NPR ran an interesting article about how much it costs to make a hit pop song.
Using a Rhianna song as an example, this article breaks down the approximate costs for songwriters, producers, engineering, and marketing.
Before reading the article, take a guess as to how much of the money spent on making a “hit” song goes to creative artists: you’ll almost certainly be surprised.
My latest contribution to the New York Times Learning Network is a math lesson built around gathering, representing, and analyzing economic indicator data.
By getting data on Real G.D.P., personal income, corporate profits, and unemployment from official sources like the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Department of Labor, students explore positive and negative correlations between the various economic indicators.
In addition, students can explore the relationships between graphs of quantities and their rates of change by creating and comparing graphs of percent change.
This is a nice resource from The Guardian that highlights some of the ways developers are making government data accessible to citizens.
The projects include housing price analysis, roadway usage, government spending, and aggregation of community information.
The site wheredoesmymoneygo.org is especially interesting: slide the bar to your yearly income, and see just how much of your salary is spent on education, health services, defense, and other categories.
Lots of applications to play around with, and plenty of food for thought!
Here is another nice crowd-sourced resource from MathOverflow.net: a list of fundamental examples in mathematics.
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/4994/fundamental-examples
From the premise that a single example can often shape an entire mathematical discipline, a list of such examples is generated.
The list includes examples like the harmonic series in Real and Complex Analysis; the Brachistochrone problem in Physics; the Gaussian integers in Algebra; the Platonic solids in Geometry; and the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg in Graph Theory.
This is a great resource that provides accessible entry points to a lot of advanced mathematics!
