I don't hear Bill Nye being a pussy and apologizing for calling it like it is.
He called a sitting US Congressman a "fucking idiot" for his pseudo-scientific beliefs and followers of creationism "fucking retarded".
Peddled soda before becoming CEO of Apple. Everybody thought that his CEO expertise would carry over to any other kind of business. He didn't understand computers and thought he could beat the competition by turning macs into commodity computers and outmarketing the rest of the field. He very nearly put Apple out of business.
I agree that Calculus is not directly useful in CS, but disagree about linear algebra being the go-to tool. Anybody who wants to do computer science should be learning discrete math.
I've taught statistics to a variety of audiences for over 25 years, ranging from hard-core engineering students to business majors who haven't seen any math since high school algebra and considered that hard. There are definite differences in how you approach the subject if you want to communicate with the students.
With science/engineering/math students they are used to problem sets. You can focus on a developmental approach to the material, starting with basic probability rules, then random variables, densities and distributions, and expectation, popular distribution models, then into descriptive statistics, point and interval estimators, and linear models. My experience is that the SEM students like to work from first principles and understand how things work. They are very amenable to the fact that there are a few principles, which are common regardless of which distribution they're being applied to. You can teach more theory and rely on the students to apply it on problem sets.
Business & social science students don't like that approach at all! I've found that it works better to start with data, treat histograms as empirical densities, talk about various ways to describe/summarize the data numerically, then migrate to the concept of a population and sample and introduce distributions as an idealized description of the sampling population. Then onto rules of probability and how the sampling would shake out. They're just not willing to build their way from first principles the way the SEM students are. You have to work a lot more examples in class, because they don't have the problem-set/practicum mentality or experience that SEM students do. It takes a lot of work, but I've found that "competency checkpoints" are really helpful - little online quizzes that ask simple questions about basic principles for the module. The students are required to take and retake the CC until they can pass it with a certain threshold (I set 80%) - if they pass it on their first attempt, they get full credit, on the second attempt 80%, third attempt 60%, etc. The good thing about this is that it tells them the principles they are responsible for knowing on the midterms, and doesn't allow them to skip foundational material and move on unprepared for what follows.
The textbook you choose is essential. You have to get one that supports the approach you're using and is written at an appropriate level for the students.
...That's why Maryland and all the other States are REPUBLICS (rule of law & protection of basic human rights), not democracies.
REPUBLIC doesn't mean what you think, either. From Webster: Republic - a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.
Our protection of basic human rights comes from the constitution, not from being a republic.
For SF, the Heinlein juveniles: Red Planet, Have Space Suit Will Travel, Between Planets, Space Cadet, etc. if your kid can deal with young-teen reading levels. If you need something younger, Asimov had "Norby" and "Lucky Starr", there were a set of books about "Danny Dunn" in the 50's and 60's, Brinley wrote "The Mad Scientist Club" for Boy's Life around the same time, and there were a bunch of "Tom Swift" books - Jr, not Sr, the latter are way too dated. Also from the 50's, check out "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet" by E. Cameron. Fifteen years ago my own kids plowed through the "Animorphs" series, but I thought they were formulaic and trite - I guess the recommendation depends on whether you're looking for "good" books or something that the kids will find engaging. In the same vein, Coville's wrote a bunch of lightweight but fun things such as "My Teacher is an Alien".
I would NOT recommend Verne or HG Wells for modern young readers, the prose seems long-winded and obtuse by modern standards, but after your kid's hooked he can certainly go back and fill in with these.
For fantasy, you couldn't do better than "The Enchanted Forest Chronicles" by Patricia C Wrede. Hold off on Tolkien until later, "The Hobbit" might be okay for a read-aloud family activity but is a bit much for most 8 year olds.
Pledge of Allegiance: "...one nation under God..."
National motto: "In God we trust"
Both cases were added in the 1950's as a paranoiac response to "godless communism". There's a Porky Pig cartoon made during WWII where he has a nightmare about Nazism and when he wakes up he stutters his way through the Pledge of Allegiance: "...one nation, indivisible...". Ironically, the original version which lacks the phrase "under God" was penned by a minister.
Court oath: "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?"
Oath of allegiance: "...I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God"
The small number of times I've bumped into a need to make a formal statement or oath, I've notified the clerk or judge and been advised to end the phrasing with "so help me."
I'm not saying that there isn't a strong religious wind blowing in the USA. There are plenty of people who, like McCarthy in the 1950's, would love to push religion into government. But some of the biggest advocates for secular government have been intelligent religious leaders who recognize the protection that secular rather than religious-based law gives them when they're minorities.
The headline implies that US students have more difficulty with reasoning skills than other students as a whole, or that this difficulty is unique to students from the US.
No, the headline does no such thing. It's just a demographic description of the cohort that was studied. That's how scientists are supposed to write, so you know how widely applicable their findings are.
As others have already pointed out, you're doing a good job of illustrating poor logic skills by inferring an emotion-laden conclusion that isn't there.
Glad you brought that up. Debt/GDP is about where it was at the end of WWII. What differs now is the will to respond. That generation tightened their belts and raised taxes as high as in the 90% range for top tax brackets.
That generation also could cut government spending by 60%, since, y'know, they could just turn off the war economy they'd been under for the past four years. It's a lot harder to turn off entitlements.
Twelve years ago we were able to maintain a thriving economy, the entitlement programs, and top marginal tax rates below 40%, and we had budget surpluses. Now we have lower tax rates, a huge debt problem, and people saying we have to chop off support for the most vulnerable segments of society. We can fix the budget problem by a convex combination of entitlement cuts and tax increases, but you can't have it both ways and most people want the entitlements.
We've had this level of debt/GDP before, and we survived it. I'm not going to claim it's a good thing, but it's not the disaster the right would like to paint it as. We've paid it down before, we can do it again. But as we pay it down, remember that the overwhelming bulk of it was accumulated by three administrations -- Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.
The lower graph is the debt/gdp ratio. As parent points out, growth is mostly in the last three Republican administrations. Also note that Obama wasn't sworn in until 2009, and the huge increase at the right began before Obama took office. In other words, it's the recession rather than the stimulus package.
Furthermore, corporations just have to raise prices, so in the end consumers pay for it. And they pay for it in a regressive way.
And assuming you work for a corporation, those 28% that "you" paid was actually paid by your employer, because that's where all your money comes from.
Your claims reflect a very common misconception. Basic supply/demand analysis shows how it actually works. The relevant slides are on pages 2-3 of the handout. The question of who bears the brunt of taxes depends on the relative elasticities of supply and demand.
Python has more market share than Ruby and I hear lots of other folks talk about how beautiful they find it. However, my primary field is computer simulation and object-oriented modeling is extremely important to me. I find it hard to get past having to explicitly include "self" as the first argument to methods in Python -- to me it makes Python feel like a procedural language which bolted objects on as an afterthought, while in Ruby OOP is integral. I seem to be in a minority on this, though.
So what you're really saying is: you're kind of a big deal.
Not even close.
What I'm saying is that being ambidextrous in a one-side dominant population provides some quality-of-life benefits. I thought that viewpoint was relevant to the topic and I shared a few examples to illustrate the point. Nothing in that list is a big deal to anyone but my wife.
It's the luck of the draw that I happened to be born ambidextrous, and to the extent that I think about it I consider it one of several ways in which I am fortunate.
You joke, but that was literally true for me w/ regards to handwriting. Then one day my second grade teacher saw me switching hands and freaked out. She made me sit on my left hand for the rest of the year and had the colossal gall to tell me that someday I'd thank her for it. When my doctor learned about it at my next annual physical, he was pissed off beyond belief. He didn't cuss, but he kept muttering about "superstitious morons" and "subjecting kids to the prejudices of idiots", or words to that effect.
Fortunately the only thing impacted was my handwriting. Fifty years later my left-handed writing still looks like a first-grader while my right-handed writing got arrested at a second grade level. But I'm one heck of a typist, when I played soccer I did equally well on either left or right wing, I'm popular at dinner parties because I can accommodate whoever I am seated next to without bumping elbows, and my wife thinks I'm a very versatile fellow.
What I want to see is a real compromise of one of these systems that can be held up as a true scare story:
....
3. The results reported are undeniably wrong. Eg., the test voting was done in a controlled manner where everyone knew what the correct results should be and that everyone saw that everyone else had voted the way they were supposed to, so if the system functioned correctly it's known exactly how many votes should be cast for which candidate.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't hear Bill Nye being a pussy and apologizing for calling it like it is. He called a sitting US Congressman a "fucking idiot" for his pseudo-scientific beliefs and followers of creationism "fucking retarded".
Nope. It's a great story, but it didn't happen.
Peddled soda before becoming CEO of Apple. Everybody thought that his CEO expertise would carry over to any other kind of business. He didn't understand computers and thought he could beat the competition by turning macs into commodity computers and outmarketing the rest of the field. He very nearly put Apple out of business.
That's a plausible explanation for why a bunch of people may have scattered, but where are all the fossilized phonemes?
when I see the fossil record.
Oh my god! They killed Kentrosaurus!
Just because the product is not in the shops by tomorrow doesn't mean it's sensationalism.
True, but I'm still waiting for my flying car.
You need calculus to actually understand statistics for continuous random variables.
I agree that Calculus is not directly useful in CS, but disagree about linear algebra being the go-to tool. Anybody who wants to do computer science should be learning discrete math.
The other problem is there is no "internet". No one thing you can point at.
Ha! Guess again!
I couldn't imagine waiting an indeterminate amount of time to have your car pull up to get you with the wife/gf also waiting.
Yeah, I'd imagine having to wait somewhere with both your wife and your gf could get hellish.
What's heat?
I've taught statistics to a variety of audiences for over 25 years, ranging from hard-core engineering students to business majors who haven't seen any math since high school algebra and considered that hard. There are definite differences in how you approach the subject if you want to communicate with the students.
With science/engineering/math students they are used to problem sets. You can focus on a developmental approach to the material, starting with basic probability rules, then random variables, densities and distributions, and expectation, popular distribution models, then into descriptive statistics, point and interval estimators, and linear models. My experience is that the SEM students like to work from first principles and understand how things work. They are very amenable to the fact that there are a few principles, which are common regardless of which distribution they're being applied to. You can teach more theory and rely on the students to apply it on problem sets.
Business & social science students don't like that approach at all! I've found that it works better to start with data, treat histograms as empirical densities, talk about various ways to describe/summarize the data numerically, then migrate to the concept of a population and sample and introduce distributions as an idealized description of the sampling population. Then onto rules of probability and how the sampling would shake out. They're just not willing to build their way from first principles the way the SEM students are. You have to work a lot more examples in class, because they don't have the problem-set/practicum mentality or experience that SEM students do. It takes a lot of work, but I've found that "competency checkpoints" are really helpful - little online quizzes that ask simple questions about basic principles for the module. The students are required to take and retake the CC until they can pass it with a certain threshold (I set 80%) - if they pass it on their first attempt, they get full credit, on the second attempt 80%, third attempt 60%, etc. The good thing about this is that it tells them the principles they are responsible for knowing on the midterms, and doesn't allow them to skip foundational material and move on unprepared for what follows.
The textbook you choose is essential. You have to get one that supports the approach you're using and is written at an appropriate level for the students.
...That's why Maryland and all the other States are REPUBLICS (rule of law & protection of basic human rights), not democracies.
REPUBLIC doesn't mean what you think, either. From Webster: Republic - a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.
Our protection of basic human rights comes from the constitution, not from being a republic.
For SF, the Heinlein juveniles: Red Planet, Have Space Suit Will Travel, Between Planets, Space Cadet, etc. if your kid can deal with young-teen reading levels. If you need something younger, Asimov had "Norby" and "Lucky Starr", there were a set of books about "Danny Dunn" in the 50's and 60's, Brinley wrote "The Mad Scientist Club" for Boy's Life around the same time, and there were a bunch of "Tom Swift" books - Jr, not Sr, the latter are way too dated. Also from the 50's, check out "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet" by E. Cameron. Fifteen years ago my own kids plowed through the "Animorphs" series, but I thought they were formulaic and trite - I guess the recommendation depends on whether you're looking for "good" books or something that the kids will find engaging. In the same vein, Coville's wrote a bunch of lightweight but fun things such as "My Teacher is an Alien".
I would NOT recommend Verne or HG Wells for modern young readers, the prose seems long-winded and obtuse by modern standards, but after your kid's hooked he can certainly go back and fill in with these.
For fantasy, you couldn't do better than "The Enchanted Forest Chronicles" by Patricia C Wrede. Hold off on Tolkien until later, "The Hobbit" might be okay for a read-aloud family activity but is a bit much for most 8 year olds.
"Atheist countries"?
Yes, like the USA.
Pledge of Allegiance: "...one nation under God..."
National motto: "In God we trust"
Both cases were added in the 1950's as a paranoiac response to "godless communism". There's a Porky Pig cartoon made during WWII where he has a nightmare about Nazism and when he wakes up he stutters his way through the Pledge of Allegiance: "...one nation, indivisible...". Ironically, the original version which lacks the phrase "under God" was penned by a minister.
Court oath: "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?"
Oath of allegiance: "...I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God"
The small number of times I've bumped into a need to make a formal statement or oath, I've notified the clerk or judge and been advised to end the phrasing with "so help me."
I'm not saying that there isn't a strong religious wind blowing in the USA. There are plenty of people who, like McCarthy in the 1950's, would love to push religion into government. But some of the biggest advocates for secular government have been intelligent religious leaders who recognize the protection that secular rather than religious-based law gives them when they're minorities.
The headline implies that US students have more difficulty with reasoning skills than other students as a whole, or that this difficulty is unique to students from the US.
No, the headline does no such thing. It's just a demographic description of the cohort that was studied. That's how scientists are supposed to write, so you know how widely applicable their findings are.
As others have already pointed out, you're doing a good job of illustrating poor logic skills by inferring an emotion-laden conclusion that isn't there.
That generation also could cut government spending by 60%, since, y'know, they could just turn off the war economy they'd been under for the past four years. It's a lot harder to turn off entitlements.
Twelve years ago we were able to maintain a thriving economy, the entitlement programs, and top marginal tax rates below 40%, and we had budget surpluses. Now we have lower tax rates, a huge debt problem, and people saying we have to chop off support for the most vulnerable segments of society. We can fix the budget problem by a convex combination of entitlement cuts and tax increases, but you can't have it both ways and most people want the entitlements.
We've had this level of debt/GDP before, and we survived it. I'm not going to claim it's a good thing, but it's not the disaster the right would like to paint it as. We've paid it down before, we can do it again. But as we pay it down, remember that the overwhelming bulk of it was accumulated by three administrations -- Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.
The lower graph is the debt/gdp ratio. As parent points out, growth is mostly in the last three Republican administrations. Also note that Obama wasn't sworn in until 2009, and the huge increase at the right began before Obama took office. In other words, it's the recession rather than the stimulus package.
Furthermore, corporations just have to raise prices, so in the end consumers pay for it. And they pay for it in a regressive way.
And assuming you work for a corporation, those 28% that "you" paid was actually paid by your employer, because that's where all your money comes from.
Your claims reflect a very common misconception. Basic supply/demand analysis shows how it actually works. The relevant slides are on pages 2-3 of the handout. The question of who bears the brunt of taxes depends on the relative elasticities of supply and demand.
Looks like Ruby or Python will do the trick
Python has more market share than Ruby and I hear lots of other folks talk about how beautiful they find it. However, my primary field is computer simulation and object-oriented modeling is extremely important to me. I find it hard to get past having to explicitly include "self" as the first argument to methods in Python -- to me it makes Python feel like a procedural language which bolted objects on as an afterthought, while in Ruby OOP is integral. I seem to be in a minority on this, though.
Darn the minimal post requirement! Subject says it all.
So what you're really saying is: you're kind of a big deal.
Not even close.
What I'm saying is that being ambidextrous in a one-side dominant population provides some quality-of-life benefits. I thought that viewpoint was relevant to the topic and I shared a few examples to illustrate the point. Nothing in that list is a big deal to anyone but my wife. It's the luck of the draw that I happened to be born ambidextrous, and to the extent that I think about it I consider it one of several ways in which I am fortunate.
You joke, but that was literally true for me w/ regards to handwriting. Then one day my second grade teacher saw me switching hands and freaked out. She made me sit on my left hand for the rest of the year and had the colossal gall to tell me that someday I'd thank her for it. When my doctor learned about it at my next annual physical, he was pissed off beyond belief. He didn't cuss, but he kept muttering about "superstitious morons" and "subjecting kids to the prejudices of idiots", or words to that effect.
Fortunately the only thing impacted was my handwriting. Fifty years later my left-handed writing still looks like a first-grader while my right-handed writing got arrested at a second grade level. But I'm one heck of a typist, when I played soccer I did equally well on either left or right wing, I'm popular at dinner parties because I can accommodate whoever I am seated next to without bumping elbows, and my wife thinks I'm a very versatile fellow.
What I want to see is a real compromise of one of these systems that can be held up as a true scare story:
....
3. The results reported are undeniably wrong. Eg., the test voting was done in a controlled manner where everyone knew what the correct results should be and that everyone saw that everyone else had voted the way they were supposed to, so if the system functioned correctly it's known exactly how many votes should be cast for which candidate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky