• Voting Schemes: I thought this was my idea but the first Google hit gives this http://www.math.princeton.edu/math_alive/Voting/index.html. Talking to Alan, he says there are voting pads that could be useful for this kind of thing. Could be made relevant with discussion about FPTP http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/article.php?id=54 or x-factor, say?
• How safe is the internet? This would look at public key encryption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography, which is the most common way of keeping something secret on the internet. Pupils could set up their own and send messages. It uses something called RSA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA which is basically loads of prime numbers times together.
• What is probability? Classically, it’s the frequency of occurrence of a given even but what if this even only happen once? Or very rarely or if the conditions change between events? How can we predict with probabilities i.e. what should we expect to happen? There are all sort of things with this like buying a lottery ticket, getting on a plane. A good way to think about it is in terms of hosting and placing a £1 prize bet; how much would you pay to play?
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• Understanding uncertainty. How can we measure it? There are all kinds of uses and abuses of stats in the media, for example. How can we interpret this? Predictions about foot and mouth, swine flu, bird flu, MMR, the election outcome. How are these done and what are the errors/variances?
• This then feeds into making decisions when things are uncertain. The idea of rational decision making when decisions are consistent between events and over time. Should we panic?!
• Epidemiology. Thinking about the spread of something in a population. I like the idea of this as a rumour. So that’s the spread of information. This could be gossip in the playground or on internet chat rooms (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-767.pdf). I’m not sure at the moment but we could get the student to spread something amongst themselves and take snap shots(?)
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