Plan: survey on what I might do next week on the quantitative aspects of voting. Work the homework problems for next week about which there are questions. That should fill the class time, since I have “taught” percentages just half of the last class. If it doesn’t, what then? The inflation calculator? (If so I need to have the computer.) Move on to weighted averages? Start voting?
Distributed the “what do you know and want to know about voting” survey, which you can find here: http://www.cs.umb.edu/~eb/114/VotingSurvey.rtf.
The two homework problems the class (actually, just one student) asked about were useful. One required the meanings of absolute and relative change (which I hadn’t covered formally in class). So I did the Red Sox ticket price increase section from the book – using the 1+ trick from the start ($325/$275 = 1.1818… is an 18% increase).
Then “50 minutes is about a microcentury” led to the discussion of metric prefixes I’d also skipped.
Then I had half an hour left. We talked a bit about how I might tally the results of the preferences from the survey, First question was whether more than one topic would be chosen. If yes, two quick possibilities
- Choose topic with largest number of first place votes
- Choose topic with best (in this case smallest) average rank
The second plan gave me a chance to introduce weighted averages, which we will encounter soon in the normal course of events.
The discussion quickly bogged down after that, since the trivial example I invented on the fly didn’t have good/interesting numbers in it. So we finished early. I will tabulate the questionnaire over the weekend and hope to be able to use it to good effect in the class – and in chapter 14!
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