jrells

So clean and beautiful! Paper and blackboards always leave me disappointed when I do graph theory.

I often worry that mathematics education is strongly supported on the grounds that it is about "learning how to think", yet the way it is executed rarely prioritizes this goal. What would it look like if math curriculum were redesigned to be super focused on "learning how to think"? Different, for sure.

It is common practice to cite things other than peer-reviewed papers (at least in math). There are even citations for "private communication", usually meaning a personal email or conversation.

I deem my name to be a competitive advantage overall. I have never wanted to change it. I deem racism to be a problem, particularly because you can't just sign a paper and change your race.

I only said it must be tough to face (non-mistaken) racism. I am curious how this is arrogantly shaking my fist, or is related to my political tastes. And I'm curious what you believe those tastes to be.

EDIT: In my own rereading, my original comment is strictly about the way people treat each other as individuals and could be consistent with any taste in politics from communism to anarchy.

As a white guy with a (very mildly) African American sounding name, I have had similar experiences. When I meet people in person after emailing them they sometimes seem surprised, and some later admit they expected me to be black. The worst example was when I was told by someone renting a room on craigslist that they couldn't rent to me because I was a "security threat", even though I had hardly said anything about myself. It must be tough for those who face that kind of attitude constantly and are unable to escape it.

"Subhuman" is an absurd term to use, especially since trying to look down on others is very much a human flaw.

Isn't the blame falling to the pension managers who picked the hedge fund, and the victims are the individual pensioners who each have negligible influence over decisions? Or am I misunderstanding something?

Fascinating stuff, I'd like to know more.

Does anyone know a better source?

I found the original article but sadly not freely available. This psmag.com article is thin and the graph of the data is so small I can't read much off of it. Google couldn't find any larger versions of the graph.

Other research suggests that cyclists may actually spend more than drivers at some kinds of businesses because it's easier for them to pop in often and unplanned.

This is probably due to a shortage of parking spots.

There's a lot to take issue with in this article. Graduate institutional affiliation is huge because more and more research is being done by undergraduates, so top institutions can more easily pick out the best talent early. It is still true in academia that research>institution, but the latter is becoming more and more correlated with the former. Top PhD graduates come from top schools, with few exceptions (and those exceptions still get jobs). With undergraduate this correlation is weak.

Yes financial privilege is huge for getting that far, but everyone applying for an academic PhD program has spent decent time in academia and has chosen that instead of money. I've never seen or heard of someone turning down an elite academic PhD program because of a low stipend (students do use stipends to choose between similar schools). Any academic adviser would tell you you'd be crazy to do so.

Edit: This might only be true for math. In undergrad I was constantly surprised to find students from elite vs sub-elite institutions differed hugely in privilege and less in ability. In my PhD program, there was a huge difference in ability between our school (arguably #3 in the area) and nearby Harvard/MIT. While this is all anecdotal, elite academia is a small community and I've seen a large chunk of math. Ability here in math is easy to measure (if they can solve my problems and I can't understand theirs). Mathematicians keep mental rankings of other mathematicians. When you apply for graduate school and later jobs, lots of other mathematicians have a really good idea how you compare.

I could spend my whole life correcting people who draw an equivalence between legality and morality, and that would be a life well spent.

She should be ashamed: she appears to have violated immigration, pension and tax laws.

She is an illegal immigrant, and a shameless criminal, but why should she be ashamed? Braking a law does not necessarily imply anything shameful, and sometimes it is shameful to obey unjust laws. I hope everyone can think of some laws (at least from history) that you'd be proud to break.

True, this certainly skews my impression of driving in other countries. However, some of the examples I recall can not possibly be good driving in any culture (like making a ten point U-turn when there is ample room to make a single turn, or failing to park in a large spot after several attempts).

I would question the claim that Americans are bad drivers in general. Compared to driving I've seen in other countries (particularly India, China), even the worst drivers I've seen in America aren't so bad. And the worst drivers in America I know personally are not actually Americans but internationals.

Maybe we are generally worse compared to other western countries but my experience suggests the prevalence of driving in America puts our skills among the best. If someone has data which suggests otherwise please share.

It's not about the price of Beyonce in particular. It is standard practice to shoot models without any makeup and make changes afterward.

I'm helping teach a math education course at an elite university. We should be teaching how to teach, but we actually teach elementary school math to education majors who struggle with the material. It blows my mind how difficult this course has been for the students. It seems that every week we are lowering our standards a little more. We have no real hope of finishing a significant amount of material in one semester (but that is all they will probably take). I doubt we would be able to just fail the whole class and keep our jobs. Our goal is to teach them one single concept, so they know what it feels like to really understand something, and then maybe they will chase that feeling later.

The author mentions that education students are generally chattier and less respectful during lectures. This is also true for our class, and we have had ridiculous problems getting students to arrive for scheduled meetings and stay on top of their responsibilities. On the plus side, most of them are highly energetic and charismatic, which are great for teachers.

I knew about these problems before this class, but I could have never possibly imagined they are as dire as I've seen.

While I'm sure your knowledge is aggregated over many sources, are there any particularly excellent sources (books, documentaries, etc) on the history of military tactics?

I'm not sure there are any disagreements here beyond language.

How about: "Try for equality, and understand that due to your own biases this might just feel like overcompensating."

The Harrison Bergeron-ing all things is a terrible path and we should definitely encourage people to rise to the challenges of their environment, and celebrate those who do.

But that doesn't have to be the end of the story. Some of the challenges that women face in the workplace can't be solved simply by those women. I think that was a major point of the article. There are common subconscious biases that businesses would be well served to address. That doesn't have to mean that businesses treat anyone like victims. It means they aren't necessarily maximizing the value of their human resources. I don't think there's a single optimum strategy for running business meetings, but we should certainly better understand the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches.

A nice explanation of privilege. I'm not super fond of the term, since I hear too many people use it as an attack instead of a conversation starter. Its hard to convince someone they're wrong, that has to be a delicate conversation.

Maybe: Do your best to treat everyone equally, and be aware of just how insanely hard this is for ANY human being to do.

That's a great example, reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Barres

I like this article, but I wish it would do more to point out that high-education low-wage workers, like adjunct university teachers, are usually in their low-wage jobs by choice, and their education gives them a lot more opportunities even if they don't take them. They are in a way very financially secure, since they could easily give up on academics and move into high-wage industry jobs (at least in the applicable fields). There are a lot of people who really want academic jobs anyway, so schools are happy to pay low.

Note: I'm an academic and I have a second job to supplement my income. I have often considered moving into industry where I would make 5-10x my teaching income.

The article says the hackers "can inject themselves seamlessly into email threads". Its hard to judge that without reading the specific conversation but I doubt they'll become public. The hackers may have simply spent some good time studying up on the industry, but having a banking background seems like a reasonable guess.

I'm surprised so many people engage in a Soylent vs cooking debate as if there are two sides and you have to choose one. Recently I was cooking an elaborate dinner, starting early in the afternoon, and I found myself wishing my Soylent shipment had arrived so I could have lunch without interrupting my dinner preparation.

I think I understand where you're coming from, economics is a form of culture, but I was trying to distinguish the cold economic price of low-skilled labor from the non-economic value we place on it (sorry I don't know a better way to express this). Hard work is generally considered very important and valuable in our culture, but excess supply and low demand drives down the economic value. I value water very highly (non-economically), more than gold, but the economy disagrees.

You could say employers are greedy and hoard excess profits while keeping wages low, or you could say that they generously provide much needed jobs to a struggling low-skill labor market. Both are true. It would be nice if low-skilled labor drew higher wages, but wages above the economic rate are just another form of charity. You don't compromise your value of hard work by choosing to pay low wages, you just lack charity.

You're right that teachers are a bad example. Their pay is heavily affected by our culture through politics (although our political system responds to many other incentives too). Private tutors make great money.

How is this a cultural problem? It seems strictly like an economic problem. Teachers are highly valued in our culture (or at least, valued much more than they are in our economy). We DO value work, and that's precisely why people are concerned. The economy doesn't value work as much as our culture does.

As much as I would love for educational institutions (and government in general) to fund open source projects to solve their needs, that doesn't seem very realistic right now. Maybe when startup culture becomes the norm. The people who make decisions about technology purchases in education are, in my experience, non-technical and highly risk averse. They pay absurd prices for outdated software. There is little pressure to create a better product. I have to use Moodle for my teaching, and I'm sure anything Google creates will be far superior. This was at the top of my startup ideas list, but I'm glad someone is working on it.

My University uses Moodle, which is also TERRIBLE. I do all my grades and such in Google Docs, since Moodle is a UX nightmare. Something as simple as entering grades in Moodle requires a lot of clicking around for each grade. We have multi-page documents describing how to perform even the most basic tasks, they require constantly clicking and going to new pages of indiscernible icons. Menus are impossible to navigate without help.