused (or didn't cause) havoc for phone companies...

The song:

How to make online learning succeed

Below are some general guidelines about how to make an online course work best for reasonably responsible high school students. An important philosophical belief I have based on my experience with both in-class and online learning is that "technology is a tool" and like any other tool it takes consistent practice to master and it may not be perfectly suited for every single person. It can be made to work reasonably well for almost everyone if the following guidelines are kept:

Good practices
1. There must be regular (once-per-week minimum) communication between the student, online instructor, and in-school contact.

2. The student is expected to:
2a. spend roughly 1 hour/day, 5 days/week, every week on coursework (reading the text, regularly accessing the website to see videos, notes, try problems, email instructor, etc.)
2b. ask questions as soon as a problem (tech, math, etc.) arises!

3. The student should be provided with a quiet place to work on the course. (library, quite time at computer lab, etc.)

4. Logistically speaking, tests are 90 minutes, on paper.  The student will need space, time, and a proctor for these tests. Midterm & Final = 180 minutes. Returning the tests is easy as using a smartphone or scanner to turn them into PDFs. * Note -- These times are specific to my courses. Your mileage may vary.


Here is how students often ... don't find success:

Bad practices
1. Students don't interact with the instructor regularly. Students don't have any sort of at-home or in-school person to check in on them weekly.

2. Students do the following:
2a. Spend 0 hours on the course for 2 consecutive weeks, then try to cram 10 hours into a weekend.
2b. Do not let the online instructor know when something is wrong (tech,math, etc.)

3. Students try to do their coursework in loud or distracting environments.

Myself and my team of instructors will continue to check in with the student and instructor throughout the enrollment, but the expectation is that the student is keeping to the suggestions above. Sometimes he or she may veer off course -- that's human, it happens, and it can easily be fixed if it's caught quickly.

Euler and more

Today's Mathematical Explorations. 

"Read Euler, Read Euler, he is the master of us all."

How to lie with dataviz: http://data.heapanalytics.com/how-to-lie-with-data-visualization/

Frequency Spectrum of sounds. (PDF)
Two letter combinations in English. http://mechanicalscribe.com/notes/most-common-two-letter-combinations/
Statistical analysis of Bob Ross's works: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-statistical-analysis-of-the-work-of-bob-ross/
Depth of the ocean -- why it's difficult to find sunken black boxes. http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/the-depth-of-the-problem/931/

Inequality in golf. And a relevant image (source)


A lexicon of common math mistakes.

Hundreds of pages of notes from Feynman.

Your weight in outer space.

census data visualization, the solar system, and engine gifs

linkdump from today's mathematical explorations

Gallery of animated gifs about engines http://imgur.com/a/eatFH
Video showing how an automatic transmission works.

Opposites do not attract, at least this is what the statistics seem so suggest.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/in-the-end-people-may-really-just-want-to-date-themselves/

Fantastic website for visualizing census data!
http://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US2404000-baltimore-md/

Solar System Live: http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Solar

Fourier series and Depth of Field experiments

Linkdump from today's mathematical explorations

Interactive Fourier series visualized in d3.js http://bl.ocks.org/jinroh/7524988


Tilt Shift photography of galaxies and nebula: http://imgur.com/a/yZcOB/layout/horizontal#0

Note: "Look at the eleventh pic, for example (NGC 3621). Many of the specks of light to the left and right are other galaxies millions of lightyears away. If this were truly tilt-shift, those galaxies wouldn't be in focus." from this comment.

Also from that thread:  "What is it about tilt-shift photography that makes things seem small?"  This exists: http://tiltshiftmaker.com/ and is pretty nifty. I made the following image with it.

before (click to enlarge)

after tilt shift (click to enlarge)

Very clever sculptures which combine stone and glass.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/10/ramon-todo-glass/

Spectroscopy and poetry

Linkdump from today's mathematical explorations

Review of Cosmos Episode 5 "Hiding in the light" with lots of links to the scientists mentioned in the show.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-cosmos-recap-20140404,0,259862.story#axzz2yCyoagkI

Spectrosopy information:
http://loke.as.arizona.edu/~ckulesa/camp/spectroscopy_intro.html
http://www.ipac.caltech.edu/outreach/Edu/Spectra/spec.html


lunchbreak reader feed notes:
The Wikipedia article on Homer pretty drat awful...
This comment thread  illustrates why this page  is really a mess, from a historian's viewpoint. Taking everything with a grain of salt, but it seems that wikipedia has some policies that do not agree with what is commonly viewed as good academic practice. The particular article on Homer gets ~ 100k views a week, so this is a problem.

Will the social sciences ever become hard science? (very likely no, and with good reason.)
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2014/04/will-social-sciences-ever-become-hard.html


The poetry that moves men to tears The comments of this article are full of thoughtful, insightful poems.
Anthony Holden's new anthology celebrates the poems that move men – with revealing contributions from the likes of Ian McEwan, Jonathan Franz...

From the comments section (which is just as fascinating as the article itself):
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up earlyand put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,then with cracked hands that achedfrom labor in the weekday weather madebanked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I`d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.When the rooms were warm, he`d call,and slowly I would rise and dress,fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,who had driven out the coldand polished my good shoes as well.What did I know, what did I knowof love`s austere and lonely offices?

Tilt and rotation of the planets.

Missing 20th century physicist, gorgeous maps

Linkdump from today's explorations

Disappearing physicist: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2014/04/02/night-crossing/ Who was Ettore Majorana? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Majorana

From an excellent stats blog: http://andrewgelman.com/2014/03/29/agree-comment/

The problem is simple, the researchers are disproving always false null hypotheses and taking this disproof as near proof that their theory is correct.

Beautiful maps made with d3.js. https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/

Beautiful graphs and beautiful monsters

Linkdump from today's mathematical explorations

Beautifully graphs with clear explanations and interpretations are one of my favorite things.  This blog post by the 538 blog is a prime example of just that.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/four-strikes-and-youre-out/

While discussing counterexamples with a student today I mentioned the Weierstrass function. Here is an great blog post which gives some backstory to the development of and reaction to the function that is everywhere continuous and nowhere differentiable. A thumb on the nose to Newton.

http://nautil.us/issue/11/light/maths-beautiful-monsters
http://www.math.washington.edu/~conroy/general/weierstrass/weier.htm

The Weierstrass function is just one of many "Pathological Functions": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_%28mathematics%29

There are many here http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/740/useful-examples-of-pathological-functions and here http://mathoverflow.net/questions/22189/what-is-your-favorite-strange-function.  There is also an excellent book titled Counterexamples in Analysis which covers even more of these pathological functions in great detail. http://www.amazon.com/Counterexamples-Analysis-Dover-Books-Mathematics/dp/0486428753

Cellular Automata

Linkdump from today's explorations

This reminded me of Cellular Automata and Conway's game of life.

Post by Olya Petrakova.

There are 128 rules with last digit "1" 000 1 I'll have to experiment, maybe finally learn some processing, to list them all here. While searching differential equations, I found an interesting discussion about why the Navier Stokes equation is so difficult. This fits nicely into the blog post yesterday about equations. http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/56496/what-is-the-mystery-of-turbulence/66917#66917 The solution to the equation is an open question in mathematics and you can read a very precise (2 page) description of it here: http://www.claymath.org/millenium-problems/navier%E2%80%93stokes-equation It basically describes how fluids flow.

Compressible flow (air)
Incompressible flow (water)
 

Chile Earthquake Facts

Linkdump from today's explorations.

All items taken from this reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/21yyig/an_80_magnitude_earthquake_has_struck_offshore/

USGS website info: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/usc000nzvd#summary
USGS Summary report: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/poster/2014/20140401.php

Wave propagation map: http://i.imgur.com/RRmDfnQ.png
Wave propagation video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhvfbjCIiXo
Hear the sound of the quake! (well, the sound of its seismic waveform) http://www.iris.edu/dms/nodes/dmc/tools/event/4597319

Pasta analogy which nicely explains the logarithmic nature of the strength of earthquakes: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bj_DmNbCIAErl1C.jpg

Old Math Books

Sometimeshttp://www.reddit.com/r/math turns has some wonderful curiosities on its frontpage. Several users have math texts from the mid to late 1800s and posted a few images. As it turns out, each text has been digitally archived and can be viewed for free by anyone with an internet connection and a PDF reader. The discussions about typesetting, mathematical notation, and mathematical exposition (writing style), was interesting.  Below are some highlights.

Plane and solid geometry by George Wentworth (1899)
imgur gallery
discussion thread
full text on Internet Archive

A treatise on differential equations by George Boole & Isaac Todhunter (1865)
imgur gallery
discussion thread
full text on Internet Archive

Elements of Algebra By George Roberts Perkins (1852)
imgur gallery
discussion thread
full text on Google Books

BBC -- Beautiful Equations

 

Artist Matt Collings chats openly with scientists as he takes a tour of some of the most important equations in physics. Equations are explained to be an unambiguous generalized shorthand for expressing relationships about physical quantities. "A little increase in mass means a gigantic increase in energy." How much, exactly? Well, the details are actually worked out in a way that anyone can follow.

This documentary is well worth watching as it gives an approachable and concrete explanation of what all the symbols on the page actually mean and how truly remarkable it is that such universal truths, which literally apply to all objects in the universe, can be expressed in such a compact manner. 

The concept of "Mathematical Beauty" is explored and (spoiler alert) it basically means that a single, compact equation can very simply and very generally express the relationship between quantities (mass, energy, time, velocity, force, etc.).

BBC Page for "Beautiful Equations" http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wltbm

Matt Collings's website: http://www.emmabiggsandmatthewcollings.net/recent

The five equations presented: 

1) The relationship between mass and energy: E = mc^2 
(E = energy, m = mass of an object, c = the speed of light)

2) The force of gravity between two bodies: F = (G * m1*m2)/(r^2)
(G = the gravitational constant, m1 and m2 = "the first object having mass m1, the second object has mass 2" and r = the distance between the two objects)

3) Time dilation: t' = t*sqrt[ 1 - (v/c)^2 ]
 t = time in your frame of reference, as you move at velocity v.
t' = time according to someone watching you from another frame of reference at rest to the first. c = the speed of light. 

4) Dirac Equation: (i*gamma*del - m)*phi = 0 
Difficult to summarize without getting into complicated mathematics. Essentially it predicted that all matter has anti-matter components and it described how the most elementary of particles behaved. More here.

 "What makes the theory of relativity so acceptable to physicists in spite of its going against the principle of simplicity is its great mathematical beauty. This is a quality which cannot be defined, any more than beauty in art can be defined, but which people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating." Paul Dirac 1969 full speech here

5) Hawking Equation:  S = A/4
S = entropy (disorder) , A = the area of the black hole

It is worth mentioning another blog post which goes nicely with this theme.

"Math doesn't use fancy words and weird notations because mathematicians are trying to confuse non-mathematicians. It’s not done out of spite, or out of some desire to exclude non-mathematicians from the club. It’s about precision."

http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2014/03/24/yet-another-cantor-crank-size-vs-cardinality/

As a particularly nice example, I offer up the equation for the Fourier Transformation.



At first, it can seem intimidating and overwhelming -- so many symbols, fractions within superscripts, what does it all mean? Well, each symbol has a very specific and unambiguous meaning, quite a lot of punch is packed into this array of symbols!


The image above was originally seen here and explained for the lay reader in this blog.