♪♫ caek's corner ♪♫

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

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.

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

lol good plan

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

i agree with caek

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.

nah i'm not talking about international recruitment

get rid of all borders

lol

you would say that, you scab

How is your teaching going, caek? Do you generally like your students or wish them to hell? What about your fellow faculty? Administrators?

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.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qjK3TWZE8

i love this video!

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/14/gravitational-waves-big-bang-universe-bicep

In about 50 minutes?

i know right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA

i am in a weird-ass software dev workshop and it is passing me by

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_CezSYzAS5Ms/TIGsRHpnESI/AAAAAAAACMM/aRj7yQcEyRU/s400/DSC09423.jpg

...wait for it...

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

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/

motherfucker u been holding out on us

hi

teleportation is the headline

but rly is this Dutch thing gonna be abt information processing and transmission, sounds huge

link?

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/sectors/technology/beam-me-up-scientists-say-human-teleportation-is-possible-1.1815010

hmm. odd article. fairly well understood theoretically, looks like a valuable but incremental practical advance.

that's just the spin put on it

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_of_Parsonstown

i was here today it looks like this '_'

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152245376168772&l=e2f516ca33

posting from fb so im assuming that wont work but anyway

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152245376168772&l=e2f516ca33

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".

Nautilus seem to have a knack of making ropey premises seem credible, starting to think that is their MO.

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

planEts, sry

woah

"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."

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.

oh some crazy moon has an ocean under its surface, wait so does our planet.

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.

is it possible that the molecules in a liquid can remain static

like if u had liquid in a container with no gravity acting on it and heat/pressure was consistent would it still be moving

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

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".

it is a great "i want to read one book, 200 pages please" recommendation

martin rees's dad was our family GP when I was a kid -- he looked like the mekon, except tall