Here are my three reasons:
(1) Once a book goes to the printer the contents of the book are set in concrete, at least until the next edition or, in the case of minor errors and typos, until the second printing. This is a problem for a book that places a premium on currency and relevance. I will illustrate how I will use this blog to get around this problem later in this post.
(2) In addition to updating information already in the book, I plan to use the blog to introduce facts, tidbits and resources that fall under the umbrella of "enrichment" of core concepts in the book. Typically these resources will be websites, videos or articles that I will introduce and, when appropriate, briefly discuss. In my second post I plan to start the ball rolling on this one.
(3) A blog can be a good place for networking– not as good as a social networking site but good enough for people to interact productively and share comments and ideas. As the book's author I have had some opportunities to hear from and interact with users of the book, but I would welcome much more sharing. The success of this aspect of the blog depends on you. I am hopeful that this blog will eventually take a life of its own and become a shared "meeting place" for all users of the book.
As promised, in this post I want to discuss a couple of substantive updates to information that went to press with the 7th edition and soon become dated. In one case the circumstances were foreseeable, in the other they were a bit of a shock.
Much to my regret, I had to submit the final manuscript for Chapters 1 and 2 in July 2008. Thus, by an accident of bad timing I was unable to discuss or even mention one of the most exciting presidential elections in U.S. history. My biggest regret is that I had to use the 2004 presidential election for the cartogram that illustrates the "real" Electoral College in the opening image for Chapter 2. Thanks to Mark Newman of the University of Michigan, a new cartogram with the 2008 Electoral College results (shown below) is readily available for anyone to use under the Creative Commons License (text and images may be freely distributed). I definitely plan to use it in my introduction to weighted voting and the Electoral College. To download the cartogram,
click here. In a later post I plan to discuss some of the other amazing cartograms produced by Mark and his team.
The second piece of real-world data badly in need of updating is Example 10.4 on the ups and down of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. When I wrote the example the Dow Jones was at around 12,800. As I write this post, the Dow Jones is at 8,300. Had I known the stock market was going to tank I would have done Example 10.4 (plus a lot of other things) differently. When I cover Example 10.4 in class I plan to change the numbers to reflect current values for the Dow. And who knows, maybe by then 12,800 will be a current number again. That's a cheery thought!
I really like this textbook for our class "The Nature of Mathematics" at Sierra College. Two thoughts for the future:
ReplyDelete1. It would be nice if some of the elections in the Chapter 1 examples and exercises had a clear-cut winner, rather than different winners by different methods. My students thought that each method would be LIKELY to produce different winners for most elections, considering that happened in the examples and exercises every time. What are the odds of an election having the same winner by every method, in the real world, anyway?
2. I can't wait to see more instructor resources posted online. I do an activity every class and it takes a lot of creativity and effort to design my own. I'm looking for some activities where students can try the various fair division methods in class in Chapter 3 for example.
Would it be possible to have a sharing site here where instructors could post ideas and activities for each chapter?
Jill
ReplyDeleteI suspect that the likelihood that a random real-world election produces a different winner with each voting method is pretty small. I do tell my students at the end, when reviewing the key ideas of the chapter that the main example carried throughout the chapter was "rigged" to emphasize an important point: the results of an election depend not just on the ballots but also on the voting method used.
Both the chapter and the exercises have examples of elections where the winner is the same under three out of the four methods discussed (such as the election in Example 1.6 and the election in Exercise 3). By the way, to make up an election where the same candidate wins under each of the four methods all one has to do is to give a candidate a majority of the first place votes (that guarantees a win under plurality, plurality-with-elimination and pairwise comparisons) and enough second place votes to insure a win under Borda.
I definitely plan to have a sharing site. I'm still trying to figure out exactly where and how. I will post the details in this blog soon.