Ideas floating around my head these days:

Estimation:


GIVEN a shower puff that is intact, how would you estimate its length unravelled?







GIVEN a plum, who can do the best job peeling it? How would you determine "best job," in a measurable way?

                 





Statistics:

A Danish economist wonders if sleep effects productivity. He has 10,000 surveys of citizens that include sleep habits. What could he do with this data to measure productivity? Click here to find out how he does it!
Freakonomics Podcast 7/16/2015 Sleep Part 2

Parenting:

Just having come back from Europe where EVERY woman goes to the beach in her bikini, young, old, skinny, overweight, glamorous, tall, short, you get the idea...I mentioned this to a friend that has a teenage daughter and a teenage son. She said, "It is so important for our boys especially to see all kinds of woman at the beach, otherwise they get a warped view from TV and magazines about what a woman's body is supposed to look like." Isn't she smart? (I don't have boys, and as everyone knows who works with or has girls, it is so important to remind them to view themselves naturally without some warped Hollywold image about what is attractive.)

Time Off:

I am going to survey my students this fall (ack, I mean in three weeks) about who feels they got a "real" vacation this summer for at least a week. I am going to let them define "real."

Then I am going to track their grades for the first semester and see if there is any correlation. Anyone in? What do you think will show up? Did you know that of the 10 countries with the fewest hours worked weekly, 9 have the highest gross domestice product per capita? (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD))

I am super excited to meet some awesome peeps at Twitter Math Camp next week. I am sure I will have much to report. I just hope that I am as groovy and smart as they are.


What are you thinking about this summer?