did you see this?
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/interactive/2013/oct/11/dominic-cummings-michael-gove-thoughts-education-pdf
quotes displaying the usual right-wing educationalist tropes reported elsewhere
he likes science and technocracy
the introduction sets out his ever so slightly ambitious idea for the uk's post-imperial usp to be the #1 scientific country in the world, quoting all sorts of estimable people in support of his idea for a 'crude' generalist education with an emphasis on complex systems
then he starts ragging on the poor standard of maths and scientific education here
i) is he more than a crank and ii) do we need to have more people in public/corporate life with a higher mathematical education
― fake irish times letters mac d (nakhchivan), Saturday, 12 October 2013 01:53 (ten years ago) link
i only read the summary, but
i) he seems like more than a crank, although this also seems like an unusually febrile and utopian document, even for a spad.
ii) "need" is perhaps a strong word, but it certainly wouldn't hurt in public/corporate life. clearly, trivially, an MP or a civil servant should understand statistics better than it seems most currently do. that is the reason that institutions like my current one, which aspire to produce leaders and empire builders absolutely should be trying to offer an education in, most epsecially, statistsics/probability/quantitative reasoning, etc. designing the course(s) is hard, but actually implementing them in a liberal arts system like the US is relatively straightforward. with the hyperspecialization in the UK, where the high flyers essentially declare their major at 15/16, and drop all other courses, it's less clear. i can't imagine the politics that would be involved in trying to make "physics for future presidents" a compulsory course somewhere like oxford. (he actually mentions that course in the summary, by the way, which is kind of impressive. based solely on watching a few lectures on youtube, it's a good course.)
there is a tendency though to take this further and to say things like "the entire population should know what a normal distribution is, and if you don't then you're not equipped to vote", etc., which i reject. there's not much you can say to people who say "i never used algebra since i left school". they're right. and clearly a lot of people find maths and science hard/incomprehensible. not clear to me that we're doing them a service by obligating its study at an advanced level. and even assuming his ideas could be implemented, a country where everything is "evidence-based" sounds terribly bloodless and dull.
also this is an absolutely booming article:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
there is absolutely no shortage in technically qualified graduates in any developed country. not even close. on the whole, business leaders are acting out of self-interest and a desire to depress wages when they call for government to encourage/oblige people to do maths or science at university.
― caek, Sunday, 13 October 2013 16:37 (ten years ago) link
yeah i'd agree with most of that
as well as this quixotic idea for a crude synoptic education he seems to want to cull the top 2% by iq at a fairly young age and give them an intensive education with a heavy scientific emphasis because we need to solve global warming and nuclear fusion etc
i think there is something like this in israel already
― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Tuesday, 15 October 2013 13:38 (ten years ago) link
lol good plan
― max, Tuesday, 15 October 2013 13:50 (ten years ago) link
max you should read the report
there is some content to be mined about how genetic testing will allow us to create specialist computerized education for the slow kids, also a lot of quotes by john von neumann, a hat tip to sokal
maybe a bit niche i suppose
― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Tuesday, 15 October 2013 13:52 (ten years ago) link
i agree with caek
― max, Tuesday, 15 October 2013 13:55 (ten years ago) link
I most definitely agree with caek
and yeah, the idea that we need to aggressively recruit scientists from abroad in the US is definitely linked to depressed wages
I know that a friend who is a lab scientist has had issues with assistants who are from abroad and have science degrees (typically not graduate degrees, though) but have no lab experience and are actually not so great at lab work. They are decent candidates for the job on paper, but really, someone with an associate degree or even vocational training geared toward lab experimentation would probably be better.
Then again, she might just have bad luck and keep getting the assistants who just don't understand that you have to balance the damn centrifuge before turning it on.
― beautifully, unapologetically plastic (mh), Tuesday, 15 October 2013 14:11 (ten years ago) link
nah i'm not talking about international recruitment
get rid of all borders
― caek, Tuesday, 15 October 2013 15:17 (ten years ago) link
lol
― beautifully, unapologetically plastic (mh), Tuesday, 15 October 2013 15:20 (ten years ago) link
you would say that, you scab
― beautifully, unapologetically plastic (mh), Tuesday, 15 October 2013 15:21 (ten years ago) link
How is your teaching going, caek? Do you generally like your students or wish them to hell? What about your fellow faculty? Administrators?
― quincie, Sunday, 20 October 2013 14:45 (ten years ago) link
i'm missing research more than i expected, and i am continually staggered by the amount of paperwork, government involvement, financial complexity and bureaucracy at private universities in the US compared to public universities in europe. (seriously, lol at any american, politician or otherwise, who cites european governance as some kind of sclerotic basket case.)
but basically on the day to day, i love it!
any more and we'd have to move this thread to 77.
― caek, Sunday, 20 October 2013 17:02 (ten years ago) link
http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/original-size/images/print-edition/20131019_FBC916.png
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble
v good article
― caek, Wednesday, 23 October 2013 17:43 (ten years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qjK3TWZE8
i love this video!
― caek, Wednesday, 6 November 2013 20:27 (ten years ago) link
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/14/gravitational-waves-big-bang-universe-bicep
In about 50 minutes?
― StanM, Monday, 17 March 2014 15:12 (ten years ago) link
i know right?
― caek, Monday, 17 March 2014 17:57 (ten years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA
― caek, Monday, 17 March 2014 17:58 (ten years ago) link
i am in a weird-ass software dev workshop and it is passing me by
― caek, Monday, 17 March 2014 18:00 (ten years ago) link
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_CezSYzAS5Ms/TIGsRHpnESI/AAAAAAAACMM/aRj7yQcEyRU/s400/DSC09423.jpg
...wait for it...
― Aimless, Monday, 17 March 2014 18:01 (ten years ago) link
my buddy was on the UK experiment that would have gotten this discovery first if the uk govt had not defunded it in order to save £2m
― caek, Monday, 17 March 2014 18:03 (ten years ago) link
bg's explanation is legit and clear and short
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=843023029056612&set=a.191237650901823.54357.178097115549210&type=1&stream_ref=10
the cosmology big guns on inspect the results on FB
https://www.facebook.com/groups/574544055974988/
― caek, Thursday, 20 March 2014 19:20 (ten years ago) link
motherfucker u been holding out on us
― dn/ac (darraghmac), Friday, 30 May 2014 11:39 (ten years ago) link
hi
― caek, Friday, 30 May 2014 13:03 (ten years ago) link
teleportation is the headline
but rly is this Dutch thing gonna be abt information processing and transmission, sounds huge
― dn/ac (darraghmac), Friday, 30 May 2014 13:11 (ten years ago) link
link?
― caek, Friday, 30 May 2014 13:46 (ten years ago) link
http://www.irishtimes.com/business/sectors/technology/beam-me-up-scientists-say-human-teleportation-is-possible-1.1815010
― dn/ac (darraghmac), Friday, 30 May 2014 13:52 (ten years ago) link
hmm. odd article. fairly well understood theoretically, looks like a valuable but incremental practical advance.
― caek, Friday, 30 May 2014 14:06 (ten years ago) link
that's just the spin put on it
― dn/ac (darraghmac), Friday, 30 May 2014 14:12 (ten years ago) link
Would be interested if you consider this credible, a new model of the Thea collision that incorporates a previous smaller moon into the mix.http://nautil.us/issue/13/symmetry/when-the-earth-had-two-moons
― xelab, Friday, 30 May 2014 15:15 (ten years ago) link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_of_Parsonstown
i was here today it looks like this '_'
― dn/ac (darraghmac), Monday, 2 June 2014 21:29 (ten years ago) link
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152245376168772&l=e2f516ca33
posting from fb so im assuming that wont work but anyway
― dn/ac (darraghmac), Monday, 2 June 2014 21:30 (ten years ago) link
― dn/ac (darraghmac), Monday, 2 June 2014 21:31 (ten years ago) link
i kind of struggled to get through that moon article. it is not crazy but my undersrtanding (not a solar system guy) is that there is a less crazy idea that is the "consensus".
― caek, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 00:51 (ten years ago) link
Nautilus seem to have a knack of making ropey premises seem credible, starting to think that is their MO.
― xelab, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 01:24 (ten years ago) link
not to get all degrasse tyson on your thread but
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25723-massive-ocean-discovered-towards-earths-core.html
plants, man! crazy stuff
― goole, Friday, 13 June 2014 20:02 (ten years ago) link
planEts, sry
woah
― mattresslessness, Friday, 13 June 2014 20:18 (ten years ago) link
"We should be grateful for this deep reservoir," says Jacobsen. "If it wasn't there, it would be on the surface of the Earth, and mountain tops would be the only land poking out."
― xelab, Friday, 13 June 2014 21:12 (ten years ago) link
It is a headfuck thinking about where all the water comes from, it seems like there is too much to have been delivered by comets alone.
― xelab, Friday, 13 June 2014 21:16 (ten years ago) link
oh some crazy moon has an ocean under its surface, wait so does our planet.
― mattresslessness, Friday, 13 June 2014 21:20 (ten years ago) link
i was not aware of that! that is cool. the NS article is a bit casual about the difference between "evidence for" and "consistent with", but otherwise seems legit.
― caek, Saturday, 14 June 2014 17:44 (ten years ago) link
is it possible that the molecules in a liquid can remain static
― Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (nakhchivan), Monday, 30 June 2014 21:57 (nine years ago) link
like if u had liquid in a container with no gravity acting on it and heat/pressure was consistent would it still be moving
― Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (nakhchivan), Monday, 30 June 2014 21:58 (nine years ago) link
no the molecules must be moving (goes for solids and gases too)
that's the definition of non-zero temperature
they stop moving by definition at absolute zero, but absolute zero is a theoretical limit and cannot be reached by a liquid
― caek, Monday, 30 June 2014 22:05 (nine years ago) link
good episode http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r113g
thank you for the martin rees recommendation in some other thread, been enjoying "our cosmic habitat".
― mattresslessness, Monday, 30 June 2014 22:07 (nine years ago) link
it is a great "i want to read one book, 200 pages please" recommendation
― caek, Monday, 30 June 2014 22:08 (nine years ago) link
martin rees's dad was our family GP when I was a kid -- he looked like the mekon, except tall
― mark s, Monday, 30 June 2014 22:12 (nine years ago) link