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Baby Names versus Dog Names

What happens when the 2017 list of top baby names and the 2017 list of top dog names appear in my news feed on the same day?

I’m going to have questions.

Like… How many names are on both lists?

The names that are on both lists

Wow! Oliver is #9 on both lists! And look at all the female names compared to male names!
It’s 27 to 10.

I don’t know what all this means but maybe some graphs will help.

Male Names
Female Names

If you have kids named Oliver or Chloe and plan to take them to the dog park, be advised.

 

Teens sharing password. This can’t end well.

In more password related news, the New York Times reports:

In a 2011 telephone survey, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 30 percent of teenagers who were regularly online had shared a password with a friend, boyfriend or girlfriend.

Sure it’s a symbol of trust, but we don’t need much of an imagination to see how this can go horribly wrong.

The password sharing results were revealed as part of a larger survey title Teens, kindness and cruelty on social network sites.

This is what happens when we have a generation growing up without Seinfeld. George taught us to never share our passwords.

Kramer also demonstrated that we should never make passwords about ourselves since they can be guessed easily.

Nobody gave Spock a hard time

Spock was always messing around with his Tricorder when the Enterprise crew explored a new planet but everyone knew that it was a tool that could help the crew learn.

tricorder spock
It would be "illogical" to go without it

Just imagine if Spock’s Vulcan school had restrictions like our cell phone bans when he was growing up.

We’d all be speaking Klingon!

What to do with Wordle

Have you tried Wordle?  If you provide the text, Wordle will create a word cloud that will display each word used in the source text in a font size based on the frequency that the word appears in the source. The more the word is used, the larger it appears. Take a look at Wordle’s gallery to see some examples.

Some have criticized Wordle by suggesting that Wordle’s only attribute is that it is eye-catching.

I’m okay with that. I can work with eye-catching. Below is a Wordle I made using all the text from a recent test.

Wordle the Test
Wordle the test at Wordle.net

A few days before the test, I shared this with my students. They were eager to hypothesize as to how words like “astronaut” or “gravy” would be used to access there knowledge of friction and momentum. Some student suggested possible questions that used the terms from the word cloud. A few of their questions were so good that I plan to use them next year.

While Woodle wasn’t able to teach physics, it was able to start a conversation. That’s perfect. I can take it from there.

Turn your own handwriting into a font

BaslerFontUsually, I never do this.  But recently I didn’t have time at a computer to type up a quiz for my physics students so I did it the old fashion way. I (gulp) hand wrote their quiz.

Sure, it is faster sometimes- especially if you have an elaborate drawing or graph. However, revising and archiving materials is not easy unless you start with a digital copy.

Nevertheless, the quiz went out to students and I jokingly made the comment that I used a special font for this week’s quiz.

I’ve had my fun with fonts before, but it turns out you can actually do this.

Check out fontcapture.com:

There’s no software to download and install, all you need is a printer and a scanner. Simply fill in the font template, scan and upload it to our website, and download your completed font. The fonts you create using fontcapture.com can be used on both Windows and Mac computers.

As I typed out my own letters for the first time, my seven year old son explained to me that he could do a better job with his letters. I think this might be a fun activity for elementary students too.