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# Posts

### October 22, 2014

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Exploring The Epic Chess Match Of Our Time: FiveThirtyEight: FiveThirtyEight and ESPN Films follow the drama of those nine days in a short documentary film, “The Man vs. The Machine,” directed by Frank Marshall. The story — part of FiveThirtyEight’s new digital short series, “Signals” — hinges on a single move, the 44th move of the second game. [source: mme rss]
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Earlier today I saw a tweet from Luke (@bettermaths) which said that the subject of those evenings #mathschat was “how should we assess year 9, in light of the new 1-9 grading system?” This got me thinking about year 9. It’s a funny year group in general. Traditionally it falls within key stage 3, but […]
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Someone on the internet asks: What percentage of the natural numbers have the digit ‘seven’ in them? This is going to sound like a weird answer: it’s 100%. I know, I know: you can point at 42 and 100 and 986,543,210 and 666,666,666,666,666 and at least a handful of others – so surely 100% can’t be right? (As an aside: you can reasonably say that there are as many ‘seven-free’ numbers as there are ‘sevenful’ ones as there are infinitely many […]
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I just sent this email to my department today. The subject was “If you still assign drill and kill problems”. I am posting the text of the email without comment. It was spurred by a conversation on Twitter with @DDmeyer and @JStevens009. Text is below: Good morning all, Hate to be the bearer of unwelcome […]
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Researchers in Sweden and Australia have retracted a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) after follow-up experiments disproved their conclusions. Here’s the notice for “Dominant suppression of inflammation by glycan-hydrolyzed IgG,” which is signed by all nine of the paper’s authors: The authors wish to note the following: “Using studies […]
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Recently, Michael Pershan has been thinking about why it’s so hard for teachers to share knowledge and ideas. He has been playing with building cases to discuss as teachers, wondering about what counts as sufficient description to invite consultation. In my work, I find that one of the challenges to building shared professional knowledge comes […]
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No summary available for this post.
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Borrowing a problem from the comments in the excellent blog CorkboardConnections. Hope that's ok... http://corkboardconnections.blogspot.com/2014/08/common-core-math.html?showComment=1413889358852#c7893872002833512194 THE PROBLEM Mdm Shanti bought 1/3 as many chocolates as sweets. She gave each of her neighbours' children 4 chocolates and 3 sweets, after which she had 6 chocolates and 180 sweets left. (a) How many children received the chocolates and sweets? (b) how many sweets did […]
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Here is a pentagonal knitting pattern done in chemlambda, as appears after 20 steps: The knitting is made of abstraction (lambda) nodes, in the middle, bordered by fanin nodes. The knitting molecule appears after 3 steps, it can be then seen at the top of the figure. The white small molecules are loops. This pattern […]
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Tom Avery explains a categorical construction of the concept of probability measure.
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Come ha ricordato Maurizio Codogno è stato il centenario di Martin Gardner. Recupero oggi con la traduzione di un articolo di David Singmaster uscito su "Nature" nel 2010 come ricordo per la figura di riferimento che ha rappresentato per moltissimi lettori, amanti della matematica e matematici professionisti.Dalla metà degli anni '50 fino ai primi anni '80 del XX sexolo, probabilmente la più nota sezione di Scientific American è stata Mathematical games di Martin Gardner. Come […]
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Every so often, some variant of the question “Is Algebra Necessary?” comes to the fore in our national conversation on math education. As I’ve written before, conversations like this don’t bother me.  I love math and I love teaching math, but I think the underlying questions here, “How much math should everyone be required to know?” and […]
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[Feature photo above by Jimmie, and "79" image (right) by Steve Bowbrick via flickr (CC BY 2.0).] Do you enjoy math? I hope so! If not, browsing this post just may change your mind. Welcome to the 79th edition of … Continue reading →
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Let $p \in \mathbb {Z}[X]$ and of fifth degree with only the terms for $x^5$, $x^4$ and $x^3$ known, the terms for $x^2$, $x$ and $1$ are not known. $$p=x^5 - 5x^4 - 35x^3 + \cdots$$ The ( five ) roots of $p$ form an arithmetic sequence. Find the roots of $p$.
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Recently I had a disagreement with Larry Bartels which I think is worth sharing with you. Larry and I took opposite positions on the hot topic of science criticism. To put things in a positive way, Larry was writing about some interesting recent research which I then constructively criticized. To be more negative, Larry was […] The post Sailing between the Scylla of hyping of sexy research and the Charybdis of reflexive skepticism appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, […]
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Πέντε μήνες μετά την τελευταία μου ανάρτηση, φεύγοντας σήμερα από το σχολείο, ένιωσα την ανάγκη να μοιραστώ την εμπειρία μου με τους φίλους αναγνώστες του blog, όσους ακόμη έχουν απομείνει και αν έχουν απομείνει... Θα πρέπει εδώ να κάνω μια παρένθεση για να πω ότι στο διάστημα […]
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Many engineering textbooks such as Ogata’s Modern Control Engineering include small code examples written in languages such as MATLAB. If you don’t have access to MATLAB and if the examples don’t run in GNU Octave for some reason, the value of these textbooks is reduced. Professor Kannan M. Moudgalya et al of the Indian Institute of [...]
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NextCODE allows users to access online datasets at full resolution without sending big files, enabling them to use the full power of next-generation sequencing data to better diagnose and treat disease.
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There’s a new journal in town. Inference’s first issue includes a lengthy review of a laboratory by a tennis instructor, a set of caricatures, and an exchange of emails from 1996 that is “perhaps, less remarkable for what it says than for the fact that it took place at all.” In short, its editors — […]
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In this talk we discuss a new geometric characterization of the so called Napoleon n-gons characterized by the property that the centers of the regular n-gons erected outwardly on its sides are vertices of a regular n-gon. As a consequence, we obtain a new proof of the well-known theorem of Barlotti-Greber that an n-gon is Napoleon if and only if it is affine-regular. Moreover, […]
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This essay is a bit late. I wrote it about three months ago, so it rehashes tons of things from the past months of posts as if they never occurred. Still, I think the example is nice. We’ve been thinking … Continue reading →
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Hoy queremos recomendaros el artículo Así será la escuela en 2030, de El Mundo, que resume las conclusiones de 645 expertos internacionales entrevistados para una encuesta realizada por la Cumbre Mundial para la Innovación en Educación (WISE). WISE, para quién aún no lo sepa, es un think tank formado por 15.000 sabios y promovido por […]
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I'm just a good ol' Arkansas boy (and a lapsed Presbyterian to boot) so I don't know from Yiddish, but for anyone discussing education reform, this one is indispensable.From the inexplicably good Cracked.com:#8. "Farpotshket" (Yiddish) What It Means: Something that was a little bit broken ... until you tried to fix it. Now it's totally screwed.To demonstrate the usefulness of "farpotshket," look no further than that nightstand you picked up at your friendly neighborhood IKEA. You […]
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Soddy's formula is another example of Stigler's law of eponymy, "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." Stigler named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law", so as to avoid this law about laws disobeying its very own decree.Soddy's formula is about the relationship of the radii of four mutually tangent circles. The formula is sometimes called the "Kissing Circles Theorem". If four circles are all tangent to each other, then they must […]
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My dear friend Krystal Shaw texted me this Vimeo Clip at 5:23am so I knew it had to be good… My gut reaction…this is awesome! The focus on number crunching has superseded our students’ ability to problem solve for far too long.  There’s … Continue reading →
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(1 + 0) * 2 * 2 * 1 = 4 Also: 10 / 2 = 2 + 1 + √4
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Marc Andreessen has a new interview up and it is characteristically packed with silliness. If things had gone better for ViolaWWW, do you think Pei-Yuan Wei would have gotten this annoying?What did you do?I just went to college. I did my thing. I came out here in ’94, and Silicon Valley was in hibernation. In high school, I actually thought I was going to have to learn Japanese to work in technology. My big feeling was I just missed it, I missed the whole thing. It had happened in […]
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PhotoMath is an app that wants to do your students’ math homework for them. Its demo video was tweeted at me a dozen times yesterday and it is a trending search in the United States App Store. In theory, you hold your cameraphone up to the math problem you want to solve. It detects the […]
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There are times when I have wondered, why our country is not a scientific superpower? We have some of the best brains the world has to offer, and yet, so few Nobel Laureates! But then again, is it a question of best brains? Or does it have something to do with opportunities? Or maybe it Read more
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“Ruuuhhheee”, brüllt Carolina und intoniert eindrucksvoll den Studienrat Groll. Sie liest dem Hund vor, der aufmerksam zuhört, wie das Sams die Schüler zum Lachen und den Studienrat auf die Palme bringt.Ihr Ton ist dabei so scharf, dass ich mich unwillkürlich frage, ob sie das von mir hat. Aber eigentlich bilde … Continue reading →