This course is MAT 1180, Mathematical Concepts and Applications, taking place in the Summer 2012 semester with Professor Reitz. We will be using this website in several different ways – as a central location for information about the course (assignments, review sheets, policies, and so on), a place to ask and answer questions, to post examples of our work, and to talk about statistics, education, reality and other false premises.
Getting Started
Take a look around and familiarize yourself with the site. Use the links at the top of the page (in the black bar just underneath the cool picture) to navigate around — there isn’t too much here, yet. Your first OpenLab assignment is due on Wednesday (OpenLab Assignment #1: Mathography). Scroll down to see it, or click the “Assignments” link above. Your first WeBWorK (homework) assignment is due Monday — for complete details, see the post Getting Started With WeBWorK (below).
Do I need to register?
Short answer: No. Anyone on the internet can look around the site and see what we are doing, and even leave a comment on one of the pages, and these are the only things that will be required of you during this class. However, registering has benefits: you will receive automatic emails when new assignments and other items are posted, and the process of leaving comments and asking questions requires a little less work (you don’t have to keep entering your name etc each time you comment).
If I want to register, how do I do it?
To register, you must be a CityTech student with a citytech email address. You will need to do two things:
- If you have not used the openlab before, you must first create an account (you will need access to your citytech email address for this). Detailed instructions can be found by following this link to the help pages, finding the “Especially For Students” section about halfway down the page, and then looking at the first link “Getting Started with the OpenLab and Joining Your Courses.”
- Once you have created an account on the openlab, log in and then join this particular course. To do this, go to the main course page, (or click the “Course Profile” link at the top left of this page), and click the “Join Now” link on the right side of the screen.
I chose topic two because I began to dislike Mathematics from high school, when I realized there were too many formulas to memorize and when to use it. I began college and I figured I wouldn’t need Mathematics as a Nurse, so I registered for the Nursing program. This was a huge misconception on my part, there is a course in the Nursing major called Health Mathematics and this involved dosage calculations formulas which includes calculating the amount of medicine to give the patient based on their body weight or mass which is dosage by weight, unit conversion in case the doctor prescribes medication and the medicine comes in a different unit than what the prescription prescribes you have to do the conversion, IV drop rate which is you have to be able to calculate the how much liquid to give over a period of time, and the drop factor which is how many drops per mL and of course this included converting hours to minutes and so on.
You simply cannot add apples to oranges, which means that two quantities of different units may not be combined by addition. I decided to change my major after I read that many patients have died or suffer complications from health professionals giving them the wrong dosage in medication. I always wanted to be a Criminal Lawyer so I chose to study Legal Studies and I thought I didn’t need mathematics to be in the legal field. So not true we can never escape mathematics because it is a part of our everyday life, from calculating what time to wake up, to get to the subway, make it in time for class, watching our diet by calculating the calories, exercises even our cell phones, how long it lasts before we charge it. So I learnt to accept mathematics because of its usefulness. Mathematics is definitely needed in law, to be able to analyze data to persuade the jury, a legal professional who understands mathematics is more persuasive. I love to argue and to being able to prove my point that is when my feelings about mathematics began to change. In a traffic accidents It is needed in calculating the precise measurement of skid marks and distance from the point of impact to the final resting place of the vehicles, at a crime scene the measurements and assessments of the location of the evidence, the punishments for illegal substances is dependent on the amount of the substance in ones possession so you have to be able to differentiate between grams, kilos, ounces, pounds to be able to determine the seriousness of the crime, calculating the ballistics in crimes involving guns and the list is plenty. So I realized to say that I dislike mathematics is denying my existence in a way because biologically our bodies are all made up of 70% of water and water weighs 8.35lbs/gallon, The human genome is made up of 3 billion (3,000,000,000) bases of DNA, split into 23 chromosomes. The human body is made up of 100 trillion (100,000,000,000,000) cells. There are 1.8 meters of DNA in each of our cells. if all the DNA in the 100 trillion cells of the human body was placed end to end it would reach to the sun and back over 600 times. The human DNA is 98 percent identical to chimpanzees. Without maths how would we be able to calculate all this. Knowledge is power.