 Thanks, everybody, for coming today for an introductory lesson to quantitative literacy. For those of you who are joining us from your laptop or whatever device you may be watching from, we have a group of interested faculty and staff from Foreside Tech who have come to work through this introduction to gain insight into what quantitative literacy class is about. I hope that while you're working through this or watching the PowerPoint and watching this presentation that you have with you and if you don't pause and go get right now, your calculator or cell phone, pencil, pen, some scratch paper to work on, because this is interactive. This whole course is interactive. You cannot gain the benefit really from taking this course by just watching passively. So please be prepared to participate as you have an opportunity to as we roll through this presentation. Quantitative literacy really kind of boils down to making sense of number in my world. It's one thing to be able to do math problems and get the right answer. A lot of people who are mathematicians have had some success with doing math problems and getting the answer that's in the back of the book. What about the rest of us? This class is really kind of about data in my world and what does it mean to me in making sense of it? So for instance, in the news, on Facebook, on billboards, in the doctor's office, in the newspaper, magazines, constantly bombarded with numbers and just what do they mean to me? Without context, they don't mean a lot. I'll give you an example from just last week. I had bought a bottle of tea in the health food store and I looked at the tea and it told me this bottle of tea has about as much caffeine as a cup of coffee. That's something I can relate to. Like if it had said, here's how many milligrams of caffeine are in here. I don't really have a concept of how my body takes in that number of milligrams of caffeine. But when it says, hey, it's about as much as a cup of coffee, then I know, well, it's two o'clock in the afternoon. Should I drink this bottle of tea or not? It gives me a context for that number. So oftentimes in the media or in your world, you're bombarded with really big number or really small number perhaps and don't have a context for it. It's $5. Is that a lot? I mean, it really depends on the context. What about millions, billions, trillions? As it ends in Iliens, it's probably really big. I'm a teacher. People like me don't really have a concept usually about what million dollars might be. You'll be able to read a newspaper article if you like from the New York Times that in this article, the author made a request that in media, number is put into context so that people can understand what they're reading. It's not because people can't do math. It's because regular people a lot of time don't have a context, just like I said about caffeine. It's not a big number, but what's the context? And so even in the media, they're making a request for people, for the news to be delivered in ways that make sense to us. So for instance, right now, let's pause and take just a minute to figure out. I don't really have an idea, like I said a minute ago, millions, billions, trillions. They're really big. But I do know how long it takes for a second to go by or a minute or an hour or a few days. Stop right now and stop at home and take a minute to decide how many days does it take for a million seconds to pass. And then the extension of that, billion, trillion, how many days, how many years. Okay, so I hope that you've had a chance at home to think about the size of millions, billions, and trillions in terms of time so we can get an idea about how big these numbers actually are. Dr. Reynolds is going to come and show her method for finding out how many days it takes for a million seconds to pass. Okay, so I really started out trying to figure out how many minutes were in a year, but I figured really quickly that that wasn't an efficient method. So I went back to very simple basic notations. So I figured there were 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in every hour, 24 hours in a day. And so when you go through, you're canceling out all your different notations and I found out that there are, there are two, six, eight, six, four, zero, zero seconds in every day. And then from there I said, okay, so that's how many seconds are in a day. So if I take one million and divide it by the number of seconds in a day, 11 days, 11.574, oops, 11.474 days. So for a million seconds to go by, it takes us 11.57 days. Thank you very much. I really like the way that Dr. Reynolds ended this with a complete sentence. That's what we want to do often time. In math class, we get the right number and we're done, we leave it. What the back of the book says we're finished. But what did we find out? That's what this class is about. What does that number mean anyway? So how many days it takes for a million seconds to go by. I also like this idea, always we can use units to help us decide what our formula will be. How many times have you sat through math class sweating over memorizing formulas when really we can make a formula just with the units. There are 24 hours in a day. So the bottom line that Dr. Reynolds came up with, 86,400 seconds in a day comes straight from this using the units to make a formula. The units divide out respectively, so we end up with seconds per day. Show of hands, we won't go through every single method, but who used something even slightly different from Dr. Reynolds' method and got Dr. Reynolds' answer. So we have even in this classroom of faculty and staff who used, we have several different, about six out of eight people use a different strategy. So there is not the way. And sometimes students think in this class it's a little bit frustrating. Tell me the way, tell me the formula, just give me these steps. This class is a little bit messy. You'll be asked a lot of times to think about, to use what you already know to come up with a method. A method, did you hear me say that? Not the method. Okay, Dr. Volk, can you show us or talk to us about your method for coming up with the next question? Well, mine looks pretty much the same, but I started with, I wanted to convert a million seconds. And I put that over one, so I had a fraction. Because I'm dealing with, I'm going to be having a lot of fractions here. So then I had 1,000 seconds and then I had one minute or 60 seconds. So that got my second out of the way. Then I had one hour divided by 60 minutes. And that got my minutes out of the way. And then I had one day for 24 hours. And I got my hours out of the way. And so I left, I started with seconds and now I have days. And so I simply have now over 60 times 60 times 24. And I got 11.57 days. And then how did you find the next step? Oh, the next one. Oh, okay, that's what I was supposed to, I'm sorry. No, that's fine to have a different answer. So then I had 10 to the 9. Well, I guess I'll write it out seconds. And that's equal to a million seconds times 1,000. So I knew this to be 11.57 days. And I multiplied that by 1,000 to get 11.7 days. And then I had to do another conversion, which was 301 year or 365 days, which when I divided these out, I got 31.71 years. Thank you, Dr. Volk. So it's possible when you had an opportunity then to find how many seconds it takes for a billion seconds to pass or how long it takes for a billion seconds to pass to go right back to your original strategy and start over with your 60 seconds in a minute and so on. The more you are acquainted with quantitative literacy and the size of number, I hope that you will be able to use maybe more efficient strategy. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a strategy that works and then using it again. But we also want in this class to develop more flexible thinking, more a variety of strategies to approach something. So when you do know that a billion is 1,000 times a million, then we can take our original answer and multiply by 1,000. Even still, 11,570 days, that's kind of like my caffeine question. I still don't know how long that is. So Dr. Volk divided out the number of days in a year. Now I have an idea. So it takes about an entire career, for instance, for a billion seconds to pass. You're nodding, Alice. Do you think about this in terms of how many careers is that? About how long is 31 years? And then we can do the same thing for trillion. So some of you who have worked on this problem here, how long does it take for a trillion seconds? You can just say it at your table. That was 31.7 thousand years. Okay, so again we can take this billion, multiply by 1,000. Now that's a few more careers, right? I don't know if Mr. Grabb might not be retired by then, but I will be for sure. So I did what you might do. I did what regular people do. When I'm faced with a number, I don't understand 31,000 years. I don't have a context for that, so I googled it. And here's what I googled. Let's see, I did learn that about 12,000 years ago, so even still not 31,000, that's about the time people started farming around the globe. Now that we have some context for about how big a million or a billion or a trillion is in time, another context that I can relate to, even though I don't have that much money, is to put it in terms of money. So we have an idea how big a trillion is now. Let's see, let's go to our US debt clock and see how big our debt is to give us an idea. So you have an idea, now the national debt clock, $18 trillion. When I first prepared this PowerPoint for my class a couple years ago, the national debt was $16 trillion and had just turned $16 trillion, so you can see. Now here's what does this mean to me? That's what I want your takeaway for this class to be. What does this mean to me? It's so easy to look at the national debt, we've got a lot of mud slinging. Whose fault is it? Well, a couple of things we could look at, it's broken down here for us, is what about total personal debt, which things like credit cards, no credit cards is a separate, sorry, but maybe car loan or other personal items. Student loans are there. Student loans are a big chunk of national debt, mortgage debt, credit card debt. So part of this class is looking out, what can I do? There's not a lot of this, Ms. Rudolph was laughing about, yeah, just let me get out my checkbook and write a check for that. This is way beyond, remember, think about one trillion, it takes 31,000 years for a trillion seconds to pass. We're talking 18 trillion, this blows my mind. But I can think about what can I do? Maybe I have a student loan, maybe I can work on paying that off, maybe not default on that. The government has very accessible strategies to paying off student loans. Maybe I have a credit card debt because I had an emergency that I wasn't prepared for. Maybe I have a credit card debt because I needed some new speakers or had to have the latest iPhone. And we're gonna talk about these, we have a section or a unit in this class about budgeting money. And so we're gonna really look at our personal finances and take a look at maybe what is my role. I can't solve 18 trillion dollars, but I can take care of myself and that will help my community, my family and ultimately the nation. I hope you will pause and take some time to take a look at this usdebtclock.org. There are links where you can look at world debt clocks. How are we doing compared to the rest of the world? You can look at state debt clocks. How is my state doing to the rest of the states? To give us some perspective, again, 18 trillion dollars makes me want to crawl in the corner and pull the sheet up over my head because it can't be fixed, but how are we doing compared to the rest of the world? So I'm gonna let you have some time to explore this on your own. So go ahead and share what you've found. I just said if I take 80,000 dollars it's the price for reasonable Mercedes. We could buy 1.2 million Mercedes with the national debt. Okay. And Derek wanted to do what I didn't do with Alexis. And this is what I want you to do as you come across numbers and your curiosity is peaked. Stop and figure it out. You know, what is this in terms of Mercedes? What is this in terms of something that makes sense to me? I know you don't drive a Mercedes, so I'm gonna sign up. So let's think about now, we talked about maybe what's my share or my portion, what does the national debt have to do with me. Several of my colleagues have made contributions to our PowerPoint. So let's, this one comes from Jonathan Lawson at Kataba Valley. Let's consider maybe the salary of a CEO of a large company. Okay. Not unusual for, say, a salary to be 100 million dollars of a CEO of a large company. Again, 100 million dollars on a teacher's salary. Hard for me to figure that out. Stop and think. Let's pretend. Let's say these companies need research scientists. Okay. Research scientists probably makes, let's say, $80,000 a year. I'm just, you know, just ballparking. Let's even say $100,000 just to make it, you know, just since I'm guessing, I might as well guess a number that's easy to divide by. Maybe even for their lab and equipment, let's say $200,000. How many research scientists at $200,000 a year could this company hire for the price of one CEO? We did 200, if we're counting 200,000. You did 100 plus 200, so that was 300. Oh, oh, oh, I was, I'm sorry. You're right. She's upped her 100 to 200. Right. I said this, let's just say for computation's sake about 200,000 per research scientist. Okay. Yeah, so if each research scientist costs about $200,000 a year, this company could hire 500 research scientists for the price of one CEO. Now, I'm not opposed to CEOs making a lot of money. They've made a lot of investment. They have a lot of responsibility. But this gives some context. That's the whole point of this class, giving some context. And remember, there are also lots of average wage earners in this company that don't make $80,000 or $100,000 or $200,000 a year. So this also maybe can give you some context if you want to pause and think about how many custodians maybe at $30,000 a year, maybe think about how much you make and decide how many of you would it cost to replace one CEO. Just to put it into some context. Another place for context. I was thinking about, suppose, well, who is the richest person in our state, North Carolina? And I Googled it. The richest person in North Carolina is... Who is it? Did I know? It is John Goodnight, the CEO of SAS. And I Googled about how much... I looked actually at this article about how much is Mr. Goodnight worth? Net worth is about $7,300,000,000. Okay, so I want to jot that down. If we look at the quick facts, you can look up quick facts for any state to get information from Census data. I looked up quick facts to find out what was the average North Carolinian household income? Household income in North Carolina average about $46,000 and change. We're doing estimates in this class. We're just kind of trying to get some context. Okay. Now, I was thinking, you know, when we watch the elections or we see somebody's made a million-dollar donation or an NFL player has been fined $75,000. I mean, that seems like a huge amount to me. But in the context of bigger budget, it might not be. So I just made up a question. Let's pretend Mr. Goodnight bought Mrs. Goodnight a Valentine present and it cost him $1 million. His net worth is $7.3 billion, according to this article I read. What would that be? And for the average household, if average Mr. So-and-So bought average Mrs. So-and-So a Valentine present. One area of caution is the Quick Facts link tells us how much the average income is and not net worth. So I want to be careful always to compare same things. Quick Facts did not give me average worth. So I had to Google that elsewhere. It is about $410,000. Still way beyond my budget, but that's average for North Carolina. So just to be fair, let's compare the average North Carolinians net worth $410,000 and Mr. Goodnight at $7.3 billion. What would that mean to average home to buy a Valentine gift? Pause and figure this out. So Mr. Grab is going to explain to us his strategy for figuring out in regular people world how much a million-dollar Valentine present would be. I'm not going to afford that, but Dr. Elwood said that $7.3 billion was his net worth and he spent a million dollars on the Valentine present. So that gave me a ratio. Over here we said the average person in North Carolina has a net value of $410,000 but we don't know how much they spent for the Valentine's present. So if I do the division on this side, I get $7,300 over 1. So there's a ratio of $7,300 over 1. So I set that equal to $410 over X, solving it for X. I had $410,000, which was from Mr. Goodwright. The North Carolina, I'm sorry, was from the North Carolina piece. $7,300 was from Mr. Goodwright to get the ratio. So we wouldn't be allowed to spend $56.16. Probably wouldn't spend that much because our salary is significantly lower than that. So we have to be concerned about what it's going to do to the cash flow in the family. All right, thank you. And again, just a show of hands who used a different method to solve this problem. There are more ways than one to solve the question. And to come back to Mr. Grabb's point, if we're using average salary as our checkpoint, instead of average worth, average salary is about $46,000 for North Carolina, then this is going to be about $5. So if we are considering salary, then it would be the equivalent of getting your sweetheart at Big Mac or something for Valentine's Day. Which, oh no, I love Big Mac and Me Fine. Okay, let's see. So while we're thinking about what is my fair share, we've talked about money, let's also talk about how much time. How much time do I get? What is my fair share? Let's suppose that there's a community college president that wants to have lunch with all of her students. Even if I were to say, you know, there are 10,000 students on this particular campus. 10,000 is not a really big number. I have a pretty good idea about 10,000 or a population or a school size of 10,000. But how much time is it going to take for this president, say, to have lunch with every student? Maybe she wants to be really personal and have lunch with five students at a time. How long would it take her to entertain all students at lunch? And what kind of questions come to your mind? That's a good question. Let's make up the rules as we go. Let's just say maybe an hour. Okay, so about 2,000 hours. So about 2,000 lunch periods. Maybe if we're going to call each one an hour. Is how successful or what does she have to do now to be successful in reaching all of her students? Because 2,000 lunch periods, well, what's the context for that? About five and a half years. And hopefully, I mean, she's the president of a community college. So we want you in and out of here. So five and a half years, probably, to cycle through 10,000 students. And remember, more students are coming in as some are leaving. So what might she do to... What are some ways she can fix her strategy so she actually can meet with every single student? If she made with 50 students at lunch, that would mean that she could get through in about a half a year. 50 students at lunch? So she's increasing the size of her students to 50. How much time is she now going to be able to pay attention to each of her 50 students as opposed to a small intimate group of five? So in order to reach her goals, she has to change her strategy, which takes away maybe from what she's hoping to do. Let's take this same idea and put it in context of the U.S. House. House of Representatives has 435 members. And the U.S. population has about 315 million people. What is my fair share of time with my representative? And one thing that we need to agree on, too, is what is a work week look like for a representative? If they're going to work theoretically, let's just say we work about 40 hours. So let's go with the 40-hour work week and maybe two weeks of vacation. So let's say 50 weeks a year, which will give you an idea about how long someone might work. What's my share of my representative's time? Pause and see if you can think about this question for a minute. So we thought about how many constituents each representative was serving and about how long, how many working hours each representative had to meet with his or her constituents. Dr. Davis, show us your strategy. If we consider that a work week is 40-hour a week and we work about 50-hour, 50-weeks per year and a congressman has a two-year term, two years, that means that each congressman would have 4,000 hours to meet with their. If we have 4,000 hours per congressman or per person times 435 congressmen, we get 1,740,000 hours. That might be kind of surprising to think about what is my fair share, what is my time with my member of the House and 20 seconds is not a lot. We talk about in this course apportionment, how has it decided, how many representatives each state gets and what are some of the methods used. We talk about that in this course and even still regardless of how we slice it up, we're not going to get very long, 20 seconds or so, which is why it's really important to stay in tune with the current events and know who your representative is and write your representative, write the office because you can take time to write a letter which you might not be able to have a lot to say in your fair share of 20 seconds. As I mentioned at the beginning of this lesson, not everybody is going to go out into the world and use or be a professional mathematician of sorts. That's what this course is about and so I was talking at my dinner table one evening with my family, with my nerdy family about this class and some members of my family spoke up about, well, here's something I'm working on and I'm not a mathematician. I'm not even good at math. I mean, that's kind of the bad perception that people might have of themselves but here's something I do with number and so I asked for these members of my family even just around the dinner table to contribute a couple of slides so that we can see, well, what do regular people do with number? What are some of the contacts in which you use number? So Randy Gamble, who is my husband and he's a Cisco instructor at Wilts Community College, talked about the IP addresses. So when they first started assigning IP addresses in the 80s, every single device that can be connected to the internet has an IP address, internet protocol. So they had a way to label the internet protocol addresses, IPv4, when they first started naming internet protocol and they had something in the billions. Now, the nomenclature is beyond the scope of this course. That's what teachers say when they don't really understand the topic. So my point here is not to explain to you how internet IP addresses are assigned. They use a method that is described in a short video you have access to with this PowerPoint that you can watch if you're interested. But in 2014, or it became evident that by 2014 we would run out of space for IP addresses using the naming strategy they were using. And so they created a new naming strategy which gave us then in the undecillions. I want you to take a look at this. We've talked about how big is a million, a billion, and a trillion. How many IP addresses are there with the IPv6? About 4.2 x 10 to the 37 undecillion IPv6 addresses. We really will never run out of internet protocol addresses after they change the naming of it. Did you see how many zeros there were for undecillion? And now we're talking how many more there are for an IPv6 address. And what they have is only defined and usable 12% of those addresses. The way it was explained to me, to put it in terms I can understand, because this number really blows my mind, is there's enough IPv6 addresses in existence for every grain of sand on the planet to have several IPv6 internet protocol addresses. So again, this is not my area of expertise, but it's something that you might be interested in. You might be a computer programmer or interested in networking, but this will be part of your content. In that same dinner time conversation, there is a member of my family who is a student at the agricultural education and extension program. She is now a graduate at NC State. And so she was doing a presentation on feminine sustainability. Well, here's a place where numeracy is important. We might not think about it on a daily basis, but for instance, this is real stuff. This is real wasteful stuff, as a matter of fact. A typical woman uses between 8,000 and 17,000 tampons in her lifetime, one woman, and think about a plastic applicator. This might not be a very pleasant thing to, you know, it's not your typical kind of black and white math class conversation, but this is real. This is really what happens when we're not careful about the products that we use, any products. And so between 1998 and 1999, it's not very current data, but it still gives you an idea. 170,000 tampon applicators were collected along US coastal areas. That's a lot of trash generated. The UK has addressed this problem of waste by recycling. And again, by Western standards, we don't want to talk about that. That's not nice. Well, that's part of the problem, not being informed. And so if we think about what they've done in the UK, the no waste company has a way to recycle and to reuse products that are used in feminine products and diapers, adult diapers and baby diapers in a process that emits 71% less carbon emissions. So we can just not talk about it because it's not nice, socially acceptable, or we can say, hey, we're wasting a lot. What else could we do? Look at what this no waste company has done. They have saved carbon emissions, which is equivalent to about 2,000 United Kingdom citizens. Or it's about the same as the emissions of 7,500 cars. So look at the benefit to the planet when we start talking about what is wasteful and what we could do. Condoms is another thing that's not very nice to talk about. And I'm certainly not advocating saving the planet and not the practicing safe sex. But just an awareness. Every time a condom is used. There's paper that's going in the trash. Ink. Don't forget packaging, transportation and so on. So the point of the contribution that was made by Miss Chiles from her program was an awareness of things that we throw away and that there are, you know, might think about more environmentally safe methods. Another topic in this class, we've already talked about units, measuring with units. And so I was really surprised when I started teaching this class about how much I didn't know about the size of things. Like for instance, a nanometer. We have a nanotech program here at Forsyth Tech. And maybe some of you are in that program or interested in nanotechnology. Well, how big is a nanometer? I don't know. I know millimeter, centimeter, meter. I'm pretty comfortable with meters. I did grow up in a country that used the metric system. But how big is, for instance, a nanometer? Here's a 20 nanometer, an example of a 20 nanometer microchip, which really wouldn't be visible. You will have access to a video to share with you an idea about the size of a nanometer. In the video, you will see, pretend we take the width of a human hair, which is pretty small, but you can see it really easily. Take that width and scale that up to the size of the Empire State Building. So think about the Empire State Building and pretend that that's the height of a human hair. A nanometer would be about the size of a quarter inch compared to the Empire State Building if the Empire State Building were the size of the width of a human hair. So we're talking a very, very tiny measurement. And again, for me as a math teacher, I'm pretty handy with how to convert between units. But I didn't really have an idea. I didn't have a context for the size of a teeny, teeny nanometer. Of course, I couldn't finish our lecture today without bragging about my salmon fishing in the Kenai River in Alaska. I had the opportunity to road trip to Alaska a couple of summers ago. When we were planning our trip, a lot of quantitative literacy went into preparation for this fishing trip about how many fish were we going to catch during the salmon run. What was our maximum? We had four people fishing. We were all going to catch the maximum amount. And again, my husband did the calculations here. How much meat comes out of each salmon after it's cleaned and gutted and deboned. So how many pounds are we going to have of salmon to ship back? And how much is that going to cost? How many boxes are we going to need? All of these kinds of things we have to think of. We can't just go on a fishing trip and then have all this Alaskan salmon without a budget and a method to ship it back. As it turned out, we got there on the tail end of the salmon run, no pun intended, which was actually at the very end and there were only two fish caught that day. There was one, my mother's was the other. So the need for freezer boxes was no longer. In that same trip, here we are, pretty educated people. I'm a mathematics teacher. My father is a mathematics teacher. But here we go. We're at this gas station and it's 237 miles or actually, sorry, from Kitwonga where we were to Iskut, 400 kilometers. So should we gas up the car? We had to figure out how much gas did we have? How far were we really going? 400 kilometers, our cars measured in miles. This is an American car. So we had to figure out how much, did we have enough gas to make it to the next gas station? In reality, when traveling in the interior of British Columbia, the answer to the question, should we gas up is always yes, regardless of how much gas is in the tank. So I hope that somewhere along today's lesson, you have kind of, your interest has been piqued or your curiosity, maybe it's something, oh, I'm studying that or I'm interested in that, or I'm working on my family budget, something that has piqued your interest. And I really hope that as we move through this course, you will be compelled to dig in and put number in your world in context and that you will know that you're empowered to do that. Right now you have the mathematical knowledge that you need. All you need is to connect that to your curiosity, get out your pencil and calculator, and provide context for yourself.