I can believe that this is the case. Good freaking luck getting research or reform on the issue, though. Note, however, in the 1929 experiment, that low-grades were cultivating number & measurement sense; just that abstract operations (add, sub, mul, div) were witheld until later.
He also asked the teachers to give their pupils some practice in measuring and counting things, to assure that they would have some practical experience with numbers.
The thing that made me yell out loud was the following. I think I have to chalk this up to education schools causing irreparable brain damage. I went into part-time college teaching at fairly low pay, over the pleadings of many people to go into higher-pay private high schools, so as to avoid dealing with people like this:
In an article published in 2005, Patricia Clark Kenschaft, a professor of mathematics at Montclair State University, described her experiences of going into elementary schools and talking with teachers about math. In one visit to a K-6 elementary school in New Jersey she discovered that not a single teacher, out of the fifty that she met with, knew how to find the area of a rectangle.[2] They taught multiplication, but none of them knew that multiplication is used to find the area of a rectangle. Their most common guess was that you add the length and the width to get the area. Their excuse for not knowing was that they did not need to teach about areas of rectangles; that came later in the curriculum. But the fact that they couldn't figure out that multiplication is used to find the area was evidence to Kenschaft that they didn't really know what multiplication is or what it is for. She also found that although the teachers knew and taught the algorithm for multiplying one two-digit number by another, none of them could explain why that algorithm works.
"There are many other explanations: First in the case in question, it may very well have been that the math teaching was so bad in that particular case that no teaching worked better than teaching math badly."
Uh, that IS one of the explanations from the FA. The bottom two whole paragraphs on page 1 are devoted to recent research on that issue.
In an article published in 2005, Patricia Clark Kenschaft, a professor of mathematics at Montclair State University, described her experiences of going into elementary schools and talking with teachers about math. In one visit to a K-6 elementary school in New Jersey she discovered that not a single teacher, out of the fifty that she met with, knew how to find the area of a rectangle.[2]
When I read that a while back I personally found it to be a large percentage of BS (the guy apparently works in my neighborhood, actually). It's way out on the "concepts and no algorithms" side of the math wars debate. Meanwhile I have college students who can't subtract negative numbers to save their own life, day after day after day.
"In the meantime, we can keep spreading the ideas of IP abolitionism, encouraging people to ignore it when they can get away with it and to push for legal change. A movement is important when fighting such established interests - buying or convincing one politician won't really do (and isn't really doable on this issue)"
Actually (responding to my own post here) to be even closer to the information at the end of the article, the original code must look somewhat like this:
if (isFallOver6Feet()) then return 'A'; if (isOtherHorribleStuff()) then return 'A';
With the edit being to change the letter at the end of the first line to a "B".
Parent is correct, and everyone else is having a reading-comprehension-glitch. (The summary is not spectacular, but the information is there.) This is definitely an error of logic. Consider this original code:
if (isGeneralHorribleThing()) then category = A; if (isFallOver6Feet()) then category = A;
Now, change the very last letter above to a "B". Do you see the logic error? FTA:
It meant that if a call involved a fall of more than 6ft it was designated a lower priority - a category B response - despite the presence of life-threatening conditions which were supposed to receive the most urgent category A response.
As a result, Mrs Mason lay unconscious for more than 38 minutes. The first ambulance sent to her home in the village of Eye, Suffolk, was diverted to attend to a drunk woman who had fallen on a pavement 22 miles away in Thetford, Norfolk. Because the inebriated woman had fallen at ground level, her situation was prioritised over that of Mrs Mason, who was close to death by the time paramedics arrived.
"so there are thousands of government workers that could easily be replaced by a small pile of silicon chips and a bit of electricity, and they are said to provide 'valuable service'?"
You show a surprising amount of gullibility in whatever the government is telling you today. The UK government has a track record of absolutely not being able to deliver on promises like these.
Tell you what, $50 US says the UK government will NOT be able to replace any one of the mentioned functions with a "small pile of silicon chips", in the stated time frame of the next 10 years. In other words, the human services are in fact too complex to be captured by algorithms at this time. You on?
"Further, the small sample size, regardless of the slight-of-hand modern statiscians would have you believe is 'science', completely invalidates the results."
Hello, my name is Anonymous Coward, I'm bad at both math and spelling.
"... attempting to make any predictions outside of the central mass of the points used to *produce* the curve is completely bogus, and yet people do it all the time."
Well, no, not completely bogus, just more risk-prone. As one example, look at how close Guillaume Amontons got to predicting the value of absolute zero in 1702 by extrapolating from his mercury-based thermometer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero#History
"Where is the design and analysis, where is the small-scale working model, where is the prototype, where is the incremental build up, where are the TEST RESULTS????? I mean come on people! Committing to full scale production before you've seen a working model is foolish."
That's ivory-tower, intellectual, East-coast, effeminate, godless, unmanly, etc., etc., etc. thinking there, pardner. Real men act, not think, and trust in God to sort the mess out. From 2004:
"Bush's budget for next year includes $10.7 billion for missile defense—over twice as much money as for any other single weapons system. This summer, he's planning to start deploying the first components of an MD system—six anti-missile missiles in Alaska, four in California, and as many as 20 more, in locations not yet chosen, the following year. Yet, except by sheer luck, these interceptors will not be able to shoot down enemy missiles. Or, to put it more precisely, Bush is starting to deploy very expensive weapons without the slightest bit of evidence that they have any chance of working."
"Name one other country that allows anyone to cross into its borders regardless of the reason."
Like, almost every other country that isn't having a religious-xenophobic-hyperventilating-freak-out episode, to be frank. For almost the entire existence of our country (and my life) we could travel from the US to Canada and back with no documentation and no questions asked. Worked perfectly fine, and at low cost.
I'm the article poster and honestly, this was a bit of a test to see who would be enough of an idiot to post "correlation != causation" about a designed study. Congratulations, you win!
A quote from Neil A. Weiss, Introductory Statistics, 7E, p. 22: "In an observational study, researchers simply observe characteristics and take measurements, as in a sample survey. In a designed experiment, researchers impose treatments and controls and then observe characteristics and take measurements. Observational studies can only reveal association, whereas designed experiments can help establish causation."
"As such I don't think the results of the study are valid. I think there are confounding factors that could falsify their theory. They need to run additional tests with those controlled before I'm willing to accept it, and I imagine such additional tests would falsify the theory... What needs to be looked at is the difference between kinds with and without videogames over a long period of time. Ideally from like elementary school up to graduation."
Ah, it's the old "la la la fingers in my ears I can't hear anything until you have a 12-year study completed" defense.
Yeah, I'm sure to use your offhand critique from undergraduate psychology class over a peer-reviewed article in Psychological Science magazine, when you admit to not actually reading the study.
"People never seem to learn it. Always falling for scams. I'm not surprised."
Even if people did learn it, there are new suckers being born every minute. See also: Construction in earthquake/flood areas, regulations on financial industries, international bodies to avoid war, etc.
"My girlfriend recently went back to school and almost every class is taught by powerpoint presentation which nearly begs the students to bring in their laptops. If you want to ban the laptop then ban the lazy practice of teaching by powerpoint..."
I'm down with that. However, at a prior school where I used to teach, the dean held a meeting where he quasi-demanded that we use PowerPoint because (a) it made us look futuristic, and (b) it showed off all the fancy the projectors & screens they'd bought recently.
"Agree, for any HARD class. E.g., upper-level undergrad and grad-level theoretic courses in your (engineering)department/major. You scribble every last greek character in every equation from the board, in a desperate attempt to try to get down every jot of information (also verbal explanations)..."
I must admit, by the end of my graduate math program, I had entirely dispensed of taking any notes in class. I found it was better to sit back, be present, and follow the "big picture" of the presentation.
I dunno, maybe it wasn't a hard class. Seemed like it, though.
"I pointed out to students that, given the cost of tuition, and the class being X units (depending on the class) it meant that each lecture was essentially costing them (or somebody), $Y. And that given it was their $Y to spend, I didn't really care how they spent it, but that as long as they were registered for the class, it was a sunk cost, so I recommended they pay attention..."
This is an enormously common line of thinking, but I've discovered it to be fundamentally not true (at least where I teach). I've been told that the majority of my students, for example, are on full financial aid (including health benefits & pocket money). So there's some loan they need to pay off arbitrarily far in the future, I guess (and it's safe to say that many can't rationally balance that abstract fact). And in fact they're pocketing cash on top of it, so in some sense mere attendance in my class is their current job. Changes the dynamic a lot.
All the time when I'm telling stories my friends say, "But they're paying for it!", and I sigh and launch into my "No, they're actually not..." routine.
"It's either your money, in which case it is your problem; or your parent's money, in which case they can always scream at you or cut you off."
Or: I've been told that the majority of my students are fully paid through financial aid. (i.e., Loans that come due at some arbitrarily far point in the future.) Changes the dynamic a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
Single best Slashdot post in several weeks. Bravo, sir.
I can believe that this is the case. Good freaking luck getting research or reform on the issue, though. Note, however, in the 1929 experiment, that low-grades were cultivating number & measurement sense; just that abstract operations (add, sub, mul, div) were witheld until later.
He also asked the teachers to give their pupils some practice in measuring and counting things, to assure that they would have some practical experience with numbers.
The thing that made me yell out loud was the following. I think I have to chalk this up to education schools causing irreparable brain damage. I went into part-time college teaching at fairly low pay, over the pleadings of many people to go into higher-pay private high schools, so as to avoid dealing with people like this:
In an article published in 2005, Patricia Clark Kenschaft, a professor of mathematics at Montclair State University, described her experiences of going into elementary schools and talking with teachers about math. In one visit to a K-6 elementary school in New Jersey she discovered that not a single teacher, out of the fifty that she met with, knew how to find the area of a rectangle.[2] They taught multiplication, but none of them knew that multiplication is used to find the area of a rectangle. Their most common guess was that you add the length and the width to get the area. Their excuse for not knowing was that they did not need to teach about areas of rectangles; that came later in the curriculum. But the fact that they couldn't figure out that multiplication is used to find the area was evidence to Kenschaft that they didn't really know what multiplication is or what it is for. She also found that although the teachers knew and taught the algorithm for multiplying one two-digit number by another, none of them could explain why that algorithm works.
"There are many other explanations: First in the case in question, it may very well have been that the math teaching was so bad in that particular case that no teaching worked better than teaching math badly."
Uh, that IS one of the explanations from the FA. The bottom two whole paragraphs on page 1 are devoted to recent research on that issue.
In an article published in 2005, Patricia Clark Kenschaft, a professor of mathematics at Montclair State University, described her experiences of going into elementary schools and talking with teachers about math. In one visit to a K-6 elementary school in New Jersey she discovered that not a single teacher, out of the fifty that she met with, knew how to find the area of a rectangle.[2]
When I read that a while back I personally found it to be a large percentage of BS (the guy apparently works in my neighborhood, actually). It's way out on the "concepts and no algorithms" side of the math wars debate. Meanwhile I have college students who can't subtract negative numbers to save their own life, day after day after day.
Dvorkin said it best: "The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using 'correlation is not causation' as an argument is close to 1."
"In the meantime, we can keep spreading the ideas of IP abolitionism, encouraging people to ignore it when they can get away with it and to push for legal change. A movement is important when fighting such established interests - buying or convincing one politician won't really do (and isn't really doable on this issue)"
Mod this up!
Actually (responding to my own post here) to be even closer to the information at the end of the article, the original code must look somewhat like this:
With the edit being to change the letter at the end of the first line to a "B".
Parent is correct, and everyone else is having a reading-comprehension-glitch. (The summary is not spectacular, but the information is there.) This is definitely an error of logic. Consider this original code:
if (isGeneralHorribleThing()) then category = A;
if (isFallOver6Feet()) then category = A;
Now, change the very last letter above to a "B". Do you see the logic error? FTA:
It meant that if a call involved a fall of more than 6ft it was designated a lower priority - a category B response - despite the presence of life-threatening conditions which were supposed to receive the most urgent category A response.
As a result, Mrs Mason lay unconscious for more than 38 minutes. The first ambulance sent to her home in the village of Eye, Suffolk, was diverted to attend to a drunk woman who had fallen on a pavement 22 miles away in Thetford, Norfolk. Because the inebriated woman had fallen at ground level, her situation was prioritised over that of Mrs Mason, who was close to death by the time paramedics arrived.
"so there are thousands of government workers that could easily be replaced by a small pile of silicon chips and a bit of electricity, and they are said to provide 'valuable service'?"
You show a surprising amount of gullibility in whatever the government is telling you today. The UK government has a track record of absolutely not being able to deliver on promises like these.
Tell you what, $50 US says the UK government will NOT be able to replace any one of the mentioned functions with a "small pile of silicon chips", in the stated time frame of the next 10 years. In other words, the human services are in fact too complex to be captured by algorithms at this time. You on?
"Further, the small sample size, regardless of the slight-of-hand modern statiscians would have you believe is 'science', completely invalidates the results."
Hello, my name is Anonymous Coward, I'm bad at both math and spelling.
"... attempting to make any predictions outside of the central mass of the points used to *produce* the curve is completely bogus, and yet people do it all the time."
Well, no, not completely bogus, just more risk-prone. As one example, look at how close Guillaume Amontons got to predicting the value of absolute zero in 1702 by extrapolating from his mercury-based thermometer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero#History
"Where is the design and analysis, where is the small-scale working model, where is the prototype, where is the incremental build up, where are the TEST RESULTS????? I mean come on people! Committing to full scale production before you've seen a working model is foolish."
That's ivory-tower, intellectual, East-coast, effeminate, godless, unmanly, etc., etc., etc. thinking there, pardner. Real men act, not think, and trust in God to sort the mess out. From 2004:
"Bush's budget for next year includes $10.7 billion for missile defense—over twice as much money as for any other single weapons system. This summer, he's planning to start deploying the first components of an MD system—six anti-missile missiles in Alaska, four in California, and as many as 20 more, in locations not yet chosen, the following year. Yet, except by sheer luck, these interceptors will not be able to shoot down enemy missiles. Or, to put it more precisely, Bush is starting to deploy very expensive weapons without the slightest bit of evidence that they have any chance of working."
http://slate.msn.com/id/2097087
"Name one other country that allows anyone to cross into its borders regardless of the reason."
Like, almost every other country that isn't having a religious-xenophobic-hyperventilating-freak-out episode, to be frank. For almost the entire existence of our country (and my life) we could travel from the US to Canada and back with no documentation and no questions asked. Worked perfectly fine, and at low cost.
I'm the article poster and honestly, this was a bit of a test to see who would be enough of an idiot to post "correlation != causation" about a designed study. Congratulations, you win!
A quote from Neil A. Weiss, Introductory Statistics, 7E, p. 22: "In an observational study, researchers simply observe characteristics and take measurements, as in a sample survey. In a designed experiment, researchers impose treatments and controls and then observe characteristics and take measurements. Observational studies can only reveal association, whereas designed experiments can help establish causation."
"As such I don't think the results of the study are valid. I think there are confounding factors that could falsify their theory. They need to run additional tests with those controlled before I'm willing to accept it, and I imagine such additional tests would falsify the theory... What needs to be looked at is the difference between kinds with and without videogames over a long period of time. Ideally from like elementary school up to graduation."
Ah, it's the old "la la la fingers in my ears I can't hear anything until you have a 12-year study completed" defense.
Yeah, I'm sure to use your offhand critique from undergraduate psychology class over a peer-reviewed article in Psychological Science magazine, when you admit to not actually reading the study.
"People never seem to learn it. Always falling for scams. I'm not surprised."
Even if people did learn it, there are new suckers being born every minute. See also: Construction in earthquake/flood areas, regulations on financial industries, international bodies to avoid war, etc.
"It's like throwing away metric and using some crazy-ass divisible by 12 unit."
Or: Metric is like throwing out base 60 and using some unit that you can't divide evenly by 3, 4, or 6.
"For ALL of you: Remember, there are people in the OPPOSING PARTY that are significantly SMARTER than you... REGARDLESS of which party you're in."
That is a provably untrue statement. (Unless party numbers are either zero or infinity.)
I was about to same the exact same thing.
I don't even like Pink Floyd. But I like brutal endurance gameplay.
Your Jedi mind-tricks don't work on us!
Oh, uh... oh, geez.
The Force is strong with this one.
"My girlfriend recently went back to school and almost every class is taught by powerpoint presentation which nearly begs the students to bring in their laptops. If you want to ban the laptop then ban the lazy practice of teaching by powerpoint..."
I'm down with that. However, at a prior school where I used to teach, the dean held a meeting where he quasi-demanded that we use PowerPoint because (a) it made us look futuristic, and (b) it showed off all the fancy the projectors & screens they'd bought recently.
"Agree, for any HARD class. E.g., upper-level undergrad and grad-level theoretic courses in your (engineering)department/major. You scribble every last greek character in every equation from the board, in a desperate attempt to try to get down every jot of information (also verbal explanations)..."
I must admit, by the end of my graduate math program, I had entirely dispensed of taking any notes in class. I found it was better to sit back, be present, and follow the "big picture" of the presentation.
I dunno, maybe it wasn't a hard class. Seemed like it, though.
"I pointed out to students that, given the cost of tuition, and the class being X units (depending on the class) it meant that each lecture was essentially costing them (or somebody), $Y. And that given it was their $Y to spend, I didn't really care how they spent it, but that as long as they were registered for the class, it was a sunk cost, so I recommended they pay attention..."
This is an enormously common line of thinking, but I've discovered it to be fundamentally not true (at least where I teach). I've been told that the majority of my students, for example, are on full financial aid (including health benefits & pocket money). So there's some loan they need to pay off arbitrarily far in the future, I guess (and it's safe to say that many can't rationally balance that abstract fact). And in fact they're pocketing cash on top of it, so in some sense mere attendance in my class is their current job. Changes the dynamic a lot.
All the time when I'm telling stories my friends say, "But they're paying for it!", and I sigh and launch into my "No, they're actually not..." routine.
"It's either your money, in which case it is your problem; or your parent's money, in which case they can always scream at you or cut you off."
Or: I've been told that the majority of my students are fully paid through financial aid. (i.e., Loans that come due at some arbitrarily far point in the future.) Changes the dynamic a lot.
"One of them seriously thought Windows started with 95."
Ouch. Wow.