Free Republic

I used to have Verizon Wireless years ago, but literally had to fight them every month because my bill was always wrong. The would always fight me with some idiot who could not do simple math … just like this. (Go to link to listen to audio)

Any Mathmaniacs out there looking for a good time on a Friday night? I suspect that you might have to have better than average skill to do this, but math is math. It's free from opinion and sometimes the truths that are revealed are more powerful than punditry. I floated this question a couple of days ago, but it was during a slow traffic hour and to a separate thread. It was also before this particular item was yanked from the Stimulus Shakedown. Anyway, I was curious if anyone might have the math skill to breakdown the cost of resodding...

The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and Life Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff W.W. Norton £16.99, 512 pages Was Solomon wise for suggesting a baby be split in two, or just lucky? Lucky, say the authors – two jovial American business school gurus – of The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and Life. The fake mother should have anticipated Solomon’s cunning. She should have feigned self-sacrifice. His judgement would not then have extracted the truth. The authors then describe ‘the simplest of the devices that would have worked’....

Obama’s treasury secretary-designate Timothy Geithner, called revelations that he neglected to pay some of his income taxes a “hiccup on my road to greatness.” The unpaid taxes stem from Geithner’s time with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Although the IMF didn’t withhold taxes on the portion of his payments identified as “self-employment” income, it did pay him an additional amount to cover this liability. Geithner did complete and sign the forms needed to obtain this additional money and did, in fact accept payment. He just failed to forward this money to the IRS. Geithner belittled criticisms of his handling of...

Pornography Prep Schools by: Daniel Allen, January 16, 2009 What did your sixth grader learn at school today? There is a good chance that she learned how to use a condom, or learned about homosexual relations from a gay activist. Or maybe it was a more innocent lesson about the importance of jihad, and how to pray to Allah. Tomorrow it might be a lesson about suicide, or a class discussion about “stupid rules at home” and parental incompetence. The unfortunate truth, as documented in From Crayons to Condoms: The Ugly Truth about America’s Public Schools, a collection of stories...

Mathematicians Land Top Spot in New Ranking of Best and Worst Occupations in the U.S. BY SARAH E. NEEDLEMANThe Wall Street Journal Nineteen years ago, Jennifer Courter set out on a career path that has since provided her with a steady stream of lucrative, low-stress jobs. Now, her occupation — mathematician — has landed at the top spot on a new study ranking the best and worst jobs in the U.S. "It's a lot more than just some boring subject that everybody has to take in school," says Ms. Courter, a research mathematician at mental images Inc., a maker of...

Does anyone use Singapore Math? I have a 4th grader (I am tutoring) who is floundering in school. He seems to be solid in all his math basics, but cannot grasp the SM. I am ordering the books so I can help him; should I order the Teachers' Books too? Do people like SM? WHY???

Yahoo News featured an interesting short report issued by Agence France-Presse on November 20. In it we discover that a consortium of French, German and Hungarian mathematicians are claiming to have proven that Einstein's famous equation, e=mc2, is correct. The report is all good except for one very small aspect. They call the effort of these mathematicians "heroic" in contradiction to the root meaning of the word. Mathematics isn't "heroic" and it is a degradation of true heroics to say it is. Unfortunately, while a small thing too casually used in the AFP report, it proves a sort of degradation...

You know the economy is in trouble when economists start bandying around numeric terms previously associated with astronomy and particle physics. You can't open a newspaper these days without seeing the phrase "trillion dollars" placed in disturbing proximity to the word losses. According to the Nexis database, these terms appeared together in 1,774 English-language news reports between July and October 2008. During the same three-month period in 2007, they appeared in only 541, and during the same period in 2006, they appeared in only 316. Those were the good old days! You may not even remember from grade-school arithmetic what...

The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued. The study suggests that while many girls have exceptional talent in math — the talent to become top math researchers, scientists and engineers — they are rarely identified in the United States. A major reason, according to the study, is that American culture does not highly...

Another crop circle has appeared in the English countryside — and this one's clearly been made by someone, or something, that understands math.

Algebra in eighth grade was once reserved for the mathematically gifted student. In 1990, very few eighth graders, about one out of six, were enrolled in an algebra course. As the decade unfolded, leaders began urging schools to increase that number. President Clinton lamented, “Around the world, middle students are learning algebra and geometry. Here at home, just a quarter of all students take algebra before high school.”1 The administration made enrolling all children in an algebra course by eighth grade a national goal. In a handbook offering advice to middle school students on how to plan for college, U.S....

Parents concerned with latest math curriculum Georgia parents were outraged after thousands of students failed statewide math exams in May. Now with the start of a new school year, parents fear for their children as the state expands the new math curriculum to high schools. Fayette County parent Wendy Ashabranner worries how her son will handle this new math when he starts at Fayette County High on Monday. He was among the 38 percent of the state's eighth-graders who failed the state's new, redesigned math exam, which was based on harder material. While parents and teachers expected some students to...

Fast Learners Montgomery County officials say accelerating students in math will better prepare them for college, but a revered teacher says it's time to step on the brakes. By Emily Messner Sunday, August 3, 2008; Page W20 It's the day before final exams start at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, and Eric Walstein is teaching a class he calls "a travesty." It's not that he minds teaching Algebra II, but these students are in Blair's acclaimed math and science magnet program, and traditionally the magnet hasn't bothered with the course -- the kids were smart enough, and their...

. . . and also, it seems, for the New York Times. 28 July 2008 The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article by Tamar Lewin—thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students...

If you believe that girls fare significantly worse on math than boys in high-school tests, you would have been right — twenty years ago. Thanks to a concerted effort by parents and schools to get more girls in advanced math classes, the test-score disparity has completely disappeared, according to the National Science Foundation:

Zip. Zilch. Nada. There's no real difference between the scores of U.S. boys and girls on common math tests, according to a massive new study. Educators hope the finding will finally dispel lingering perceptions that girls don't measure up to boys when it comes to crunching numbers. "This shows there's no issue of intellectual ability--and that's a message we still need to get out to some of our parents and teachers," says Henry "Hank" Kepner, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in Reston, Virginia. It won't be a new message. Nearly 20 years ago, a large-scale study...

My wife and I have 3 children (ages 1, 3, and 5), and we recently purchased a home in Winchester, Massachusetts, because its schools have a good reputation and its students do well on the MCAS . I looked at the "Academics" section of the school district web site and found "Math literature lists" (what happened to textbooks?) for various grades. The 4th grade list at http://mail.winchester.k12.ma.us/~mkerble/mathlists4.doc lists dozens of books, including Count your Way Through Africa Count Your Way Through Arab World and 7 move "Count your Way" books Amazon says the "Count your Way Through Africa" book "uses...

New Push To Prevent Gas Gouging At Illinois PumpsReporting Dorothy Tucker Jul 3, 2008 6:27 pm US/Central CHICAGO (CBS) With the price of gas well over $4 a gallon, consumers want every drop they pay for. But sometimes Pamela Smith wondered if the gas was flowing when she was pumping. "While I'm pumping the nozzle is clicking and it's going on and off and I'm not certain if the gas is going into the vehicle," Smith said. She is among the hundreds who have registered their concerns with the state. The state has had 700 complaints since January, compared to...

Reading and math scores for New York students in grades three through eight showed extraordinary gains across the state since last year, with particularly striking leaps in the large urban areas, including New York City. The gains were apparent for nearly every grade tested in both subjects, in some cases with double-digit increases in the percentage of students performing at grade level or above, according to the scores on the annual statewide exams released by education officials on Monday. The improvements were so substantial that several education experts expressed skepticism, noting that large gains were posted even by cities like...