The following (reports) were written by members of the Math Explorations Club. Some elements may have been removed for various reasons, but the text that remains is in the student's own words. Today we talked about how people try to use math to trick peole and how people can use math to not be tricked. Like in the magazine popular science we saw an add that said, This product is 900% off. It was in a real magazine! The product costs $100 dollars, and they would be paying us $800 dollars. - by, Christine Today was fun and just plane cool. We learned how to trick people and to defend and hurt. -Anne During this session we gave and received false advetising related to mathematics. We finished by making a scenario of sales between two ice cream companies. One company was more stable in their sales, and one company had one extremely large profit. We manipulated graphs to show the benefits of each company. -Ben I think that Hersheys ice cream is sometimes has too much chocolate, strawberry, Vanilla, etc.And in summer the ice cream is melty. Veronica Our topic today was math abuse, and the way you can twist numbers to your own advantage without ever really lying. However, we also learned that if you are not careful, and you make a mistake, you can end up making yourself ridiculous! I'm looking forward to next time. Aimee Today we discussed on how math can be used to benefit others or trick/hurt them. We also discussed situations that are created to mislead the public. These situations can be avoided by using math and applying it to the situation. Math can also be used, not only for confusing word problems, but also for separating right facts using graphs. These graphs can be used to make things stable and unstable. -Adit Today I learned about % and how people think about math. Some people think it's like a sword fight. Some people think you can stick it to your head. Some people have a shield to protect them with the sword. We learned what a industry it's like what they say. Magazines they give you money like for example like 25% off their price. -Alex Today we went on Netscape to see pictures of our previous sesssions. Avterwards we talked aboout 2 companies copeating against each other . Then we each selected one of the 2 companies and made graphs about their rprevious buyers and tried to make it look more stable . We took the components number of previous buyer and made it look unstable . In the end .Bryers ( one of the companies ) was more stable than Hersheys ( the other company ), but Hesheys sold more and Bryers did not. -Natalie Today one of the girls did a very jumpy graph. It was ten pages long and it always printed an extra page all the time. By Michelle Today we learned about several interesting things. The first thing we learned about was how Math can hurt you As an example of how math can hurt you, our instructor showed us an advertisment: the advertisment was for a whole sale company, and in their advertisment, they said there were products 500% - 900% percent off, so they were saying that they would actually PAY you for the products that they sold you! After that, we used graphs to try to prove that our company was stable, and that our competitors company was very inconsistent in its monthly sales. We did this by using different graphs to make the competitors figures look out of proportion, and to make our sales look more stable. -Jonathan Today we worked on the white board. Then we tryed to make the jumpiest graph. - Amos Today Anne printed an about 20 page bar graph. We learned how people make mistakes when they make advertisments. Todays class was really fun. One of the mistakes was made by Winn Dixie. They said that they would take of 25 percent of prices then they would take 25 percent more of already reduced prices. They claimed that they were taking of 50 percent when they were really taking of less - Amos