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Putting Two and Two Together : Selections from the Mathologer Files

Putting Two and Two Together is a humorous and quirky collection of unusual, ingenious, and beautiful morsels of mathematics. Authors Burkard Polster (YouTube's Mathologer) and Marty Ross delve into mathematical puzzles and phenomena in engaging stories featuring current events, sports, and history, many flavored with a distinctive bit of Australiana. Each chapter ends with "puzzles to ponder" that will spur further reflection.These stories were written for a general audience, and originally appeared in the Maths Masters column in The Age newspaper. The book offers mathematical entertainment.

Dying of Whiteness : How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland

A physician reveals how right-wing backlash policies have mortal consequences-even for the white voters they promise to help Named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Esquire and the Boston Globe In the era of Donald Trump, many lower- and middle-class white Americans are drawn to politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as Dying of Whiteness shows, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death. Physician Jonathan M. Metzl's quest to understand the health implications of "backlash governance" leads him across America's heartland. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, he examines how racial resentment has fueled progun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. And he shows these policies' costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates. White Americans, Metzl argues, must reject the racial hierarchies that promise to aid them but in fact lead our nation to demise.

Why Universities Should Seek Happiness and Contentment

The totalizing effect of consumerism, well-being and satisfaction is a discourse which may negate the value of struggle and mastery of complex subjects and a realization of personal potentiality. Why Universities Should Seek Happiness and Contentment considers the consequences of a hedonistic and well-being centred model of student education as one of the goals of higher education and proposes an alternative goal for higher education. In a globalized consumer society where the anxiety for an identity leads to the fear of not reaching the standard, Paul Gibbs shows how anxiety can be harnessed to secure contentment with one's own future without the fear of consumer-induced emptiness. He conceptualises higher education in a counter-valued way to the current dominant discourse of higher education institutions and educational policy while placing students at the centre of their own educational activity. In doing so, Gibbs proposes contentment as a guiding principle of higher education.

Towards Gender Equality in the Music Industry : Education, Practice and Strategies for Change

Gender inequality is universally understood to be a continued problem in the music industry. This volume presents research that uses an industry-based approach to examine why this gender imbalance has proven so hard to shift, and explores strategies that are being adopted to try and bring about meaningful change in terms of women and gender diverse people establishing ongoing careers in music. The book focuses on three key areas: music education; case studies that explore practices in the music industry; and activist spaces. Sitting at the intersection between musical production, the creative industries and gender politics, this volume brings together research that considers the gender politics of the music industry itself. It takes a global approach to these issues, and incorporates a range of genres and theoretical approaches. At a time when more attention than ever is being paid to gender and music, this volume presents cutting edge research that contributes to current debates and offers insights into possible solutions for the future.

Discourse and Identity on Facebook

Social network sites are dynamic online socio-cultural arenas which give users ample and unprecedented opportunities for self-presentation through the meshing of language with other semiotic modes. With a focus on Facebook, one of the most widely-used online social network sites, this book brings together ideas and concepts related to language online, multimodality, and identity through five topical issues. These include place, time, profession and education, stance-taking, and privacy. The book features a discourse-centred online ethnography that provides authentic verbal and multimodal Facebook posts in both Greek and English . These are complemented with insights from interviews with Facebook participants. Focusing on discourse manifestations of identity, this book also shows how Facebook can function as a space for vernacular literacy practices, a silo of relationships, a digital memory bank, a research tool, a knowledge forum, a cardiograph of a society, and a grassroots channel.

The Prospect of a Humanitarian Artificial Intelligence : Agency and Value Alignment

Carlos Montemayor illuminates the development of artificial intelligence (AI) by examining our drive to live a dignified life. He uses the notions of agency and attention to consider our pursuit of what is important. His method shows how the best way to guarantee value alignment between humans and potentially intelligent machines is through attention routines that satisfy similar needs. Setting out a theoretical framework for AI Montemayor acknowledges its legal, moral, and political implications and takes into account how epistemic agency differs from moral agency. Through his insightful comparisons between human and animal intelligence, Montemayor makes it clear why adopting a need-based attention approach justifies a humanitarian framework. This is an urgent, timely argument for developing AI technologies based on international human rights agreements.

Fractions, Tilings, and Geometry

Designed for precollege teachers by a collaborative of teachers, educators, and mathematicians, Fractions, Tilings, and Geometry is based on a course offered in the Summer School Teacher Program at the Park City Mathematics Institute. The overall goal of the course is an introduction to non-periodic tilings in two dimensions and space-filling polyhedra. While the course does not address quasicrystals, it provides the underlying mathematics that is used in their study. Because of this goal, the course explores Penrose tilings, the irrationality of the golden ratio, the connections between tessellations and packing problems, and Voronoi diagrams in 2 and 3 dimensions. These topics all connect to precollege mathematics, either as core ideas (irrational numbers) or enrichment for standard topics in geometry (polygons, angles, and constructions). But this book isn't a "course" in the traditional sense. It consists of a carefully sequenced collection of problem sets designed to develop several interconnected mathematical themes. These materials provide participants with the opportunity for authentic mathematical discovery--participants build mathematical structures by investigating patterns, use reasoning to test and formalize their ideas, offer and negotiate mathematical definitions, and apply their theories and mathematical machinery to solve problems.

Revealing Media Bias in News Articles : NLP Techniques for Automated Frame Analysis

This open access book presents an interdisciplinary approach to reveal biases in English news articles reporting on a given political event. The approach named person-oriented framing analysis identifies the coverage's different perspectives on the event by assessing how articles portray the persons involved in the event. In contrast to prior automated approaches, the identified frames are more meaningful and substantially present in person-oriented news coverage. The book is structured in seven chapters. In the end, Chapter 7 summarizes the thesis and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the thesis to derive ideas for future research on media bias. This book mainly targets researchers and graduate students from computer science, computational linguistics, political science, and further social sciences who want to get an overview of the relevant state of the art in the other related disciplines and understand and tackle the issue of bias from a more effective, interdisciplinary viewpoint.

Hobson's Choice

Ask for this DVD at the Blume Library Circulation Counter, call number: DVD PN1995.9 .F67 H62 2008. Rated 92% "fresh" at RottenTomatoes.com. Winner of the BAFTA award for Best British Film of 1955. This black and white classic stars Charles Laughton as Henry Hobson, a British widower, the overbearing and alcoholic owner of a shoe shop. His three daughters -- Alice, Vicky and Maggie (Brenda De Banzie) -- work as unpaid clerks and housekeepers for him and all are eager to get out from under his thumb. When the headstrong Maggie announces she intends to marry Henry's best employee, Will (John Mills), father and daughter engage in an intense showdown. As Maggie works on launching a competing business, she also helps her sisters free themselves of their domineering father.

Jerry and Marge Go Large

Ask for this DVD at the Blume Library Circulation Counter, call number: DVD PN1997.2 .J47 2022. Rated 78% "fresh" at RottenTomatoes.com. Based on a true story, Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening play long-married couple Jerry and Marge Selbee. Jerry is forced into retirement and looks for some way to spend his newly acquired and unwanted spare time. He is "good with numbers" and finds a poorly designed state lottery game that, given enough entries, will always pay out a premium. Jerry and Marge invite the folks in their dying small town to invest in his idea, chip in their savings, and attempt to beat the system.