Articles & Videos

This disclaimer informs the readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the articles below belong solely to the author and are not the opinions of the MTH 101 instructors or MSU. The articles were selected as examples of various ways data is represented,  analyzed, and used to support certain arguments.

Side-by-Side and Stacked Bar Graphs

(Recently in the News)

• Study: Charts Change Hearts and Minds Better than Words Do
  • From the Washington Post Wonkblog by Christopher Ingraham
• How Modern Medicine Has Changed the Supreme Court
  • From the New York Times by Dhruv Khullar and Anupam B. Jena
• Some Colleges Have More Students From the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60. Find Yours.
  • From the New York Times the Upshot
• 6 Charts That Illustrate the Divide Between Rural and Urban America
  • From PBS by Brian Thiede, Lillie Greiman, Stephan Weiler, Steven Beda and Tessa Conroy for The Conversation

Absolute and Relative Measures. Percent Change.

• World Population Growth
  • From ourworldindata.org
• United States Unemployment Rate
  • From tradingeconomics.org
• 5 Facts about the Minimum Wage
  • From the Pew Research Center
• How the 13 new state minimum wage raises break down, in three charts
  • From PBS
• The Opioid Crisis: Every State’s Overdose Death Rate, Ranked
  • From Madison.com, based on CDC data
• This One Chart Shows How Obscene CEO Pay Has Become
  • From Fortune Magazine
• Returns to Education
  • From ourworldindata.org

Rankings

• Norway Is No. 1 in Happiness. The U.S., Sadly, Is No. 14.
• The 20 Happiest Countries in the World
• How U.S. News Calculated the 2019 Best Colleges Rankings
  • This reading would be useful for you to see an example of how to structure your paper. It is also a required reading for your MyMathLab homework assignment.
• Why Rotten Tomatoes Scores Don’t Mean What They Seam
  • This is also part of your MyMathLab assignment.
• Chess Player Rankings – Elo Rating System
  • From Wikipedia
• Point-based Immigration Systems: Canada
  • From the Library of Congress
• Why Billboard’s New Chart Changes Will Please Some – but Aggravate Others
  •  From www.musicbusinessworldwide.com
• A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow
  Is GDP a good measure of happiness? TED Talk by Kate Raworth.
• Why it’s time for ‘Doughnut Economics’ | Kate Raworth | TEDxAthens
  Economic theory is centuries out of date and that’s a disaster for tackling the 21st century’s challenges of climate change, poverty, and extreme inequality. Kate Raworth flips economic thinking on its head to give a crash course in alternative economics, explaining in three minutes what they’ll never teach you in three years of a degree.
• Robert F. Kennedy challenges Gross Domestic Product
  What does GDP measure and what does it not measure?
• How Madden Ratings Are Made: the Secret Process that Turns NFL Players into Digital Gods
  • From fivethirtyeight.com
• Best and Worst Places to Raise a Family
  • From wallethub.com
• Useful Data Sources for your Project on World Happiness Rankings:
  • CIA World Factbook
  • https://www.gapminder.org/

Data Visualization

• The American Dream Is Harder To Find In Some Neighborhoods
  • NPR
• The Opportunity Atlas
• Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes – The Joy of Stats – BBC Four
• Ways Writers Use Misleading Graphs To Manipulate You
  • venngage.com

Exponential vs Linear Growth. Logistic Curve.

• A Frightening Curve: How Fast Is The Ebola Outbreak Growing?
  • NPR
• Beyond the Limits to Growth
  • Richard Heinberg
• Exponential Outbreaks: The Mathematics of Epidemics
  • The Learning Network: Teaching and Learning with the New York Times
• Exponential Business Growth: A Smartphone Case Study
  • systemsandus.com

Fermi Estimation Problems

• Environment: Waste production must peak this century
  • Nature
• Back to school: Almost 20 million kids are getting free lunch
  • CNN
• How much milk does the US produce?
  • U.S. Dairy Industry; United Dairymen of Idaho
• How much food do we waste?
  • USDA
  • Foodforward.org
• Can Decreasing Shower Time Really Make a Big Impact?
  • PSU’s Mathematics for Sustainability: Student Blog Spring 2015

Frequency Charts, Characterizing Data – Mean, Median, Mode

• Visualizing the distribution of ACT scores
  • From sas.com

Normal Distribution, Standard Deviation, Sampling and Margin of Error

• Methods for a Pew Research Center survey
  • Sample size, margin of error, confidence interval
• When writing about survey data, 51% might not mean a ‘majority’
  • From the Pew Research Center
• 5 key things to know about the margin of error in election polls
  • From the Pew Research Center
• Just for fun: Height Percentile Calculator, by Age or Country
  • From tall.life

Correlation and Causation

• Correlation is not causation
  • From the Guardian
• New evidence confirms human activities drive global warming
• Temperature Change and Carbon Dioxide Change
  • From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association

Health and Risk; False Positives/False Negatives

• What the tests don’t show
  • From the Washington Post: “Doctors are surprisingly bad at reading lab results. It’s putting us all at risk.”
• Polygraphs are accurate, but not foolproof
  • From ABC News
• How Likely Is It That Birth Control Could Let You Down?
  • From the New York Times
• Pharyngitis (Strep Throat)
  • From the CDC