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REPORT BY AMERICAN INSTITUTES FOR RESEARCH FINDS AT LEAST 20 PERCENT OF COLLEGE GRADS UNABLE TO DO FUNDAMENTAL COMPUTATIONS WASHINGTON, D.C. – Twenty percent of U.S. college students completing 4-year degrees – and 30 percent of students earning 2-year degrees – have only basic quantitative literacy skills, meaning they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies, according to a new national survey by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). The study was funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. The AIR study...

Mathematics literacy is a new civil rights battleground, according to the renowned activist and political organizer Robert Parris Moses. Using the same ideas and methods that he once used to fight for voting rights in the South, Moses is working to increase access to quality mathematics education through the Algebra Project, a nationwide program that he founded... Today, Moses says, many young people are excluded from full participation in the country's economy because they lack mathematical literacy... The ubiquity of computers makes abstract, quantitative reasoning skills critical to a wide range of job opportunities... Moses founded the Algebra Project...

"Obviously, people will focus on people who win," said John Allen Paulos, a Temple University mathematician. "All the same dumb sticks who did the same thing [and lost] are invisible." Author of a bestselling book, "Innumeracy," Paulos says lotteries have always owed their appeal to people's loose grip of math. Paulos recalled a line from Voltaire: "Lotteries are a tax on stupidity." Paulos once tore up a Powerball ticket on the eve of a drawing in front of an audience. "They all gasped as if I just slashed the Mona Lisa," he said. To a mathematician, the lottery is a...

Published online: 19 August 2004Tribe without names for numbers cannot count Helen PearsonAmazon study fuels debate on whether the concept of numbers is innate. Can a knowledge of numbers determine the way we think? © Alamy A study of an Amazonian tribe is stoking fierce debate about whether people can count without numbers. Psychologists, anthropologists and linguists have long wondered whether animals, young children or certain cultures can conceptualize numbers without the language to describe them. To tackle the issue, behavioural researcher Peter Gordon of Columbia University in New York journeyed into the Amazon. He carried out studies with the...

UNDATED - Up to 3,000 Iraqi fighters were killed in a show-of-force foray into Baghdad by American armored vehicles, the U.S. Central Command said Sunday. The command also said it was investigating a report of a friendly fire incident in northern Iraq. According to Kurdish officials, at least 12 people were killed when a U.S. warplane bombed a convoy carrying Kurdish fighters and U.S. special forces. In southern Iraq, British forces made their deepest push yet into Basra, with a column of 40 armored personnel carriers rolling into the country's second-biggest city after a series of strikes on Saddam Hussein's...

Reason Magazine, March 1997Copyright 1997 by Reason Magazine Read an editorial based on this article. Why are the Gulf War vets getting sick? You won't find out by reading The New York Times and USA Today. "For Some, a Day of Betrayal," ran a headline in Denver's Rocky Mountain News the day before Veterans Day. A Persian Gulf vet said to be suffering the effects of the mysterious Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) was profiled, and the story by reporter Dick Foster contained a startling figure: "Cancers have developed in Gulf veterans at three to six times the rate among the...