Walnut Crushing World Record (with 3 Act Task)

Check out this video (thanks to @ddmeyer for pointing this one out).

So the guy crushes walnuts with his head and what we get is a linear relationship. There are a few things here. First off, there is a 3 Act task. I modelled the 3 Act task off of @Gfletchy's similar task for rope jumping. Secondly, I timed how long it took for each walnut to get crushed and collected in file (if you are interested, I slowed the video down by 50% then used an online timer to get the splits). So now you can do some analysis. It's not a particularly interesting data set but it might give a fun context to look at linear relationships.

3 Act Task

Act 1 - Watch the movie

How many walnuts will he be able to crush with his head in 60 seconds? Estimate

Write an estimate you know is too high.  Write an estimate you know is too low.

Act 2a - Before you show this ask students what information they would like to have.

Act 2b - Show this video for information with more accessible math

Act 2c - Show this video for information with even more accessible math

Act 3 - Show this video to reveal the answer.

Analysis

I guess the question that most comes to my mind (after "does he have a headache") is he crushing the walnuts at a constant rate. Careful observation might find a couple of spots where he hesitates a bit and you might want to discuss whether that shows up in the data. But is the data linear? Looking at the graph you can see that for the most part it is, but there is a slightly faster rate at the beginning and a slightly slower at the end but each section seems pretty linear.

Another thing you might want to discuss is whether it should be Time vs Walnuts or Walnuts vs Time. Since rates are usually per unit time then it probably makes sense to do Walnuts vs Time but you could argue that the total time depends on the number of walnuts or that the total number of walnuts you could crush depends on how much time you have. Note that the easiest way to swap the axes in a Google spreadsheet is by changing the position of the columns so to do that I just copied the Time column to both sides of the Walnuts column.

Sample Questions

Besides the above questions you could certainly ask:

• What's the line of best fit?
• What's the correlation?
• How many walnuts do you think he could crush if it were two minutes? 10 minutes?
• Is there a better fit than linear?
• How many nuts would he have cracked if he kept at the same pace as the first 10 seconds?
• If you only saw the first 5 seconds, what would be your prediction of the number crushed in 1 minute?
• Can you tell, on the graph, when he hesitated?
• What if he would have had the pace he finished with throughout the whole minute, how many nuts would he have cracked then? I think this was the previous record of 281. 

Download the Data

• Original video: https://youtu.be/i1PQX64cTgY
• Google Sheets Version
• CODAP Version
• Comma Separated Version
• Desmos Version

Let me know if you used this data set or if you have suggestions of what to do with it beyond this.

Five Thirty Eight's Pile of Data

UPDATE: Now even more of their data is available and easier to get at, you guessed it, their data site: https://data.fivethirtyeight.com/

I have always found it tough to find interesting data sets. Especially those that are not contrived. At Five Thirty Eight they are constantly looking at the world through data. Their primary posts tend to be about politics or sports but often they have posts on pop culture and other items. For example, recently they had a post titled "Why Classic Rock Isn't What it used to be". In that post they analyzed over 37000 plays of classic rock songs spanning decades. And not only have they done the work, they've made all of the raw data available. All 37673 pieces in a csv file.

Downloading the Data

So basically they have a Github site where they make much of the raw data available for many of their stories. They have a lot of data related stories and although most of them are not on this site there are almost 100 that are. So for example, you could look at the article about how deadly it is to be an Avenger and see that the article doesn't have any graphs but there is a bunch of data where you could do a histogram or something with the categorical data.

Or if you were a Bob Ross Fan (real or ironic) then you can get the data the analyzed on the paintings he created for his show. Here's the article, but on the GitHub site you get the raw data plus, as an added bonus for you code jockeys, the Python script that they used to create the data set. Most have the link to the original article.

Note that when you see the CSV file listed, you can't just right click and download the file. That will just get you the script used to get the data. To get the actual data, click the CSV link and then copy the data from the table that appears.

Some other interesting sets are on Fandango's movie ratings, or the connections between the actors in the movie Love Actually or their data on the popularity of unisex names.

One small warning. This is raw data and in a few cases really raw. For example the data set about the number times someone cursed or bled out in a Quentin Tarantino movie is very cool but totally inappropriate for a classroom (there are 1895 pieces of data in this set).

Check them all out on the sites:
https://data.fivethirtyeight.com/
https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data

The Data and Story Library - DASL

DASL (pronounced "dazzle") is the Data and Story Library is an awesome database of sets of data that are specifically to help teach topics of statistics. They are all real sets and are all categorized by topic/subtject (eg automotive, food, health, sports etc) and mathematical method (eg boxplots, mean, outliers, regression, scatterplots etc). So theoretically if you wanted to find a set of data that could be used to help teach a specific topic you could search for, say, "correlation"
These are some great data sets to get through the mechanical nature of statistics. It's not very current data but it's great for practicing statistical methods.
For the longest time this set of data was not available but just recently it was hosted by Data Description Inc. so now we have access to it again.

Analysis

There are far too many sets to talk about analysis but when the site was down I blogged about one of my favourite sets on Smoking and Cancer. Take a look at that post to get a sense of the data. When you get to any data set, to see the actual data file, click on the Datafile Name

This will show you the text file of the data with the download link at the top of the page.
From that point you can do the analysis. Each data set will have a detailed description of each variable and a short story and sample analysis of each set
There are many data sets on this site for every statistical topic and on a range of subjects. One thing you might have your students do is just explore on this site and find data sets that can be used to exemplify a particular statistical concept.

Download the Data

Site: http://dasl.datadesk.com/ 

Let me know if you used this data set or if you have suggestions of what to do with it beyond this.