David Foster

Mathematics versus The Blob

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(…and so far, the blob seems to be winning)

Here’s a New York Daily News article on mathematical ignorance among City University of New York students:

During their first math class at one of CUNY’s four-year colleges, 90% of 200 students tested couldn’t solve a simple algebra problem, the report by the CUNY Council of Math Chairs found. Only a third could convert a fraction into a decimal.

And here’s Sandra Stotsky, discussing some of the reasons for poor math performance in America’s schools:

But the president’s worthy aims (to improve math and science education–ed) won’t be reached so long as assessment experts, technology salesmen, and math educators—the professors, usually with education degrees, who teach prospective teachers of math from K12—dominate the development of the content of school curricula and determine the pedagogy used, into which they’ve brought theories lacking any evidence of success and that emphasize political and social ends, not mastery of mathematics.

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Management Advice From George Eliot

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Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessman had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary’s men, but a little uncertain also about your own . . . You would be especially likely to be beaten if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.

–George Eliot, in Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)

Lots of political leaders and their academic advisors, and also more than a few business executives, fail to understand this point about the kind of “chess” that they are playing.

See also investing advice from George Eliot.

Power: Mechanical, National, and Personal

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James Boswell is of course best known as the great biographer of Samuel Johnson. But Boswell didn’t spend all his time in Dr Johnson’s company. In 1776, he visited the Boulton & Watt steam engine factory. Showing Boswell around, Matthew Boulton summed up his business one simple phrase:

I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have–POWER.

Fast forward to 2009. In the United States as in Western Europe, politicians are conducting a vendetta against the energy industry. See for example this, which describes the closure of an aluminum smelter in Montana–because it can no longer obtain affordable electricity–and the probable exit of much of the nonferrous metals industry from Western Europe, for the same reason. (Link via MaxedOutMama)

So, was Matthew Boulton wrong? Have we finally found a group of humans–our present-day political leaders–who are NOT interested in power?

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Bombs from Iran: Now with convenient compact packaging

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There is evidence that not only is Iran working on a nuclear weapon–it is making progress with two-point implosion technology, which allows the diameter of a bomb to be reduced so that it can easily fit into the nosecone of a missile.

Nuclear weapons expert James Acton:

It’s remarkable that, before perfecting step one, they are going straight to step four or five … To start with more sophisticated designs speaks of level of technical ambition that is surprising.

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Gangs of Chicago

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There are the Vice Lords, and the Gangster Disciples, and the Black Disciples, and the Four Corner Hustlers. But the gang that does the most harm to the Chicago public schools is–in the view of State Senator James Meeks–the Chicago Teachers Union.

via Joanne Jacobs