KhanAcademyVideos

How the evolution from newspapers to radio to television to the Internet and social media have affected political discourse.

How the Supreme Court uses the principal of stare decisis when incorporating precedent into decisions.

Ideologies of political parties in the United States. General views of liberals (generally associated with the Democratic Party) and conservatives (generally associated with the Republican Party).

Media as a linkage institution. Incentives for media to cater to ideologies of target audience.

How categorical grants, mandates and the Commerce Clause have been used to expand federal power over state affairs.

Overview of reasons why reality may end up being different than what polls indicate.

A discussion of why public opinion as measured by polling data may or may not drive public policy decisions.

How executive orders have been used by presidents to expand their powers beyond those explicitly listed in Article II of the US Constitution.

An introduction to the typical ways that political scientists measure public opinion.

What makes a poll or survey credible: random sampling, large sample sizes, low margin of errors and unbiased poll questions.

How liberals, conservatives, and libertarians think about fiscal and monetary policy. Discussion of Keynesian and supply-side economics.

Standard deviation of the residuals are a measure of how well a regression line fits the data. It is also known as root mean square deviation or root mean square error.

Regression lines as a way to quantify a linear trend. Residuals at a point as the difference between the actual y value at a point and the estimated y value from the regression line given the x coordinate of that point.

Introducing the idea of a z-score as the number of standard deviations away from the mean a certain data point is.

Two example items (from NY Regents exams) using molecular evidence to think about how closely related different species are.

An introduction to reading and analyzing pedigrees.

Example questions analyzing data to justify claims in experiments.

Classifying distributions as being symmetric, left skewed, right skewed, uniform or bimodal.

In this Wireless Philosophy video, Berislav Marušić (Brandeis University) talks about promises to do difficult things, such as the promise to spend the rest of one's life with someone. Beri explains that such promises pose a philosophical problem: they seem to be either insincere, in case one doesn't believe that one will keep them, or irrational, in case one does believe it. He describes how exactly the problem arises and sketches five possible responses.

In this Wireless Philosophy video, Nina Emery (Mount Holyoke College) explores the nature of chance and probability.