Okay, I’ll admit it. I don’t typically watch television news. (Sorry Tony!) But when bad weather comes along, seeing those weather maps is often exactly what I’m looking for. I lived in a hurricane prone area for 15 years, weathering (eh-hem)
Royalty Math: How many books will you have to sell?
So let’s say you got a book deal. Yay! Have that glass of wine or virgin daiquiri — and then it’s time to get down to business. How much can you actually earn from this venture? If you’re new to publishing,
Overwhelming Word Count? Use math to motivate
November 2011, I knew I had my work cut out for me. First off, I had never written a book before. Writing 800-word stories paled in comparison to the 55,000 words I was expected to produce for this book. Second,
Math at Work Monday: Jennifer the book editor
So you’ve got a brand new book on your nightstand or electronic reader. Or maybe you have a book idea that you’d love to get published. How on earth does an idea get translated to pages or bytes? A book
Welcome March! Media, publishing and math
In 1998, I landed my first real media job — as a content producer at PilotOnline and HamptonRoads.com, websites for The Virginian-Pilot, a daily newspaper in Norfolk, Va. My first assignment was to develop and launch a schools section, featuring interactive content like a
Histograms: Illustrations of variance
In our interview on Monday, professional photographer Sally Wiener Grotta talked about using histograms to help determine the exposure she needs to best reflect her subject in a photograph. If you took any statistics in high school or college — or have
Watch Your Language (And Your T-Shirts)
Earlier this year, Forever 21 and J.C. Penny had problems with moms and teen girls, when they retailed their own versions of math-as-gender-warfare–t-shirts that read: Allergic to Algebra and I’m Too Pretty for Homework, So My Brother Does It for Me. Within days,
Math Secret #4: You do use algebra
It’s the No. 1 question asked of math teachers: “When will I ever use this stuff?” And in terms of upper-level math — conic sections, radicals, differentiation and the quadratic formula — the answer may very well be, “Not much.”
When Journalists Get the Math Wrong
This has been a very weird four days. First, I found out that USA Weekend— the weekly newspaper supplement that appears in more than 800 newspapers in the U.S. and is read by 4.7 million people each week — published a cool, little
Feeling Anxious about Math? Here’s how to cope
Earlier this week, I provided a guest post about math anxiety and kids for Imp3rfect Mom. I wasn’t surprised to get a comment from a reader asking about how to deal with her math anxiety. My son is an adult so my question
Get the Anxiety Out of Math
Things that make many kids anxious: a new school, big dogs, the deep end of the swimming pool, bees, strangers, nightmares, math. Did you notice something there? For many children, math and bees are equally frightening or at least nerve-wracking.
Math Secret #2: You Were Born This Way (take 2)
All summer long, we’ve seen some pretty amazing research on math ability and education. We’ve been told that understanding geometric concepts may be innate and that elementary-aged students with a good sense of numeracy do better in math by the 5th grade. And yesterday