From Cocktail Party Physics: we are in…like…so much in trouble… episode two.
In my grouchier moments (one of which I am having right now), I am considering a public relations campaign to make fun of people who can’t do simple math and shame them into either acquiring some fundamental skills or staying quiet and not bothering the rest of us with their ignorance.
I am once again selling books from my library. I shipped one today, getting $78 for it. Today I listed another 10 math, physics, and statistics books at Amazon.com. My pricing strategy is simple: For any given book my price is clearly the lowest. In a couple cases that still let me set a price in 3 digits. There is also a history book I want to sell, but I am giving colgaffneyis members a chance at it before going to Amazon.
Again there was a quantum mechanics text that, after some thought, decided I could not bear parting with. I wonder if it was the same book as back in 2005.
From a note at the end of _+3=5+7=_: it depends what ‘equals’ equals (An interesting post generally, BTW):
….a scary chain: Female first and second grade teachers who are anxious about math pass that anxiety along to their female students. More female students are likely to agree with the suggestion that boys are better than girls at math after being exposed to this anxiety, and the female students who did agree with this stereotype performed worse in math as the year went on. Great article and PNAS makes the full text publicly available.
From the abstract of that article:
We show that when the math-anxious individuals are female elementary school teachers, their math anxiety carries negative consequences for the math achievement of their female students. Early elementary school teachers in the United States are almost exclusively female (>90%), and we provide evidence that these female teachers’ anxieties relate to girls’ math achievement via girls’ beliefs about who is good at math.
From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal via Skepchick.
Convergence 2010 — Physics and Fantasy
Notes from a panel at Convergence 2010, with web links, comments, and one smart-assed quote.
Subprime borrowing and innumeracy
….those who fell behind on their mortgages were noticeably less numerate than those who kept up with their payments in the same overall circumstances. The least numerate fell behind about 25% of the time. For those who did best on the test, the number of payments they missed was almost 12%. A fifth of the least numerate group had been in foreclosure, but only 7% of those who were more numerically adept had.
Having taken, and understood, some serious classes in the mathematics of probability, the mentality of the gambler is incomprehensible to me. One of our cars has a bumper sticker that says: “Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.”
So I found this interesting: Gambling: The almost-winning addiction
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 