A little late to the US Election Party

You may have heard about the United States having an election recently.  In fact, all the talk about Florida and racial divisions might have reminded you of other recent elections.

I spent some happy time after the 2004 election gathering data, by county, in a Fathom document.  I was inspired by some fascinating articles with incredible data visualizations:

The changing colors of America (1960-2004)

Maps of the 2016 US presidential election results (it used to be 2004)

and posed a few questions on The Math Forum.

Fathom is licensed by the Ontario Ministry of Education for use in its publicly funded schools and Ontario has an innovative Data Management course at the Grade 12 level.

Here are two of the plots that I created in Fathom which I also think are very cool - not quite as fancy as the ones above however.  These make you wonder where "middle America" has gone...



The comments related to the collection are worth a read.

Scratch and Binomial Walks

I am at the #bit15 conference and attended the Coding and Math session with @georgegadanidis.  We learned a little Scratch programming.

We did the requisite square and circle creation tasks.  He had some nice connections to higher level math - including extending a two coin toss scenario to the binomial theorem.  At that point, I worked on my program to make the cat do a binomial walk - not realizing that he would have that example later.  I have shared my project at https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/86529699/ and embedded it below:

The cat should start moving when you click the green flag.  In the offline Scratch editor, you can export the list of horizontal positions where 0 is the centre.  I then imported it into Fathom to make a histogram.

Looks pretty binomial to me!

I am using Twitter as part of our #mmmmECOO presentation - my handle is @rossisen.

A little shameless self-promotion

Now that Amazon.com has accepted my edit, adding me as an author (yup - that's my name at the bottom), it is a good time to let you know that a book that I helped to write is available at the Key Press site.