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In the past years, we would have perhaps one session (and sometimes none) focused on math. But this year, we have a whole track - three discussion sessions and two demos specifically on math, not to count others that touch on math sideways, through computing etc.
So if math is your thing, and you decided to skip ScienceOnline because you thought there was no math there - think twice. There are 25 seats left, and those will be open for registration tomorrow at 6pm EST.
What math sessions do we offer this time? See:
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Math Future network of communities: A year in review (discussion) - Maria Droujkova
The Math Future Interest Group is an international network of researchers, educators, families, community leaders and technology enablers. We are collaborating on a variety of research and development projects and conversation threads about social media as it relates to mathematics and mathematics education. In 2011, we opened a peer-to-peer School of the Mathematical Future in collaboration with P2PU; started to develop a community publishing process and a press called Delta Stream Media; launched Math Game Design group; held a successful crowd-funding campaign for "Moebius Noodles," a young math project; and organized our 100th open, free and interactive webinar in the ongoing series.
Teaching Core Competencies in Science: Solving Algebraic and Word Problems (discussion) - Kiyomi Deards and Khadijah M Britton
Math skills are necessary to the successful pursuit of science. Unfortunately, many students have not successfully developed these skills by the time they enter a biology, physics, chemistry, or other science class. Come share your expertise and questions about how we can communicate math simply, clearly and effectively to help students understand these core concepts, and the scientific process.
Never Tell Me the Odds: Assessing Certainty and Probability in Scientific Data (discussion) - Matthew R. Francis and Cedar Riener
Many stories in science aimed both at the general public and technical stories between scientists hinge on understanding probability, but our brains aren't really built for comprehending probability. However, it's not really that hard to grasp on a basic level, so we can talk about the relative chances of a particular statement being "right" -- and avoid insulting anybody's intelligence in the process. (I did something of this sort in my Science Vs. Pseudoscience class last year. We actually tested telepathy statistically.) Trained scientists know (on an intellectual level at least) that absolute certainty isn't known, and working with error bars or other measures of uncertainty is standard. However, as narratives often focus on conflict and seeking out the rare dissenting voice on matters where there is a great deal of consensus (e.g. global climate change), it's essential to get an idea of levels of uncertainty. This session might involve learning to read (or learning to explain for those who know how to read) plots and other figures that have error quantified in them.
Mathblogging.org (demo) - Peter Krautzberger
Mathblogging.org started out as a copy-cat of scienceblogging.com but with a focus on the small niche that is mathematical blogging. The project is now little over a year old and has slowly grown in terms of its database and functionality. In this process we moved away from mimicry to ideas that serve the mathematical community better, such as supporting other projects like mathoverflow.net.
Booles' Rings (demo) - Peter Krautzberger
At first sight, it may appear that Booles' Rings is yet-another-blogging-network, running a wordpress multisite installation to host a couple of sites. However, the goal of Booles' Rings is to change the way mathematicians (and other researchers) use their academic homepages: we are developing best practices for using a modern website technology to present and connect our online presences as researchers in the fullest sense. Using wordpress and other open-source tools we incorporate aspects of decentralized social networks hoping to bring the scientific community a tiny step forward towards being an actual community of people: in control of their content and making connections and interactions with other researchers transparent and visible beyond publication metrics. I will demonstrate the features of and ideas for our very young project (beyond the well-known wordpress features) focusing on the potential of wordpress and other decentralized social networking tools.
Learn more:
What is: ScienceOnline2012 – and it’s coming soon!