Yes and no. There are certainly some benefits to repeated practice in developing the speed and accuracy of computations. The problem is that some people may never master these low-level computations due to undiagnosed cognitive disabilities (i.e. discalculia or problems with working memory) and this content is being used as a gate-keeper to higher-level mathematics which the person could potentially master with appropriate support. Different types of mathematical activities use different areas of the brain. Assigning more arithmetic practice to someone with a cognitive disability isn't going to magically make the problem go away, so why not focus on the math skills they *can* learn instead?
According to the article, the tweet in question was a reference to the Prophet Muhammud. In some parts of the word, disavowing the religion of the majority (apostasy) can be punishable by death. Interpol's compliance in this act violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Interpol itself is tasked with upholding by its constitution.
I think it's important to note that the Green Party platform supports transitioning government agencies to Open Source Software, supports Net Neutrality and opposes Software Patents. Those are three key "geek" issues to me which both the Democrats and Republicans choose to ignore. Read the Green Party 2010 Platform and decide for yourself.
I don't think any list of "Most Violent Video Games" would be complete without Time Killers. Who needs solid game play or nice graphics when you can just up the ante on blood and gore with the ability to dismember your opponent?
The problem isn't that math isn't important. The problem is that the math being taught isn't important.
Totally agree.
With calculators and computers, nobody needs to know math itself.
Totally disagree. There's definitely a base level of mathematical understanding that is necessary to use calculators and computers. For example, students need to know that entering "1 + 3 / 4 - 2" into the calculator is not the same as "(1 + 3)/(4 - 2)".
Personally, I think computational mathematics is one of the important areas where the "traditional curriculum" is currently lacking. It's like the curriculum is trapped in the early 1900s and hasn't acknowledged the way computers have transformed society. In this technology rich era, students need to become educated computer users.
Accordingly, the focus of mathematics education needs to shift from "memorizing formulas" to "thinking algorithmically". Not only will this benefit the students going into further STEM studies, but other subject areas as well. Even something as simple as "baking a cake" can be thought of as an algorithm.
You may be interested in the Teach Scheme! project. The idea is to teach the programming fundamentals with Scheme where the syntax is simple and use those experiences as a scaffold for more complex languages. The project offers both a LGPL Scheme interpreter, Racket, and an online textbook, How to Design Programs. Follow up with How to Design Worlds, and students could be making games in no time! An intro course to game design might give that touch of creativity you were looking for.
Is there even a market, let alone a convention, for selling game concepts?
Nope. Quite frankly, the only way its going to get made is if you do it yourself. I'd suggest using an established engine to cut development time/cost to a minimum and going with a digital distribution service like Steam to bring the product to market.
I don't t that zombies represent our fear of science and technology, but rather the lack of them. We're afraid of what would happen if mankind were to revert back to a primitive state of being.
Obligatory: "Empty your cup so that it may be filled; Become devoid to gain totality" -- Bruce Lee
When I was doing my undergraduate work in mathematics, I found that I had to "unlearn" much of what I was taught earlier in order to grasp some of the more advanced concepts. At the time, I couldn't help but feel that I would have been better prepared for these classes if I had been allowed to explore mathematical ideas on my own, rather than being subjected to the public school curriculum. Looking back, I realize the irony in this hypothesis because I would not be me if my experiences had been different.
To complete the parent's saying, I'd suggest "You must unlearn what you know before you can learn that you know not".
From the description of the study, it sounds like this effect could be due to stress rather than depression and the two just happen to be correlated. When you encounter a complex problem, how would you describe your emotional state? depressed or stressed?
The study notes that stressful life events have been shown to induce depression, but their analysis does not seem to control for stress as a potential factor.
Really, most studios won't require a "game designer" to know how to program. Knowing how to work with a language like LUA or C++ will certainly be to your advantage, but it's not going to land you paying job. The only way a company will hire you as a game designer is if you can show them a game that you've designed.
I would recommend that you start by taking an existing game and making a mod for it. A large number of games for PC ship with the development tools included: Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, Oblivion to name a few. You'll probably need a high-end PC to even run these tools. Anything with less than 4GB of RAM will give you nothing but misery. Search the web to find a modding community and you should find some tutorials to get you started. Start small with a single room, test it out to make sure it works, then expand it to build a larger level. You might also want to pick up a 3D modeling suite, such as Maya, 3DS Max or Blender, so that you can create your own art assets as needed.
Another alternative would be to start with a pen and paper game, board game, dice game, or card game. The main idea is that you want to have some kind of game that you can include in your portfolio as you shop your resume around. The main rule of thumb in the industry is, "It's not what you know, its what you can show."
Scrap math and teach programming and math as a subtext.
I think that instead, we should be teaching math with programming as a subtext.
I agree that programming could potentially teach a number of skills that are currently lacking in the "free public education". In particular, programming provides individuals with a vocabulary to deal with formalized logic. Formalized logic is also a topic that mathematics deals extensively with. However, logic is often left to college math courses when it really seems like a prerequisite for the material in middle and high school mathematics courses.
I've recently moved from a career in software development to math education, and it certainly has been an eye-opening experience so far. I agree with the article, that an increase in the social value of knowledge will increase student motivation to learn math. However, I don't think that an increase in motivation alone will be sufficient.
In my experiences teaching thus far, I've noticed a few things that I had not expected:
The attitude of the faculty seems to be that students either get it or don't when it comes to math. This runs quite opposite to the attitude that I came to the profession with, namely that anyone could learn math if it were presented properly. The current math curriculum has been in place for a long time, and I think that many instructors are afraid to deviate from it -- even though doing so might benefit the students in the long run.
Students enter these mathematics courses without the prerequisite reasoning abilities necessary to comprehend the material. In trying to introduce a student to mathematics (or programming for that matter), it is expected that the students have a certain level of reading/verbal comprehension and an ability to reason logically. This is not always the case. Educators cannot simply assume that students have "common sense", and instead we need to formalize what "common sense" entails and incorporate it into the curriculum. For example, I spent a significant amount of time explaining to students the mathematical difference between "and" and "or" because knowing this distinction was necessary for students to understand how to approach certain word problems.
Students seem unwilling to seek out knowledge on their own, and expect the teacher to teach to the test. As a new teacher, one of the things I tried do was to give students a background on why the math was important. When I did this, the response from students was "Is this going to be on our test?" In regards to the article, the only social value in math seems to be the letter grade they earn in the course. This attitude, in conjunction with legislation such as the "No Child Left Behind Act" that places such a focus on being able to answer the standard battery of test questions, reduces the focus on the student's ability to reason logically and formulate conclusions based on new information.
I certainly agree that society's values are adversely affecting students willingness to study math, but I also feel that the lack of formalized instruction in logic negatively affects a students ability to learn mathematics. If anyone is aware of any studies that examine the effects of instruction on formalized logic on mathematical aptitude, I would be delighted to hear the findings.
I think that parent AC makes a valid point. While fansubs may technically be a violation of copyright law, those viewers that become fans of the series will probably end up purchasing the DVDs, T-Shirts, Video Games, and other merchandise related to the franchise.
In respect to the Anime market in the US, there are a number of other factors that could be contributing to low sales:
Bad voice acting. There are exceptions to this (i.e. Mononoke Hime), but many of the English dubs are terrible. The English actors don't seem to convey the same tone and mood of the original voice-overs. Most anime fans prefer Japanese voice-overs with English sub-titles. The only real reason to include an English dub is if the target audience is very young and can't be expected to read.
Price tag. The average cost per disk is about $25-$30 and it contains 3 episodes on average, 4 if you're lucky. It probably works out to about $8 per episode. Considering that many of the series contain upwards of 200 episodes, this becomes a hefty chunk of change. I think the problem here is the cost of producing the English dubs. You can often import the same series without English VOs in a box set for closer to $1 an episode. Why pay 8 times the price for English VOs that you're not going to listen to anyway?
Release delays. The DVDs don't hit the US stores until almost 3 years after the original air date. Presumably this is due to the time it takes to record the English VOs. By the time the DVD hits the US market, the buyer has lost interest in the series and moved on to something else.
In short, Anime publishers should ditch the English VOs and get the product to market sooner and for a lower price.
As an atheist and an engineer as well, I would agree that being an engineer doesn't necessarily predispose one towards religious fundamentalism. Contrary to the thread title, I don't think thats what this study was claiming either:
The paper also found that engineers are 'over-represented' among graduates who gravitate to violent groups. That says to me that they took a sample of "potential terrorists" and found that a significant percentage of them were engineers. This makes a more sense, considering that there is probably a high demand for technological proficiency in the activities that these "terrorists" are purported to engage in.
The real problem I have with articles like these is that its so hard to find a scientific way to measure "terrorism". The article suggests that the sample group was composed of Islamic fundamentalists, but I've heard the word "terrorist" used to describe almost anyone who questions authority. Shortly after 9/11, being "skeptical of the Bush administration" was sufficient to label someone a "terrorist". How much of the population would that definition include now?
I agree with the modding on Telvin's post because it points out the subtle line between the mathematical definition of a Mobius strip and the study of the physical properties of objects that are similar in appearance to a Mobius strip. The mathematical definition of a Mobius strip calls for a surface with zero thickness to it, while physical reproductions of its likeness inherently have some non-zero thickness. The research referred to in the article seems be asking the question: "What happens to physical representations of a Mobius strip as the thickness approaches zero?"
Reviewer has wrong definition of Spread!
on
Divine Proportions
·
· Score: 1
The actual definition given by Wildberger is this:
DefinitionThe spread s(L1,L2) between the lines L1 = < a1 , b1 , c1 > and L2 = < a2 , b2 , c2 > as the number:
[In Wildberger's line notation, a line L = < a , b , c > satisfies the equation a*x + b*y + c = 0 for all {x,y} in F^2]
The reviewer is entitled to his opinion, but does not have the right to present false information as fact. Definitions are very important in mathematics. The fact that Wildberger's definition does not use the classical trigonometric concept of an angle is a key feature of rational geometry.
I think that Wildberger's biggest flaw in Divine Proportions was presenting the spread-equals-sine-squared equation in the "Indroduction". This put too much focus on the relationship between classical trigonometry and rational geometry, and not enough focus on the implications of rational geometry in higher dimensions.
Having said that, it was also the most enjoyable book I'd read in a long while. I despised classical trigonometry in high school. It felt so arbitrary and forced compared to the rest of mathematics. The scope of this book doesn't go that far beyond the tools provided by trigonometry, but it solves the same set of problems with a smaller set of assumptions. Simplicity is beautiful.
Personally, I read through this book with a multi-dimensional analog of spread dancing around in the back of my mind...
For vectors v1 and v2 in an inner product space F^n, the spread can be defined as:
[the inner product, or "dot-product", is denoted here by < , >]
Being able to define a method for measuring relative orientation in an arbitrary number of dimensions is unnecessarily difficult in classical trigonometry. I think that Wildberger was on right on track with this book, and that readers can get as much out of it as they are willing to put in.
Come to think of it, this could be the best possible thing for an aspiring string theorist. The kind of mathematics he'll need to understand string theory could completely replace the standard K1-12 curriculum, at least the one I went through anyway.
Pre-School and Kindergarten could introduce little kids to logic and set theory. Concepts like 'true', 'false', 'and', 'or', and 'not' should be fairly easy to teach to children of this age group. It might even be possible to do this indirectly through other actities.
Elementary shool math could be replaced by an gentle introduction to number theory and abstract algebra. Getting kids familiar with the concept of fields (i.e. Q, R, and Np) by K5 sounds like a reasonable goal since in the classical K1-K5 classes, the topics covered in math would include addition, multiplication, division, exponentiation and roots anyways. Why not do them a favor and give them more precise definitions? It'll come in handy later.
Middle school math is basically an introduction to polynomials and planar geometry, and the current high school curriculum struggles to expand into higher dimensions. Why not replace all of this with a proper introduction to linear algebra? Teach kids how to work directly with inner products and cross products instead of bothering with angles and classical trigonometry. Introducing high school students to calculus and statistics seems the current standard, but wouldn't college level physics classes benefit from a freshman class that was already familiar with differential geometry and probablity theory?
An math education up to this point would be sufficient to start teaching high school graduates M-theory, especially if the physics program was accelerated at a similar rate. If this is where Song Yoo-geun is at 8 years old, I am thoroughly impressed.
I'd guess that Song Yoo-geun's math education was sped up about 64 fold commared to the public education system in the US, so a 50 fold increase sounds like a reasonable goal.
While I was studying Math in college, one of my old high school teachers asked me to give a guest lecture to help encourage her students to continue their education. I was interested in computer graphics at the time, so I brought in my laptop and showed them a simple video game I had been toying with. It was a great success. I captivated their interest pretty quickly by bringing in something they normally associate with "play" rather than "school", and they had plenty of questions for me. The laptop was great because it provides an interactive visual aid, although I'd suggest bringing a joystick if you plan on having them play. That way you can have the computer in front of you at all times. Some topics could discuss which could be tailored for K-5: *Math *Physics *Logic *Art *Engineering
Slashdot Mirror
I found that Blender has a surprisingly intuitive Video Sequence Editor. It might be worth looking into.
Yes and no. There are certainly some benefits to repeated practice in developing the speed and accuracy of computations. The problem is that some people may never master these low-level computations due to undiagnosed cognitive disabilities (i.e. discalculia or problems with working memory) and this content is being used as a gate-keeper to higher-level mathematics which the person could potentially master with appropriate support. Different types of mathematical activities use different areas of the brain. Assigning more arithmetic practice to someone with a cognitive disability isn't going to magically make the problem go away, so why not focus on the math skills they *can* learn instead?
I get that this is April Fools joke, but it might be worthwhile to mention that there is a real project aimed at accomplishing this goal: RepRap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard#One-handed_versions
According to the article, the tweet in question was a reference to the Prophet Muhammud. In some parts of the word, disavowing the religion of the majority (apostasy) can be punishable by death. Interpol's compliance in this act violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Interpol itself is tasked with upholding by its constitution.
I think it's important to note that the Green Party platform supports transitioning government agencies to Open Source Software, supports Net Neutrality and opposes Software Patents. Those are three key "geek" issues to me which both the Democrats and Republicans choose to ignore. Read the Green Party 2010 Platform and decide for yourself.
I don't think any list of "Most Violent Video Games" would be complete without Time Killers. Who needs solid game play or nice graphics when you can just up the ante on blood and gore with the ability to dismember your opponent?
The problem isn't that math isn't important. The problem is that the math being taught isn't important.
Totally agree.
With calculators and computers, nobody needs to know math itself.
Totally disagree. There's definitely a base level of mathematical understanding that is necessary to use calculators and computers. For example, students need to know that entering "1 + 3 / 4 - 2" into the calculator is not the same as "(1 + 3)/(4 - 2)".
Personally, I think computational mathematics is one of the important areas where the "traditional curriculum" is currently lacking. It's like the curriculum is trapped in the early 1900s and hasn't acknowledged the way computers have transformed society. In this technology rich era, students need to become educated computer users.
Accordingly, the focus of mathematics education needs to shift from "memorizing formulas" to "thinking algorithmically". Not only will this benefit the students going into further STEM studies, but other subject areas as well. Even something as simple as "baking a cake" can be thought of as an algorithm.
You may be interested in the Teach Scheme! project. The idea is to teach the programming fundamentals with Scheme where the syntax is simple and use those experiences as a scaffold for more complex languages. The project offers both a LGPL Scheme interpreter, Racket, and an online textbook, How to Design Programs. Follow up with How to Design Worlds, and students could be making games in no time! An intro course to game design might give that touch of creativity you were looking for.
Carnegie Mellon has an open source speech recognition project you might want to look into. Sphinx
arXiv
Is there even a market, let alone a convention, for selling game concepts?
Nope. Quite frankly, the only way its going to get made is if you do it yourself. I'd suggest using an established engine to cut development time/cost to a minimum and going with a digital distribution service like Steam to bring the product to market.
I realize that they were trying to be funny and all, but calling Kurt Gödel an "idiot" seemed a little low.
I don't t that zombies represent our fear of science and technology, but rather the lack of them. We're afraid of what would happen if mankind were to revert back to a primitive state of being.
Obligatory: "Empty your cup so that it may be filled; Become devoid to gain totality" -- Bruce Lee
When I was doing my undergraduate work in mathematics, I found that I had to "unlearn" much of what I was taught earlier in order to grasp some of the more advanced concepts. At the time, I couldn't help but feel that I would have been better prepared for these classes if I had been allowed to explore mathematical ideas on my own, rather than being subjected to the public school curriculum. Looking back, I realize the irony in this hypothesis because I would not be me if my experiences had been different.
To complete the parent's saying, I'd suggest "You must unlearn what you know before you can learn that you know not".
From the description of the study, it sounds like this effect could be due to stress rather than depression and the two just happen to be correlated. When you encounter a complex problem, how would you describe your emotional state? depressed or stressed?
The study notes that stressful life events have been shown to induce depression, but their analysis does not seem to control for stress as a potential factor.
Really, most studios won't require a "game designer" to know how to program. Knowing how to work with a language like LUA or C++ will certainly be to your advantage, but it's not going to land you paying job. The only way a company will hire you as a game designer is if you can show them a game that you've designed.
I would recommend that you start by taking an existing game and making a mod for it. A large number of games for PC ship with the development tools included: Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, Oblivion to name a few. You'll probably need a high-end PC to even run these tools. Anything with less than 4GB of RAM will give you nothing but misery. Search the web to find a modding community and you should find some tutorials to get you started. Start small with a single room, test it out to make sure it works, then expand it to build a larger level. You might also want to pick up a 3D modeling suite, such as Maya, 3DS Max or Blender, so that you can create your own art assets as needed.
Another alternative would be to start with a pen and paper game, board game, dice game, or card game. The main idea is that you want to have some kind of game that you can include in your portfolio as you shop your resume around. The main rule of thumb in the industry is, "It's not what you know, its what you can show."
Good luck!
Scrap math and teach programming and math as a subtext.
I think that instead, we should be teaching math with programming as a subtext.
I agree that programming could potentially teach a number of skills that are currently lacking in the "free public education". In particular, programming provides individuals with a vocabulary to deal with formalized logic. Formalized logic is also a topic that mathematics deals extensively with. However, logic is often left to college math courses when it really seems like a prerequisite for the material in middle and high school mathematics courses.
I've recently moved from a career in software development to math education, and it certainly has been an eye-opening experience so far. I agree with the article, that an increase in the social value of knowledge will increase student motivation to learn math. However, I don't think that an increase in motivation alone will be sufficient.
In my experiences teaching thus far, I've noticed a few things that I had not expected:
I certainly agree that society's values are adversely affecting students willingness to study math, but I also feel that the lack of formalized instruction in logic negatively affects a students ability to learn mathematics. If anyone is aware of any studies that examine the effects of instruction on formalized logic on mathematical aptitude, I would be delighted to hear the findings.
In respect to the Anime market in the US, there are a number of other factors that could be contributing to low sales:
In short, Anime publishers should ditch the English VOs and get the product to market sooner and for a lower price.
The real problem I have with articles like these is that its so hard to find a scientific way to measure "terrorism". The article suggests that the sample group was composed of Islamic fundamentalists, but I've heard the word "terrorist" used to describe almost anyone who questions authority. Shortly after 9/11, being "skeptical of the Bush administration" was sufficient to label someone a "terrorist". How much of the population would that definition include now?
The definition you sited refers to a "square", a subset of a "plane", which has no depth to it.
I agree with the modding on Telvin's post because it points out the subtle line between the mathematical definition of a Mobius strip and the study of the physical properties of objects that are similar in appearance to a Mobius strip. The mathematical definition of a Mobius strip calls for a surface with zero thickness to it, while physical reproductions of its likeness inherently have some non-zero thickness. The research referred to in the article seems be asking the question: "What happens to physical representations of a Mobius strip as the thickness approaches zero?"
[In Wildberger's line notation, a line L = < a , b , c > satisfies the equation a*x + b*y + c = 0 for all {x,y} in F^2]
The reviewer is entitled to his opinion, but does not have the right to present false information as fact. Definitions are very important in mathematics. The fact that Wildberger's definition does not use the classical trigonometric concept of an angle is a key feature of rational geometry.
I think that Wildberger's biggest flaw in Divine Proportions was presenting the spread-equals-sine-squared equation in the "Indroduction". This put too much focus on the relationship between classical trigonometry and rational geometry, and not enough focus on the implications of rational geometry in higher dimensions.
Having said that, it was also the most enjoyable book I'd read in a long while. I despised classical trigonometry in high school. It felt so arbitrary and forced compared to the rest of mathematics. The scope of this book doesn't go that far beyond the tools provided by trigonometry, but it solves the same set of problems with a smaller set of assumptions. Simplicity is beautiful.
Personally, I read through this book with a multi-dimensional analog of spread dancing around in the back of my mind...
For vectors v1 and v2 in an inner product space F^n, the spread can be defined as:
s(v1,v2) = 1 - ( <v1,v2>*<v2,v1> )/( <v1,v1>*<v2,v2> )
[the inner product, or "dot-product", is denoted here by < , >]
Being able to define a method for measuring relative orientation in an arbitrary number of dimensions is unnecessarily difficult in classical trigonometry. I think that Wildberger was on right on track with this book, and that readers can get as much out of it as they are willing to put in.
Maths can be sped up 50 fold
Come to think of it, this could be the best possible thing for an aspiring string theorist. The kind of mathematics he'll need to understand string theory could completely replace the standard K1-12 curriculum, at least the one I went through anyway.
Pre-School and Kindergarten could introduce little kids to logic and set theory. Concepts like 'true', 'false', 'and', 'or', and 'not' should be fairly easy to teach to children of this age group. It might even be possible to do this indirectly through other actities.
Elementary shool math could be replaced by an gentle introduction to number theory and abstract algebra. Getting kids familiar with the concept of fields (i.e. Q, R, and N p) by K5 sounds like a reasonable goal since in the classical K1-K5 classes, the topics covered in math would include addition, multiplication, division, exponentiation and roots anyways. Why not do them a favor and give them more precise definitions? It'll come in handy later.
Middle school math is basically an introduction to polynomials and planar geometry, and the current high school curriculum struggles to expand into higher dimensions. Why not replace all of this with a proper introduction to linear algebra? Teach kids how to work directly with inner products and cross products instead of bothering with angles and classical trigonometry. Introducing high school students to calculus and statistics seems the current standard, but wouldn't college level physics classes benefit from a freshman class that was already familiar with differential geometry and probablity theory?
An math education up to this point would be sufficient to start teaching high school graduates M-theory, especially if the physics program was accelerated at a similar rate. If this is where Song Yoo-geun is at 8 years old, I am thoroughly impressed.
I'd guess that Song Yoo-geun's math education was sped up about 64 fold commared to the public education system in the US, so a 50 fold increase sounds like a reasonable goal.
While I was studying Math in college, one of my old high school teachers asked me to give a guest lecture to help encourage her students to continue their education. I was interested in computer graphics at the time, so I brought in my laptop and showed them a simple video game I had been toying with. It was a great success. I captivated their interest pretty quickly by bringing in something they normally associate with "play" rather than "school", and they had plenty of questions for me. The laptop was great because it provides an interactive visual aid, although I'd suggest bringing a joystick if you plan on having them play. That way you can have the computer in front of you at all times. Some topics could discuss which could be tailored for K-5:
*Math
*Physics
*Logic
*Art
*Engineering