Freshness Challenge: Young Entrepreneurs

In my career at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy I get to work with young entrepreneurs. I also enjoy playing guitar. When I came across a video about Alex Niles, a South Florida Middle School student who won a NFTE regional prize for his custom made guitar business, I was intrigued. His work is pretty impressive and he has solid endorsements. This led to a search for Niles Custom Guitars.

Can you buy one of Alex's guitars today? If so, where or how?

Here's a link to more information about Alex (about two-thirds the way down the page).

Post your answers to this blog.

Leap Years, Leap Seconds

Leap years are curious occasions. They occur every four years. Well, almost.

There are some four year stretches when a leap year is not observed. A century is not a leap year unless it is divisible by 400. That's why the year 2000 was a leap year and why 2100 is not.

This little factoid got me reading further and that's when I found the "leap second:" an adjustment to time made to coordinate atomic time with the earth's rotation. Atomic time is based on periods/oscillations of the Cesium-133 atom at the ground state (if you want to know more about that, it's easy to look up). The earth is very gradually slowing down (to find out why, that can also be looked up). To keep the clock and the earth in sync, there's the leap second.

Let's say you what to capitalize on a topic of current interest and reinforce information fluency with students. You could have them search for NEXT LEAP SECOND. These happen more often than leap years. And there's another one coming up later this year.

But if you look at the returns from this search in Google, you may see two conflicting reports:

About Leap Seconds

www.timeanddate.com › Time Zones

Next leap second on 2012-06-30 23:59:60 UTC. The last leap second was inserted like this, in the UTC time scale, and corresponding times elsewhere in the ...

When will the next leap second occur? - Yahoo! Answers

answers.yahoo.com › ... › Science & Mathematics › Astronomy & Space

3 answers - Feb 2, 2010

Top answer: None are currently in the works. Since leap seconds depend on factors that can only be observed, not predicted, leap seconds themselves cannot be ...

Obviously, these answers don't agree. If searchers don't pay attention to the date information, they could be misled.  It's a good opportunity to point out the importance of paying attention to the published date of information.

Updated Date/Freshness Challenge

Thanks to teachers and librarians who use the resources on our site, we are able to stay up to date.  Many times the examples on 21cif are subject to Internet 'creep': a change is made to an external page over which we have no control.  With hundreds of challenges on the site, we don't routinely check up on the activities for alterations.

Here's a challenge I just updated. Ironically, it was the Date.swf Challenge and it contained three tasks that seemed 'stale': information on the web site no longer matched the challenge.

I adjusted one answer, substituted another page for a problem site and decided to leave the third example alone. Information taken from the context of the page is more accurate than the timestamp returned when the page opens in a browser window.

Java may be used to publish a timestamp of the exact moment a page is opened. Many times this is what you see if you check Page Information data. How did I manage to open a page exactly at the time it was last modified? Well, it's unlikely you did. The 'last update' is misleading and it's nothing more than the last time the page was opened by you.

In that case, other clues should be consulted for freshness. The example page in question hasn't changed in more than five years, yet its last modified is 'now'. If I was citing the page, I'd stick with the internal clues that make more sense.

Try the new challenge!

Challenge Revisited: Pump Price

Back in 2005, I first posted the Pump Price Challenge.  I had to update it a few times due to inflation and additional sites that people were finding.

Now in 2011, the question could be: How much did people pay for gas at the pump in 1920? How much would that be in 2011 dollars?

The value of the dollar keeps changing due to global economics and inflation so this is definitely a moving target.

The challenge is to find an authoritative site (think: who is an authority on inflation?) so you can convert the price of a gallon of gas in 1920 into the most current dollar information.

This isn't a particularly hard search, but it requires finding a site that is regularly refreshed.

Challenge One: Find an authoritative site where information on inflation is regularly updated.
Challenge Two: use that to determine what a gallon of gas in 1920 costs today.
Challenge Three: use the most current information to determine what a gallon of gas purchased in 1981 would cost in 2011 dollars. (Yikes!)

I found a good site, but there could be more. I'll consider other alternatives for redesigning the pump challenge.