Author: Geoff
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The Minnesota Timberwolves are complaining about having the second pick in the NBA Draft. Do they have a point?
Lest this become a sports-draft blog, I feel contractually obligated to post about the NBA Draft Lottery, what with the Cavs winning and the statistical odds and all. Last night, the Cleveland Cavaliers (my favorite team for you non-twitter followers) won the NBA Draft Lottery, meaning, by chance they were awarded the #1 overall pick…
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U-haul Linear Systems problem (updated and improved)
A couple weeks ago I posted this problem. I like the problem, but I wasn’t a huge fan of its solution and frankly, it sort of got away from me. Thankfully, my colleagues are more adept than I am at developing clear problems. So here’s the updated, improved version. =============================================== Moving On Up Artifact / Entry Event…
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Do NFL teams actually use that draft pick chart when trading draft picks?
The 2011 National Football League draft of players is tomorrow, and I was inspired by a really interesting post over on Mr. Honner’s blog regarding the NFL Draft Pick Trade Value chart and exponential decay. The gist is this: somewhere, sometime, someone came up with a chart that assigned a numerical value to every pick…
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‘What is it your students really do well?’ What “The Three Amigos” can teach us about Project Based Learning
What is it your students really do well? For those that aren’t intimately familiar with the classic ¡The Three Amigos!, as I am, this scene takes place as the villainous (and infamous) El Guapo and his henchmen are riding horseback to destroy the village of Santa Poco. Outmanned and outgunned, the people of Santa Poco…
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The Dallas Mavericks are 2-16 in playoff games officiated by Danny Crawford. Is this statistically significant?
Artifact. This shocked me. The Mavs have a 2-16 record in playoff games officiated by Crawford, including 16 losses in the last 17 games. Dallas is 48-41 in the rest of their playoff games during the ownership tenure of Mark Cuban, who has been fined millions of dollars in the last 11 years for publicly…
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Can someone help me improve this problem? (U-Haul rental rates ; systems of linear functions)
So the Emergent Math family moved houses this weekend (editor’s note: they didn’t actually move the houses, they moved the furniture inside the houses). We were given basically three different options for U-Haul rentals of increasing size and increasing price. This led me to believe that a nice systems problem could be constructed from this. I…
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A stop-sign vs. a stoplight; when does each make sense? (Part 2, Math modeling)
I know it’s been a while since we visited this, but quick recap: We want to figure out when it is appropriate to have a stop-sign at an intersection versus a stoplight. In Part 1, we made some assumptions about stop-sign wait time modeling and developed an equation that gave us the total wait time…
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What Teachers Want: An Education Parable Written By a Math Teacher
Our scene opens with the Teacher and the Student in a moderately decorated classroom. The walls are covered with posters, both inspirational and informative. The Student is seated at one of dozens of neatly aligned desks, facing the Teacher, who stands in front of a whiteboard covered in information, examples, and tasks. The Teacher is…
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Let’s graph this and/or make it better; What constitutes a “blown game?”
A few minutes ago the other day, NPR’s Mike Pesca tweeted his mathematical rule as to what constitutes a “blown game” in basketball. That means if at any time a team is winning by (# of minutes left in the game)+4, and loses, that’s a “blown game.” There are 48 minutes in a NBA game…
emergent math 