politico--2019-07-26--Clinics exiting family planning program may have to destroy contraceptives

Health clinics that quit the federal family planning program over new Trump administration anti-abortion rules may have to destroy or return tens of thousands of dollars of contraceptives and other medications.  Federal health officials confirmed to POLITICO that clinics might need to get rid of drugs, intrauterine devices and other treatments they bought at a discount while part of the Title X program, a long-standing requirement that's catching some providers by surprise as they weigh whether to comply with new rules that, among other things, forbid abortion referrals.  Many clinics are considering leaving Title X although they have a few more weeks to decide and are watching to see whether the courts halt or delay the rules.  Maine Family Planning, a network serving over 23,000 low-income patients and the only Title X grantee in the state, was one of the first in the country to announce it would withdraw from the program because of the new Trump rules. As a result, they may have to dispose of $80,000 to $100,000 worth of drugs, according to George Hill, the nonprofit’s president and CEO. “We can’t recycle it, we can’t donate it, there are very strict rules surrounding the transfer of drugs," he said.  Hill originally said the nonprofit had to dispose of contraceptive supplies by the end of this month, but after this article was published the organization clarified that the actual date is still to be determined.  Title X clinics are eligible for a separate federal program known as 340B that allows health facilities serving low-income patients to purchase discounted drugs and devices. About 3,002 family planning clinic locations get discounts from manufacturers.  Clinic operators say they may have to return or destroy IUDs, hormonal patches, NuvaRings and birth control pills if they leave the federal family planning program. And since Title X also serves people who want to become pregnant, stocks of hormone treatments might have to be tossed as well.  The amount of discarded products could vary widely, since some facilities serve hundreds of thousands of patients every year and are constantly restocking.  The fate of those clinics' drugs hinges on consultations with the Health Resources and Services Administration, the federal agency that administers the 340B program.  Some providers that are part of Title X may be able to keep some of the discounted medications if they're also designated under 340B in other ways, such as by being federally qualified health centers or sexually transmitted disease clinics, according to an agency spokesperson.  But clinics lacking those certifications that leave the family planning program can't keep the cheaper drugs or transfer them to other facilities, according to the discount drug program's guidelines. The products must be “returned” to the wholesaler or drug manufacturer or destroyed following specific state laws for drug disposal. In some cases, clinics might be able to get a partial refund, according to the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association.  There isn’t a firm timeline for getting rid of the medications, but an HRSA spokesperson said it should be done “as soon as possible” and that facilities can’t dispense the cheaper drugs to patients once they no longer qualify for 340B.  Providers with “extenuating circumstances” can ask HRSA for “possible alternatives to this approach." Hill of Maine Family Planning says his nonprofit is now checking if other arrangements can be made.  The Illinois Department of Public Health is the only other grantee so far to confirm it’s quitting Title X, and a department spokesperson told POLITICO that state officials are evaluating options and that “ensuring that patients have access to comprehensive reproductive health care in Illinois, including birth control and other drugs” is a priority.  The Oregon Health Authority, the only Title X grantee in the state, told clinics that it stopped using the federal program's funds but is still a grantee. In an advisory sent to providers on Wednesday, it cautioned against purchasing additional supplies under the Title X-340B designation, encouraging clinics to begin buying drugs under other 340B designations, such as an STD clinic or a health center “whenever possible.” The state says it's “considering next steps” in light of HHS' recent guidance on overhauling Title X and is leading a multi-state lawsuit to halt the policy changes.  Some clinics contacted by POLITICO were unaware they may have to discard drugs and devices if they exit the program. Others, like the Boulder Valley Women’s Health Center, which is leaving Colorado’s Title X network, think they will be able to hold onto their current stocks since they remain part of the different federal program aimed at eradicating sexually transmitted infections.  “There’s a lot of confusion around this, and it’s hurting the very people meant to be served by the Title X program, who have the least access to care to start with,” said Lisa Radelet, the communications director of Boulder Valley Women’s Health Center. “There's not clear guidance coming out from HHS, only very vague rumors and hearsay.”  The procedures for leaving Title X are contained in grant agreements and outlined when clinics ask about the protocol for withdrawing, according to Mia Heck, an HHS director of external affairs. Once an organization formally withdraws, its grant officers will give guidance on how to do so, including steps related to discounted drugs, she wrote in an email.  It’s possible more providers will soon face this dilemma. The Trump administration recently announced that they’re giving federally funded clinics two extra months to comply with its new rules, which are the object of multiple court challenges.  Though the new Title X rules took effect July 15, HHS announced last week that clinics have until Aug. 19 to submit an “action plan” detailing how they plan to come into compliance, then have until Sept. 18 to follow most major provisions.  Many providers that oppose the rules haven't decided whether to leave, wagering the administration's policy change will be frozen in court before the new enforcement deadline. Planned Parenthood, which currently serves about 40 percent of the approximately 4 million patients in Title X, is using its own emergency funds in lieu of federal dollars, but hasn’t formally quit.  “Most entities are trying to hold on as long as possible to see how things shake out from a legal perspective,” said Audrey Sandusky, the spokesperson for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association.  Still, the clinics leaving the program insist that even the potential hardships of quitting Title X are preferable to living under the new rules.  “We were the first abortion clinic in the state,” said Radelet, of the Boulder Valley Women’s Health Center, which is giving up half a million dollars of funding. “There is no way we would stop referring for or providing abortions."

aollstein@politico.com (Alice Miranda Ollstein)


theblaze--2019-04-08--California Democrats are one step closer to forcing college health clinics to provide abortion pill

California Democrats are one step closer to forcing college health clinics to provide 'abortion pills'  At least 22 women have died from the abortion medication


thedailyrecord--2019-01-13--Unions vow to sue NHS if more porters injured while handling hazardous clinical waste

Unions have vowed to sue the NHS if more porters are injured handling hazardous clinical waste.  The Sunday Mail has obtained pictures of the material porters are handling – including a six-inch needle said to have burst from a bag injuring one of the men last week.  Staff at Raigmore hospital in Inverness claim they have been forced “under duress” to deal with bags of used swabs and syringes following the collapse of waste firm Healthcare Environmental Services.  The work is still being carried out by porters despite their union’s plea for it to stop.  We told last month how a worker had suffered a needle injury moving piles of the waste.  The GMB union confirmed four men out of a team of 14 porters had now sustained injuries.  Liz Gordon, GMB regional organiser, said: “If members continue to do this work, and any are injured, we will take legal action against NHS Highland.  “The NHS have made no attempt to put any further safeguarding measures in place.”  An NHS Highland spokeswoman said: “As part of our normal procedures, the health board are investigating these incidents to find out how these events have occurred and we will take any necessary action to prevent any further incidents from happening.  “We, like the union, regard the safety of our employees as paramount.  “That is why the whole process has been risk assessed and safe systems of work identified.  “Where appropriate, protective equipment has been issued and made available to our porters.  “NHS Highland believe that those processes when followed should ensure nobody is at risk.  “We are due to meet with the union next week to address their concerns.”


theguardianuk--2019-03-12--New Zealand doctors move clinics outside in bid to stop measles spread

New Zealand doctors move clinics outside in bid to stop measles' spread

Doctors are treating unimmunised New Zealanders in carparks and outdoor areas in an attempt to reduce the spread of measles, as the number of confirmed cases of the contagious disease rose to 25.  A severe measles outbreak, described as the worst “in years” continues to spread in the Canterbury region of the South Island, with health authorities saying 100,000 people need to be urgently vaccinated, and more cases of the highly infectious illness are expected in the coming days and weeks.  As a result, doctors have moved their clinics outside, to reduce the chance of the disease spreading in confined surgeries and waiting rooms.  Vaccine supplies have run out in the affected region and tens of thousands of extra supplies are being flown in from around the country, as doctors use their last stocks to vaccinate those most in need of protection, including young babies and those with other health issues.  “It can now be assumed that measles is circulating widely in our community,” said Dr Ramon Pink, Canterbury medical officer of health.  The minister of health, Dr David Clarke, said government health officials were “closely monitoring” the situation in Canterbury to try and prevent the disease spreading to other parts of the country.  Government health representatives were on the ground in Christchurch, and would have an update on Wednesday regarding the latest steps that are being taken to isolate the outbreak, and ensure it doesn’t spread beyond Canterbury’s borders.  People who were born before 1969 or have had two shots of the MMR vaccinations are considered “fully protected” Pink said, but those aged between 29 and 50 who have only had one measles vaccination are not considered immune, and will require an additional shot.  New Zealand, like many other countries, is seeing a resurgence of measles, following scepticism from growing sectors of the population that the MMR vaccination can cause autism – a belief that has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked by global health experts, including the World Health Organisation.  “The resurgence of measles is of serious concern, with extended outbreaks occurring across regions, and particularly in countries that had achieved, or were close to achieving measles elimination,” said Dr Soumya Swaminathan, the deputy director general for programs at the WHO.  “Without urgent efforts to increase vaccination coverage and identify populations with unacceptable levels of under- or unimmunised children, we risk losing decades of progress in protecting children and communities against this devastating, but entirely preventable disease.”


theguardianuk--2019-06-25--Child gambling is a form of self-harm its too complex for a quick-fix clinic Anouchka Grose

Child gambling is a form of self-harm – it’s too complex for a quick-fix clinic | Anouchka Grose

Almost half a million children in England and Wales are [gambling regularly](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/30/half-million- children-gamble-every-week-uk-gambling-commission-report), with about 55,000 estimated to have a serious problem. Suicide rates for gambling addicts are high, and gambling-related problems cause stress for individuals and families. In response, the [NHS has opened its first children’s gambling clinic](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jun/24/nhs-to-open-first- ever-gambling-clinic-for-children), offering face-to-face treatment – mostly cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).  Out-of-control gambling is linked to complex individual and social problems – including stress, anxiety and other mental health issues such as bipolar disorder. CBT attempts to tackle the behaviour by dismantling some of the common beliefs and attitudes around it. Gamblers may be encouraged to set themselves realistic limits, fulfil their financial obligations before spending on betting, and to think of gambling as a form of entertainment as opposed to a means of making money.  It’s all very sensible, and is surely a helpful starting point. But it fails to address the unscrupulousness of an industry that targets children by normalising risky practices, couching bets in kid-friendly video games or the deeper mental processes that might lead a person to take serious risks with their own or their family’s money and possessions.  Of course not everyone who gambles has a problem – gambling covers everything from buying a lottery ticket to risking your house in a game of roulette. Betting on anything from tennis to future Tory leaders may be seen as socially acceptable (although many religions take a dim view of any kind of betting). Problems start when gambling comes to fulfil an emotional need, or to buffer certain forms of psychic suffering.  In a sense, it often follows the same logic as physical self-harm. A sense of unbearable, free-floating anxiety may be funnelled through a self-destructive activity that converts a feeling that’s difficult to process into a palpable act. An unnameable worry becomes a nameable one – a loss or a cut.  [Children](https://www.theguardian.com/society/children) and adolescents tend to be very much engaged in the tricky business of working out what to do with difficult feelings. Crying and screaming are, one expects, gradually being weeded out in favour of behaviours more conducive to peaceful coexistence. This tends not to be a smooth process. At the same time as trying to contain emotions, young people are also in the process of separating from carers, gradually teetering towards independence. Less socially acceptable feelings, such as anger, aggression and envy – not to mention all the sexual stuff – need to be dealt with, and the means might not always be obvious. And all this may be happening in a context of difficulties at school, at home, with friends, in the wider world.  It’s hardly surprising that dangerous activities that can be enacted furtively might promise to ameliorate the problem. Like cutting, gambling can be an attack, albeit one that may never be felt by the person it’s ultimately aimed at. It can be a manifestation of anger, panic or frustration turned inwards as it seems to have nowhere else acceptable to go.  Given all this, it’s tragic and horrifying to think that there is an industry built around exploiting the situation. In an effort to make sure people keep gambling, IT consultants and psychologists are hard at work trying to understand what makes them stop playing games and turn away from their screens. The gaming industries become ever more sophisticated at reeling people in and keeping them there, inventing ever more unputdownable technologies to ensure an endless stream of funds. Like junk food, cigarettes, and every other offering that promises pleasure and delivers harm, the gambling industry sends its roots into the cracks in human beings and sucks out whatever it can.  It’s great that the NHS recognises the scale of the problem but there’s still the question of how best to respond to it. While it may simply be helpful to offer people a space in which their difficulties will be heard, named and responded to, you might also wonder whether quick, commonsense-based practices such as CBT are up to the job. As the [Royal College of Psychiatrists’ web page on gambling treatments](https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mental-health/problems- disorders/problem-gambling#faq-accoridon-collapse5830b253-9ace-4853-a51f- dd89218c9a05) says in response to the question of how CBT compares with other treatments: “We don’t know yet – there have not been enough large studies to be clear about this.”  It seems to be yet another iteration of the classic contemporary conundrum. Society offers you “cures” – empty satisfactions that soon become symptoms – then offers you simplistic treatments to cure you of those failed cures. Children with gambling problems are no doubt attempting to buffer some of the devastating difficulties of growing up, and while it’s great that they have a space to speak about it, it will surely take more than a few words of general wisdom to remove them from the grip of an addiction whose business it is to make sure that they keep coughing up.  • Anouchka Grose is a psychoanalyst and author  • In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at [www.befrienders.org](https://www.befrienders.org/)


wnd--2019-12-17--136 abortion clinics shut down in last 5 years

At least 136 independent abortion clinics across the nation have been closed since 2014, according to a pro-abortion group.  The Abortion Care Network lamented that since 2010, more than 400 state laws have made operating abortion clinics too expensive or logistically impossible, PJ Media reported.  The group's executive director, Nikki Madsen, told CBS News that "anti-abortion politicians have long used onerous restrictions to try and shut down independent abortion providers."  TRENDING: MSNBC cameraman spins in circles as woman accusing network of lies keeps crashing live shot  PJ Media noted that the 136 independent abortion clinics that closed are unaffiliated with Planned Parenthood.  A report released in November 2018 by the Abortion Care Network said independent abortion facilities conduct 60% of all abortions in the U.S., while Planned Parenthood facilities account for about 35%.  The findings are broadly consistent with a January 2019 report from the pro-life group Operation Rescue that found 40 clinics had shut down in 2018.  Operation Rescue said a total of 697 abortion clinics in the U.S. were in operation by the end of 2018, about 150 fewer than the 844 clinics reported in 2009.  "This represents a massive 79 percent decrease in the number of surgical abortion facilities over the past 27 years," Operation Rescue said.  Six states have only one abortion clinic remaining.  Nearly 90 percent of counties in the United States had no abortion clinic as of 2017, according to a Guttmacher report.  CBN News reported in September a report by Jessica Arons on the American Civil Liberties Union website said abortion clinics could disappear without the Supreme Court touching Roe v. Wade, largely due to the state regulations and restrictions.  She said that state regulations requiring higher safety standards have had the biggest impact.  Such laws require abortion providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals or require clinics to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers.


bbc--2019-01-09--South African maths whizz answers complex arithmetic questions in seconds

South African ten-year-old Sibahle Zwane is a maths whizz who has gained fame on social media by doing incredible arithmetic challenges.  He first gained fame when he was filmed answering complex maths questions from a local policeman.  The BBC's Pumza Fihlani went to see if his skills lived up to the hype.


bbcuk--2019-06-18--Further maths A-level paper replaced following leak

A further maths A-level paper due to be sat by about 7,000 candidates on Thursday has been replaced following the leak of an earlier exam last week.  Two questions from the Edexcel maths A-level paper were shared on social ahead of it being sat on Friday.  Pearson, the exam board's parent company, says it is replacing the latest paper and an unnamed centre is being investigated for the leak.  It described the move as "precautionary steps" to protect students.  Pearson said their investigation had revealed a package containing the further maths paper had been opened by an individual at the centre concerned.  According to the company, there is no evidence to suggest the withdrawn test or any of its questions have been leaked but it is taking "precautionary steps" to safeguard the exam for the students.  Sharon Hague, senior vice-president, schools for Pearson, said: "We have reached out to all of our centres directly to inform them of this decision.  "We will continue to support and communicate with them through this unusual yet necessary step that is vital for the safeguarding of confidence in the examination system and to ensure fairness for all learners.  "Our message to students is not to worry about this and focus on your revision as you normally would."  Arrangements are being made to deliver the new further maths paper to all centres shortly before Thursday's exam - with the exception of the one being investigated.  For this centre, separate arrangements are being made to ensure its students can complete their exams.  In a video message to students, teachers and parents, Ms Hague said it was necessary for everyone involved in the exam system to work together.  "We are reliant on the collaboration and trust of everyone involved in the exam system - and when someone commits malpractice, they let everyone down," she said.  She said the "serious security breach" last Thursday had been referred to the police, who had been asked to investigate it as a criminal matter.  Ms Hague added there were various ways to ensure fair outcomes from last week's A-level maths exam, including the option to exclude the two leaked questions from the final calculation.  Earlier this year, Pearson said it would be trialling a scheme where microchips were placed in exam packs to track the date, time and location of the bundles.


drudgereport--2019-12-14--Fuzzy Math Makes American Companies Look More Creditworthy...

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Imagine walking into a bank to borrow money. The loan officer might ask for your pay stubs and tax returns to prove your income, as well as for information about your de...


eveningstandard--2019-06-14--A-Level maths exam paper leaked online sparking investigation

An investigation has been launched after questions from an A-Level exam paper were leaked online.  Two questions, apparently from Edexcel’s A-Level Maths Paper 3, were shared on social media on Thursday evening ahead of Friday’s exam, sparking fury among students and parents.  Some claimed students had access to the whole exam before taking it.  Edexcel A-Level maths papers have previously been leaked in 2017 and 2018.  Pearson, the firm which operates the board, said it was “investigating the source” of the leak.  One parent said on Twitter: “Unacceptable situation with today’s maths paper... as a parent I am appalled.”  Another person said: “It's disgusting and makes a mockery of all the hard work thousands of students have put in."  "This situation is unfair and demoralising and damaging for Year 13 students who will now spend the summer worrying if they have got their grades for University," added another.  Pearson said in a statement: “We are aware that an individual circulated blacked out images of two exam questions on social media ahead of today’s A-Level maths exam. We are investigating the source of this.  “All students should be reassured we have well-established processes in place to ensure no-one will be advantaged or disadvantaged, and this paper will not have to be resat.”


fortune--2019-12-23--This Fashion Institute of Technology Photographer Finds Art in Mathematicians’ Chalkboards

Electric Truck Maker Rivian Just Raised $1.3 Billion. Here’s What You Should Know


fusion--2019-05-28--Guillermo del Toro helps Mexican math students go to South Africa

Oscar-winning film director, Guillermo del Toro, opened his wallet to help fund a trip to South Africa for a group of talented Mexican school kids who will represent their country at the ‘South Africa Math Olympiad,’ one the most important math competitions in the world.


fusion--2019-07-22--Mexican students bring home medals from UK math competition

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro helped Mexico’s national mathematics team travel to the United Kingdom, where they won four medals at the 60th annual International Mathematics Olympiad. Azul Alvarez has the story of this once-in-a-lifetime trip for one group of students.


instapundit--2019-03-01--HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE UC campuses are requiring math professor applicants to provide

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:      UC campuses are requiring math professor applicants to provide …

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UC campuses are requiring math professor applicants to provide diversity statements. Both former and current academics have said that such requirements ‘trivialize’ diversity. Also, math.


instapundit--2019-06-20--IN THE MAIL Lost in Math How Beauty Leads Physics Astray Plus browse todays Lightning Deals

IN THE MAIL:  Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.  Plus, browse today’s Lightning Deals…

Plus, browse today’s Lightning Deals and Deals of the Day.  IN THE MAIL: Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.  InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com


instapundit--2019-10-03--JUST THINK OF WOKE AS A SYNONYM FOR IDIOTIC AND YOU WONT GO FAR WRONG Woke Math in Seattle

JUST THINK OF “WOKE” AS A SYNONYM FOR “IDIOTIC” AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG:  Woke Math in Seattle.  …

JUST THINK OF “WOKE” AS A SYNONYM FOR “IDIOTIC” AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Woke Math in Seattle. “The young people who are going to learn real math are those whose parents can afford to put them in private schools. The public school kids of all races are going to get dumber and dumber … and this is going to compel the wokesters in charge of Human Resources at institutions along life’s way to demand changing standards to fit political goals. Eventually, bridges are going to start falling down. That too will be the fault of Whiteness.”  Or we could quit letting them get away with this crap.


instapundit--2019-10-13--SCIENCE:  Bees get better at math when they’re punished for mistakes….

SCIENCE: Bees get better at math when they’re punished for mistakes.


ipolitics--2019-08-28--Ontario to spend 55 million on math education this year before slashing math curriculum

Ontario to spend $55 million on math education this year, before slashing math curriculum

Ontario will spend more than $55 million this year hiring math learning leads for school boards, providing “extensive” training in elementary and secondary schools, and expanding other programs like tutoring — despite the fact the provincial math curriculum is set to face the chopping block the spring.  Education Minister Stephen Lecce addressed the press at Queen’s Park on Wednesday to announce a four-year math strategy. His remarks came shortly after the release of results from this year’s EQAO standardized testing, which indicated in particular a decline in English-speaking Grade 3 students meeting provincial math standards. Fewer than half of Grade 6 students — 48 per cent — met the standard.  The provincial government has blamed a curriculum known as ‘discovery math’ for declines in EQAO scores, announcing their intentions to return to “basics” in math education. Premier Doug Ford campaigned on scrapping the discovery math teaching plan, but his government’s revamped curriculum — which Lecce described on Wednesday as a “dramatic” overhaul — is not expected to be announced until the spring, and won’t be implemented in classrooms until September 2020.  “In year two … we’ll look at making sure there’s an alignment with the new curriculum,” Lecce said, when asked by a reporter why $55 million was being spent this coming year on a system that he said didn’t work.  “You can provide more tools, you can provide more summer learning, you can provide greater access to tutoring, you can provide leaders in math,” Lecce continued. “We’re doing all that while concurrently revamping the curriculum. We think those are prudent things. I don’t think we can wait.”  Research shared by the EQAO office on Wednesday showed that Ontario’s students in Grades 3 and 6 have stronger basic knowledge of fundamental math than ability to apply it. Lecce was asked by reporters why the government would push ahead with a ‘back to basics’ curriculum if the issue lay outside the fundamentals. In response, Lecce again pointed to the decline in EQAO results since discovery math was implemented. “It’s not working for students,” he said.  Lecce was unable to answer questions about how the standardized test results correlated to students’ grades within the province, and whether students were failing to reach standards on their report cards in the same quantity as the number failing in their EQAO tests. “That is a fair question. I’m not in the best position to answer it,” he said, adding that there was a “continual decline” in broader grades.  READ MORE: Federal Ontario ministers set to slam Ford’s first budget  The EQAO results Wednesday also showed a marked difference between French and English-speaking students, with 82 per cent of French-speaking students in Grade 6 meeting the provincial math standard versus just 48 per cent of English students in the same age group. “Look, the French system is doing great work in how they are keeping those numbers up and how they’re encouraging young students in the province, Grade 3 and 6 and beyond, to learn numeracy,” Lecce said.  There has been a shortage of French-speaking teachers in Ontario, he affirmed, saying it was a “fair point” when a reporter asked whether the government’s mandatory math proficiency tests for new teachers could exacerbate the problem.  The details of the proficiency testing, which will begin in March, were revealed in a memo sent out last week. At least 70 per cent of the assessment will be based on math content, with the rest focused on how to teach it. The plan has been criticized by teachers’ unions, with Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario president Sam Hammond claiming the test won’t, in fact, increase math outcomes for students.  “The new test will focus on both elementary and secondary concepts. This is a problem as instructional practices vary widely between the panels and the content is widely different — expecting a kindergarten teacher to have a firm grasp of calculus makes no sense,” he wrote in a statement shared with iPolitics. “This government has yet to address the education funding formula which is short-changing students, schools and educators in terms of support and resources.”  His comments come the same week that Ontario’s largest school board released an update on the implementation of certain cut-back decisions it made in June, responding to the provincial budget that included a substantial slash to its funding. In a document prepared for Toronto District School Board members, board staff describe having to cut to the equivalent of nearly 300 positions through layoffs or attrition. The board has linked the change in part to a structural deficit of $25.7 million, but largely blamed it on $42.1 million cut from its provincial funding.  Lecce said many of the jobs cited in the TDSB report were part of a two-year agreement negotiated by the former government, the continuation of which was being negotiated between the government and teachers’ unions. “It is a matter that’s being discussed at the table, and that’s the best place for it,” Lecce said.  Opposition parties have taken aim at the Ford government’s actions around math learning this week, with NDP education critic Marit Stiles calling for an end to what she called “outdated, old-fashioned and ineffective standardized testing,” and Ontario Green Party leader Mike Schreiner deeming the government’s remarks about the math scores a “distraction” from issues like the sex-ed curriculum reform.  “If the Conservatives were truly concerned about giving students the fundamentals, they would not have replaced in-class instruction with online learning or threatened to raise class sizes,” he said.


mercurynews--2019-04-18--Letter Students need more math to compete in 21st century

Letter: Students need more math to compete in 21st century

Most people agree that our children are falling behind the rest of the world, especially in the STEM subject areas. How can anyone disagree with adding a fourth year of math?  We need more math education, not less. The article notes: “The extra year-long course could be the traditional calculus or more practical alternatives such as statistics, computer science or personal finance, administrators say.” We need calculus, not personal finance.  The article also states: “But critics say they fear the possible harmful impact on underprepared students in low-income and high schools already struggling to find enough math teachers.” These are the students who need more help, so they will not be low-income forever.  Letter: Asylum-seekers welcome in Bay Area and needed in US Letter: Newsom needs to be taught a lesson on handling immigrants Letter: What parents before vaccine would’ve done to halt polio… Letter: California’s rich are not fleeing state due to taxes Letter: Medi-Cal covers new moms with this condition, then abruptly cancels them I believe society is cheating our students by not providing the education needed for them to compete in the 21st century. And it is not the students’ fault, it is many adults’ fault. Let’s have a fourth year of math ASAP.  Submit your letter to the editor via this form   Read more Letters to the Editor


newspunch--2019-12-04--Common Core: US Students Perform 4 Grade Levels Behind Chinese Students In Math

10 years after Barack Obama forced schools around the country to begin phasing in Common Core, American students are lagging far behind their counterparts from other nations.  According to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which analyzed 79 countries and economies, representing about 32 million 15-year-olds, American students are performing four grade levels behind Chinese students in the critical study of mathematics.  Here is what US parents, teachers, corporate leaders, legislators, and anyone else who cares about education and the future of our children and country must know — our US scores show that our education system, dominated by Obama’s Common Core, is failing our youth.  We are not keeping up with our global counterparts, and risk falling far behind in a world that is becoming increasingly interconnected and competitive.  The situation in the US education system has become so dire that even “disadvantaged students” in China and other countries are performing better than the average American student.  “The 10% most disadvantaged students in Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang (B-S-J-Z) or in Macao or Estonia… those students actually do as well or better than the average student in the US.“  Parents and teachers across the nation are now urging schools to dump the toxic Common Core curriculum, arguing that it deliberately dumbs down children and creates unnecessary and complicated methods for working out relatively simple problems.  Students are recording results lower than previously thought possible, and frustrated teachers are warning that “if we do nothing” about Common Core the results “will keep on declining.”  Since Common Core was fully phased in nationwide, student test scores in the United States have dropped for the third time in a row on the nation’s broadest and most respected test.  The drop is a sudden reversal of the upward trend that was experienced between 1990 and 2015.  The class of 2019 is the first to experience all four high school years under Common Core, and unsurprisingly it has come out as the “worst-prepared for college” in 15 years, according to a new report.  The latest results were released last month and show that American students slid yet again on nearly every measure.  Declaring Obama’s Common Core to be “worst large-scale educational failure in 40 years,” a recent study examined the effects of Common Core on school choice and found the program has “blunted the innovation, dynamism, and competition” while also producing the worst math scores in generations.  It’s going to take a lot more than acknowledging Common Core’s failure to make up for the years of classroom chaos that the Bill Gates/Barack Obama curriculum inflicted on many teachers and students without their consent.  A direct apology and a promise to stay away from our kids and their education in the future would be a start.


newyorkpost--2019-01-16--Joey Fatone gets schooled on basic math

Joey Fatone gets schooled on basic math

1:45  ### 'Made in Staten Island' mom gets schooled in slang  Former “Mob Wives” star Karen Gravano and daughter Karina Seabrook sat down with Page Six to dish on their new MTV show “Made in Staten Island.” Nineteen- year-old Karina isn’t sure how cool Mom is, so she tested her text slang knowledge. The show airs on MTV Mondays at 10/9c.  1:08  ### Lance Bass’ dream reunion tour is NSYNC and the Spice Girls  Lance Bass sat down with Page Six to talk about his reunion tour dream team: NSYNC and the Spice Girls! Bass also shared some revealing 'NSYNC group texts.  1:10  ### Diane Lane gets nostalgic about her taxicab-driving dad  “House of Cards” actress Diane Lane was born in NYC, where her father drove a taxi. She shares her fond memories and special New York moments she spent riding along in her dad’s cab as a child. She still looks for his cab number today and even FaceTimed with the driver when her daughter serendipitously got in it recently.  2:06  ### ‘Counterpart’ star Betty Gabriel’s most stylish red carpet looks  Betty Gabriel is an actress to watch on the red carpet. She sat down with Page Six to dish about her unique fashion sense, the designers she loves and that scandalous Oscars dress. She stars in "Counterpart" Season 2 on Starz.  1:39  ### Aidan Gillen conjured a deceased actor during his darkest hour  Aidan Gillen made a career playing villainous characters. But the "Game of Thrones" actor is now transitioning away from the bad guy in his new drama, "Project Blue Book." Gillen sat down with Page Six to talk about the History series, as well as the time he called upon a deceased actor to get through tough times. "Project Blue Book" airs Jan. 8, 2019, on History.  3:33  ### All this ‘Real Housewife’ wants for Christmas is a Barbie Dreamhouse  A bouncy ball for Christmas? That’s what one actor got as a kid and he’s mad as hell. Page Six asked celebrities to share their childhood gift disappointments. “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” star Melissa Gorga wanted a Barbie Dream House and never got it. Valentina from “RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars” wanted a mermaid Barbie. There’s still time to fulfill these wishes, Santa!  2:21  ### Every celeb wants to kiss Bradley Cooper this Christmas  What do Thom Filicia, an ex-bachelorette and a New Jersey housewife have in common? They all really want to kiss Bradley Cooper under the mistletoe. Find out whom the stars are crushing on this holiday season and who loves a certain “Game of Thrones” hunk.  1:17  ### 'RHONJ' star Danielle Staub shares her biggest splurges  Stars came to Barneys New York to celebrate the launch of Page Six Style and shared some of their style secrets. "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" cast members Danielle Staub, Melissa Gorga, Margaret Josephs and Jackie Goldschneider revealed their biggest splurges. Dr. Oz and Jordin Sparks were among the fabulous guests at the event.  2:26  ### 'RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars 4' caption their naughty Instagram photos  "RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars 4" cast members Valentina, Naomi Smalls and Farrah Moan sat down with Page Six to re-caption some of their favorite and naughtiest Instagram photos. Watch the girls throw some shade and get down and dirty with their sexy posts. The new season premieres Fridays at 8/7c on VH1.  1:51  ### Nev Schulman explains how to avoid being 'Catfished'  “Catfish” is back for Season 7 on MTV. Creator Nev Schulman has been helping people reveal the truth about whom they are really meeting online. He stopped by Page Six to share his tips on what to look for when talking to potential dates.


newyorkpost--2019-07-03--Half of public school kids in Bronx District 9 fail state math test

An entire Bronx charter-school class in the nation’s poorest congressional...


sottnet--2019-01-03--North Carolina to scrap standard math exam for licencing teachers after thousands fail it

Thousands of aspiring teachers coming out of North Carolina's education colleges can't pass a high school level math licensing exam, so state officials may scrap it to lower the bar.The state Board of Education learned in August that 2,400 elementary and special education teachers have flunked the math portion of the state license exam, which was created by the education company Pearson. Then last week, research presented to the state's Professional Educator Preparation and Standards Commission showed new teachers who passed the math exam on the first try did not perform significantly better in evaluations than those who had to retake it.The Charlotte Observer reports:The standards commission includes teachers, administrators and representatives from colleges of education - those most impacted by the situation. Teachers are complaining because the $139 tests get expensive when they have to repeatedly retake them, while others allege it could ultimately cost them a career they're otherwise well-suited for."It's not an indicator of an effective teacher," said Cabarrus County Schools Assistant Superintendent Glenda Jones, a member of the commission. "It is a barrier to licensure and that trickles down to being vacancies in the classroom and a teacher shortage.""We've got teachers who are taking that same Pearson (math exam) over and over and over and are not passing, and the cost's coming out of their pockets at $35,000 a year for a beginning teacher," she said.Robin Hiatt, a commission member and teacher in Johnson County Schools, said some educators spend hundreds of dollars to secure their credentials."Right now I've got a kindergarten teacher who has spent $600 of her money on taking the test and test-prep programs," Haitt said.The panel voted to replace the math exam with a "Praxis" math test develop by the nonprofit ETS.The recommendations were forwarded to the state Board of Education for potential action next month.In August, the Observer reported that before the state switched to the Pearson math test in 2014, pass rates for the test "hovered around 85 percent or higher."States including Florida and Indiana are dealing with a similar trend.Instead of considering ways colleges can better educate future teachers to pass the tests, the focus thus far has remained mostly on whether the Pearson test is to rigorous.The Observer reports "Concern about the validity of the Pearson licensing exams is so pervasive that it was discussed at this year's National Education Association (teachers union) conference, said North Carolina Association of Educators President Mark Jewell."Pearson, meanwhile, has defended the math exam, pointing out that states set their own standards.," spokesman Scott Overland wrote in a statement. "Pearson does not place any artificial barriers in the way of candidate success and only considers test scores as criteria for passage."


sottnet--2019-01-20--Eugene Wigners scientific treason The connection between physics and math is a miracle

Eugene Wigner's scientific treason: The connection between physics and math is a miracle

We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.


sottnet--2019-03-18--The statistical mathematics that tells a cell what it is

From Wires Under Oceans to Neurons in the Brain  During development, cells seem to decode their fate through optimal information processing, which could hint at a more general principle of life.In 1891, when the German biologist Hans Driesch split two-cell sea urchin embryos in half, he found that each of the separated cells then gave rise to its own complete, albeit smaller, larva. Somehow, the halves "knew" to change their entire developmental program: At that stage, the blueprint for what they would become had apparently not yet been drawn out, at least not in ink.Since then, scientists have been trying to understand what goes into making this blueprint, and how instructive it is. (Driesch himself, frustrated at his inability to come up with a solution, threw up his hands and left the field entirely.) It's now known that some form of positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. But the signals carrying that information seem to fluctuate wildly and chaotically - the opposite of what you might expect for an important guiding influence."The [embryo] is a noisy environment," said Robert Brewster, a systems biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. "But somehow it comes together to give you a reproducible, crisp body plan."The same precision and reproducibility emerge from a sea of noise again and again in a range of cellular processes. That mounting evidence is leading some biologists to a bold hypothesis:Questions about optimal decoding, according to Aleksandra Walczak, a biophysicist at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, "are everywhere in biology."Biologists haven't traditionally cast analyses of living systems as optimization problems because the complexity of those systems makes them hard to quantify, and because it can be difficult to discern what would be getting optimized. Moreover, while evolutionary theory suggests that evolving systems can improve over time, nothing guarantees that they should be driven to an optimal level.Yet when researchers have been able to appropriately determine what cells are doing, many have been surprised to see clear indications of optimization. Hints have turned up in how the brain responds to external stimuli and how microbes respond to chemicals in their environments. Now some of the best evidence has emerged from a new study of fly larva development, reported recently in Cell.For decades, scientists have been studying fruit fly larvae for clues about how development unfolds. Some details became apparent early on: A cascade of genetic signals establishes a pattern along the larva's head-to-tail axis. Signaling molecules called morphogens then diffuse through the embryonic tissues, eventually defining the formation of body parts.Particularly important in the fly are four "gap" genes, which are expressed separately in broad, overlapping domains along the axis. The proteins they make in turn help regulate the expression of "pair-rule" genes, which create an extremely precise, periodic striped pattern along the embryo. The stripes establish the groundwork for the later division of the body into segments.(Full study here: Development 2002 129:4399-4409) How cells make sense of these diffusion gradients has always been a mystery. The widespread assumption was that after being pointed in roughly the right direction (so to speak) by the protein levels, cells would continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments as development proceeded, locking in on their planned identity relatively late. That model harks back to the "developmental landscape" proposed by Conrad Waddington in 1956. He likened the process of a cell homing in on its fate to a ball rolling down a series of ever-steepening valleys and forked paths. Cells had to acquire more and more information to refine their positional knowledge over time - as if zeroing in on where and what they were through "the 20 questions game," according to Jané Kondev, a physicist at Brandeis University.Such a system could be accident prone, however: Some cells would inevitably take the wrong paths and be unable to get back on track. In contrast, comparisons of fly embryos revealed that the placement of pair-rule stripes was incredibly precise, to within 1 percent of the embryo's length - that is, to single-cell accuracy.That prompted a group at Princeton University, led by the biophysicists Thomas Gregor and William Bialek, to suspect something else:And that's just what they found.Over the course of 12 years, they measured morphogen and gap-gene protein concentrations, cell by cell, from one embryo to the next, to determine how all four gap genes were most likely to be expressed at every position along the head-to-tail axis. From those probability distributions, they built a "dictionary," or decoder - an explicit map that could spit out a probabilistic estimate of a cell's position based on its gap-gene protein concentration levels.Around five years ago, the researchers - including Mariela Petkova, who started the measurement work as an undergraduate at Princeton (and is currently pursuing a doctorate in biophysics at Harvard University), and Gašper Tkačik, now at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria - determined this mapping by assuming it worked like what's known as an optimal Bayesian decoder (that is, the decoder used Bayes' rule for inferring the likelihood of an event from prior conditional probabilities). The Bayesian framework allowed them to flip the "unknowns," the conditions of probability: Their measurements of gap gene expression, given position, could be used to generate a "best guess" of position, given only gap gene expression.The team found that the fluctuations of the four gap genes could indeed be used to predict the locations of cells with single-cell precision. No less than maximal information about all four would do, however: When the activity of only two or three gap genes was provided, the decoder's location predictions were not nearly so accurate. Versions of the decoder that used less of the information from all four gap genes - that, for instance, responded only to whether each gene was on or off - made worse predictions, too.According to Walczak, "No one has ever measured or shown how well reading out the concentration of these molecular gradients ... actually pinpoints a specific position along the axis."Now they had: Even given the limited number of molecules and underlying noise of the system, the varying concentrations of the gap genes was sufficient to differentiate two neighboring cells in the head-to-tail axis - and the rest of the gene network seemed to be transmitting that information optimally."But the question always remained open: Does the biology actually care?" Gregor said. "Or is this just something that we measure?" Could the regulatory regions of DNA that responded to the gap genes really be wired up in such a way that they could decode the positional information those genes contained?The biophysicists teamed up with the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Eric Wieschaus to test whether the cells were actually making use of the information potentially at their disposal. They created mutant embryos by modifying the gradients of morphogens in the very young fly embryos, which in turn altered the expression patterns of the gap genes and ultimately caused pair-rule stripes to shift, disappear, get duplicated or have fuzzy edges. Even so, the researchers found that their decoder could predict the changes in mutated pair-rule expression with surprising accuracy. "They show that the map is broken in mutants, but in a way that the decoder predicts," Walczak said."You could imagine that if it was getting information from other sources, you couldn't trick [the cells] like that," Brewster added. "Your decoder would fail."These findings represent "a signpost," according to Kondev, who was not involved with the study."Through evolution, these cells have figured out how to implement Bayes' trick using regulatory DNA."How the cells do it remains a mystery. Right now, "the whole thing is kind of wonderful and magical," said John Reinitz, a systems biologist at the University of Chicago.Even so, the work provides a new way of thinking about early development, gene regulation and, perhaps, evolution in general.The findings provide a fresh perspective on Waddington's idea of a developmental landscape. According to Gregor, their work indicates that there's no need for 20 questions or a gradual refinement of knowledge after all. The landscape "is steep from the beginning," he said. All the information is already there."Natural selection [seems to be] pushing the system hard enough so that it ... reaches a point where the cells are performing at the limit of what physics allows," said Manuel Razo-Mejia, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology.It's possible that the high performance in this case is a fluke: Since fruit fly embryos develop very quickly, perhaps in their case "evolution has found this optimal solution because of that pressure to do everything very rapidly," said James Briscoe, a biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who did not participate in this study. To really cement whether this is something more general, then, researchers will have to test the decoder in other species, including those that develop more slowly.Even so, these results set up intriguing new questions to ask about the often-enigmatic regulatory elements. Scientists don't have a solid grasp of how regulatory DNA codes for the control of other genes' activities. The team's findings suggest that this involves an optimal Bayesian decoder, which allows the regulatory elements to respond to very subtle changes in combined gap gene expression.Kondev said." he added. "That's a question we could not have asked before this study.""That's really what this work sets up as the next challenge in the field," Briscoe said. Besides, there may be many ways of implementing such a decoder at the molecular level, meaning that this idea could apply to other systems as well. In fact, hints of it have been uncovered in the development of the neural tube in vertebrates, the precursor of their central nervous system - which would call for a very different underlying mechanism.Moreover, if these regulatory regions need to perform an optimal decoding function, that potentially limits how they can evolve - and in turn, how an entire organism can evolve. "We have this one example ... which is the life that evolved on this planet," Kondev said, and because of that, the important constraints on what life can be are unknown. Finding that cells show Bayesian behavior could be a hint that processing information effectively may be "a general principle that makes a bunch of atoms stuck together loosely behave like the thing that we think is life."But right now, it is still only a hint. Although it would be "kind of a physicist's dream," Gregor said, "we are far from really having proof for this."That goal later turned into a broader consideration of how to transmit information optimally through a channel. It wasn't much of a leap to apply this framework to the brain's sensory systems and how they measured, encoded and decoded inputs to produce a response.Now some experts are trying to think about all kinds of "sensory systems" in this way: Razo-Mejia, for instance, has studied how optimally bacteria sense and process chemicals in their environment, and how that might affect their fitness. Meanwhile, Walczak and her colleagues have been asking what a "good decoding strategy" might look like in the adaptive immune system, which has to recognize and respond to a massive repertoire of intruders."I don't think optimization is an aesthetic or philosophical idea. It's a very concrete idea," Bialek said. "Optimization principles have time and again pointed to interesting things to measure." Whether or not they are correct, he considers them productive to think about."Of course, the difficulty is that in many other systems, the property being decoded is more difficult than one-dimensional position [along the embryo's axis]," Walczak said. "The problem is harder to define."That's what made the system Bialek and his colleagues studied so tantalizing. "There aren't many examples in biology where a high-level idea, like information in this case, leads to a mathematical formula" that is then testable in experiments on living cells, Kondev said.It's this marriage of theory and experiment that excites Bialek. He hopes to see the approach continue to guide work in other contexts. "What's not clear," he said, "is whether the observation [of optimization] is a curiosity that arises in a few corners, or whether there's something general about it."If the latter does prove to be the case, "then that's very striking," Briscoe said. "The ability for evolution to find these really efficient ways of doing things would be an incredible finding."Kondev agreed. "As a physicist, you hope that the phenomenon of life is not just about the specific chemistry and DNA and molecules that make living things on planet Earth - that it's broader," he said. "What is that broader thing? I don't know. But maybe this is lifting a little bit of the veil off that mystery."Correction added on March 15: The text was updated to acknowledge the contributions of Mariela Petkova and Gašper Tkačik.


sottnet--2019-10-08--Seattle schools proposal wants to teach students math is oppressive against people of color - 'who g

Seattle schools proposal wants to teach students math is oppressive against people of color - 'who gets to say an answer's right?'

Two plus two may equal four, but if the student says five, you better not correct them, oppressor! Math, in Seattle schools, will become a social justice course. But that's not all. The U.S. government will be posited as a racist institution that must be destroyed. If this is taught to students, it's indoctrination at its most destructive.An Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee (ESAC), under the Seattle Public Schools Superintendent, published a preliminary Math Ethnic Studies framework document populated by district representatives thatThe framework, created by various statewide districts, tackles four themes, including Power and Oppression and History of Resistance and Liberation.At its core, the belief seems to be thatand, consequently, it "erases the historical contributions of people and communities of color."None of this has anything to do with the math you should learn in K-12; these are topics left for a progressive college course you'd likely see at Evergreen State College.The framework asks,It wonders, "Who gets to say if an answer is right?"Apparently, math is now subjective. Who are you to insist two plus two equals four? It goes on to ask "Who is Smart? Who is not Smart?" Answer: the person who says two plus two equals five is not yet smart and should be corrected, even if you think it oppresses them.The framework believes math is manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to persist. They ask, "Who is doing the oppressing?" I think the answer is supposed to be the white, cis-gendered, heterosexual Christian man.They ask,Ironically, if you subscribe to this social justice world view of math, and teach anyone that there's no such thing as correct answers, you will be doing immeasurable and, yes, oppressive, harm to students.These radical educators aren't just looking to redefine the study of math. They seem ready to use history courses to present an aggressively progressive worldview, using socialist activist Howard Zinn teachings to indoctrinate kids.The U.S. History Ethnic Studies Framework insists "the United States government was founded on racist intellectual premises and economic practices that institutionalized oppression of people of color that continues to the present day."They present mass incarceration as "the New Jim Crow" and want students to understand that Europeans brought the dominant worldview values of "guns, the bible, private property and social hierarchy, and racial supremacy."Reasonable people can certainly argue that history has been whitewashed and we'd all benefit from a more holistic approach to how contemporary society has been shaped. But this document of possible recommendations goes way beyond that. This would be teaching an ideological perspective; this isn't teaching history.The ESAC is made up of a number of educators and was created due to a legislature mandate to "advise, assist, and make recommendations to the office of the superintendent of public instruction regarding the identification of ethnic studies materials."The committee will meet throughout the next year in order to meet a September 1, 2020 deadline to offer up their final recommendations."The Committee thought it was important to review work that has already been done," Kate Payne, Director of Communications from the Superintendent's Office. "The materials posted to our ESAC webpage were created by school districts around our state, and the Committee intends to review them as they the work move forward.""In creating a state-level framework and recommended resources, we hope to provide guidance to districts implementing Ethnic Studies as part of their class offerings. Again, the Committee has not yet created any documents, nor have they made any recommendations. They are in the process of gathering information about current practices and deciding on the best course of action to ensure our students and educators receive appropriate support. This is an elective class offering, and there are no requirements that school districts offer Elective Studies courses at this time."


sputnik--2019-11-11--Myth Dispelled: Girls and Boys Possess Equal Math Aptitude, Research Shows

According to a study published in the journal, Science of Learning, there are no gender differences in math aptitude and brain functioning.  In a comprehensive study of the cerebral development of young boys and girls, the research team from Carnegie Mellon University concluded that children’s brains are similar regardless of their gender.  It was the first neuroimaging study conducted to evaluate biological gender differences in math aptitude for young children, where researchers compared scans to evaluate brain similarities.  The study also included the examination of brain maturity by comparing a child’s scan to that of an adult (63 adults; 25 women), who watched the same math video. The results showed boys' and girls' brain maturity was statistically equivalent in comparison to either men or women in the adult group.  Comparing the results of the “Early Mathematics Test”, a standardised test for three to eight-year-old children (97 children including 50 girls), the researchers said that math ability did not reflect a difference based on gender or with age.  A few days ago, a study also revealed that Indians have smaller brains, in size and width, and that their brains are much more similar to Chinese and Korean brain atlases.


sputnik--2019-12-15--Do Your Math, NASA! Scientists’ New Research on the Milky Way’s Weight Challenges the Space Agency

New research on the weight of the Milky Way has challenged NASA’s findings on this issue. According to a study published on arxicv.org on 9 December, the mass of our galaxy is drastically lower than previously estimated. NASA working together with the European Space Agency found out that the mass of the Milky Way stands at whopping 1.5 trillion solar masses, meaning it weighs 1.5 trillion times more than the Sun. Yet according to a paper titled “a robust estimate of the Milky Way mass from rotation curve data” the weight of our galaxy is considerably modest, just 890 billion solar masses.  The study noted: “We have used rotation curve data to estimate the dark and total mass of the Milky Way and performed a careful assessment of the robustness of these estimates". Much of the weight is attributed not to stars in our galaxy, but to dark matter and supermassive black hole Sagittarius A, which weighs more than 4 million times more than the Sun. The new study also revealed the width of the Milky way, claiming it is about 250,000 light years across.  There have been numerous attempts to measure the weight of the Milky Way. Some have put it at 500 billion solar masses, while others labelled it at 3 trillion solar masses. It is hard for scientists to make exact calculations due to the Earth’s position inside the galaxy. It is easier for scientists to measure the weight of nearby bodies, like the Andromeda galaxy, because they can observe them in full.


theborowitzreport--2019-03-14--Betsy DeVos Suggests That Bribing Colleges Helps Students Learn Math

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Offering an upbeat assessment of the headline-grabbing college-admissions scandal, Betsy DeVos said on Thursday that bribing colleges gave students “a really neat opportunity” to learn math.  The Secretary of Education suggested that, rather than keeping children in the dark about the bribes that enable their college acceptances, “Parents should sit around the kitchen table with their kids and work on some fun math problems together.”  “Let’s say it’ll cost Amber seventy-five thousand dollars to get into Stanford, and it’ll cost her twin brother Dylan seventy-five thousand to get into Georgetown,” she said. “How much money total will their parents have to wire?”  “Or let’s say Jenna has a 470 verbal score, but she needs a 730 to get into Yale,” DeVos said. “How much will she have to pay to get her score changed?”  DeVos said that, as regrettable as the criminal charges against the parents in the bribery scandal were, the arrests themselves provided a teachable moment. “Lori Loughlin posted a million dollars in bail, and Felicity Huffman posted two hundred fifty thousand,” she said. “How much bail did Lori and Felicity post?”


thedailyecho--2019-11-29--Ex Chandler's Ford teacher to host free maths workshops across Hampshire

AN EX teacher based in Chandler's Ford is offering free parent maths workshops to help tackle the "mental block" many kids have with the subject.  Caroline Cutress is the founder of Boost Maths Tuition, who have been helping hundreds of children and parents make the subject more engaging for more than 12 years.  Now the company is looking to expand further into Hampshire, and is offering free parent maths workshops to schools in the county, which aims to give parents some encouragement and inspiration in providing fun ways to help children with Maths at home without the children noticing.  Caroline said: "Most parents don’t know where to start with their child’s Maths, but I’m here to show them that they can sneak so much Maths in, without their child even noticing. Even if a parent knows the whole Maths curriculum, children rarely accept formal help from a parent, but there are dozens of ways to help without the child even realising they are doing Maths! I am really keen to spread the Maths-joy in homes around Hampshire whilst helping local schools in the process."  The free workshops will include methods of how to deal with maths anxiety, dozens of examples of fun and practical activities that parents can do with their children without them even noticing, and tips on how to deal with stressful maths homework situations.  Schools can apply for a visit or find out more by visiting boostmaths.co.uk/schools.


thedailymirror--2019-08-03--Mathematician explains tricky maths question thats been dividing the Internet

Mathematician explains tricky maths question that's been dividing the Internet

A mathematician has provided an explanation to a simple maths question that has left thousands of Twitter users across the globe baffled.  The algebra equation was first posted by a user under the handle @pjmdoll, who challenged people to solve: 8÷2(2+2)=?  Alongside she shared an anime scene from popular Japanese manga Naruto with the equation on the blackboard.  More than 14,000 people have liked her tweet and thousands replied with their answers - although not everyone agreed.  The maths problem has divided people into two groups with some claiming the answer is one and others 16.  Hannah Fry, an associate professor in the Mathematics of Cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London, spoke to the Mail Online about the mind-boggling question.  Hannah, who has written two popular maths books, said the way the question was written leaves 'room for ambiguity' over the answer.  She explained: "The (2+2) in brackets is easy enough to deal with - it's equal to four. But then what does the rest of the equation mean? Is it 8÷(2x4)=1? Or is it (8÷2)x4=16?  "This is like a maths version of the sentence 'He fed her cat food'. Does it mean the man gave some food to a cat? Or he fed some cat food to a woman.  "It's impossible to tell from the information we've been given."  The 35-year-old mathematician said it would be clear if the equation was written using fractions instead of division, or obelus, symbol.  In conclusion, Hannah said both one and 16 are correct answers and it's just 'depends on how you interpret it'.


theguardianuk--2019-02-11--Girls just wanna do maths - and the women who help them

“I used to think boys were just better at maths,” said Linah. “But now, it’s like, we go to the same school, we do the same subjects – so if you can do it, I can do it.”  There’s a reason for the renewed confidence in the 15-year-old from Dagenham and it’s sitting next to her in a swanky office in the City of London. Elaine McLoughlin is a business control manager for Bank of America Merrill Lynch. She is also a volunteer tutor on a programme to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds and get more girls studying sciences at top universities.  “[Maths] used to be one of my favourite subjects but over the years I’ve gone into autopilot,” said Linah, who lives with her two sisters, her mum, who works as a carer and her dad, who is between jobs. “I would freak out if I didn’t understand a topic in class but now I know we can go over it here.”  Since last year, her predicted GCSE maths grade at Lister community school in Newham has jumped from a 4 (the equivalent of a C), to a 7 (equivalent to an A). “Practice makes perfect so it’s going back and looking back at those topics that she’s no longer studying in class,” said McLoughlin.  In many ways, Linah is archetypal of her age group: she counts editing Instagram photos for friends among her hobbies and is relieved at getting to skip an extra physics class in order to be interviewed on a Friday evening. She has hopes, though, to attend one of the top-tier UK universities to study forensic psychology. Visiting McLoughlin’s office each week is a source of inspiration.  Linah said: “I thought it was going to be really intimidating but you walk in and feel like you’re a different person. You see people who have their lives together and you’re like: ‘I’m so gonna be like that guy’, even if you don’t know what their job is.”  Although the divide is steadily shrinking, there is still a gender gap within Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects. Women make up 14.4% of people working in Stem professions in the UK, which falls far short of the country’s goal of 30%.  On top of this, Britain’s booming private tuition sector, worth an estimated £2bn, is making the playing field even less level for disadvantaged children. Last July, an annual survey by The Sutton Trust revealed that 27% of secondary students in England and Wales have had home or private tuition. The figure rises to 41% in London.  The Access Project, founded by teacher Alex Kelly in 2008, works to address this inequality in 28 schools. It has more than 1,000 tutors supporting 1,250 students across London and the Midlands.  To Mcloughlin, who graduated with a maths and economics degree from University College Dublin and revises Linah’s topics over the weekend and offers her ad-hoc career guidance, diversifying the workforce is about more than equality. “Having more women on board and more diverse teams leads to more successful output,” she said, adding that her boss is a working mum who has “turned a lot of things around”.  There is a stigma attached to Stem for women, according to Karishma Honap, 23, an assistant engineer at WSP and Access Project tutor in Birmingham. In the engineering sector, fewer than 9% of professionals are women. “When I applied to do engineering everyone was sort of like: ‘Oh, don’t guys do that? That’s rare for a girl,’” she said.  But, according to her student, Melissa, a year 10 pupil at Wood Green Academy in Wednesbury, in the West Midlands, mindsets are already shifting. The 15-year-old says there’s a 50-50 split between boys and girls in her triple science class, despite the fact that the percentage of female A-level physics students has stagnated at about 21% for the past decade.  Although she’s always enjoyed science at school, since starting physics mentoring with Honap in October, Melissa’s confidence has blossomed. “I know if I was falling back a bit, I’ve got someone who will support me and understand what I’m facing,” she said.  Melissa, who lives in Wednesbury with her mum, a retail assistant, her younger brother and stepdad, wants to study at Oxford University. She will visit the campus with the charity next week. There’s still a way to go, including finishing her GCSEs and starting A-levels before she can apply but in some ways it feels like doors are already being opened to spaces she isn’t accustomed to.  When she visits Honap at the Mailbox, an upmarket shopping and office development in Birmingham’s city centre, which she hasn’t visited since she was eight, she feels welcomed. “I was nervous to begin with but now I find it cool how the receptionist knows my name, knows who to contact and just tells me to carry on up to the office,” she added.  This article is part of a series on possible solutions to some of the world’s most stubborn problems. What else should we cover? Email us at theupside@theguardian.com


theindependent--2019-03-14--Can you answer these maths questions aimed at 11-year-olds

Can you answer these maths questions aimed at 11-year-olds?

This week a study found that children with maths anxiety are experiencing feelings of rage and despair when faced with sums  According to Cambridge University researchers, this emotional response to the subject causes emotional suffering and behavioural problems among pupils.  The study of nearly 2,000 British and 1,000 Italian school children found that a general feeling that maths was more difficult than other subjects strongly contributed to this anxiety.  The students surveyed also often discussed the role that their teachers and parents played in their development of maths anxiety.  Below are a selection of questions from a UK Key Stage Two national curriculum maths exam, typically taken at age 11.  Could you pass the test?


theirishtimes--2019-07-04--What did the Romans ever do for maths Very little

What did the Romans ever do for maths? Very little

The ancient Romans developed many new techniques for engineering and architecture. The citizens of Rome enjoyed fountains, public baths, central heating, underground sewage systems and public toilets. All right, but apart from sanitation, medicine, education, irrigation, roads and aqueducts, what did the Romans ever do for maths?  It might be thought that the great Roman works of engineering and architecture required advanced mathematical understanding and achievement. However, this is a false view. The reality is that, in relation to mathematics, the Roman contribution amounted to essentially nothing.  The Romans were disinterested in speculative or logical investigation. They regularly applied simple mathematics to solve practical problems. They also needed elementary arithmetic for surveying and for managing trade and taxes, but they were satisfied with rules-of-thumb that called for little in the way of understanding of the great body of theoretical Greek scholarship.  Any educated person asked to name a mathematician of the ancient world would have no difficulty. Certainly Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes are universally familiar, even to people without any knowledge of their work. But they are all Greek. The Wikipedia list of Greek mathematicians names nearly 100 ancient mathematicians from the Hellenic world. There is no corresponding list for ancient Rome.  Greek mathematicians continued under the rule of the Roman Republic and later in the days of the Empire, but there were no noteworthy native Roman mathematicians. There is not a single name from the Roman Empire worthy to stand alongside the great mathematicians of Greece.  Roman engineers and military technologists were interested only in simple mathematics that was essential for solving practical problems. Curiously, they took little interest in Greek trigonometry, which could have been of great value in surveying, engineering and astronomy. They were oblivious to the beauties of theoretical mathematics and geometry that were so highly valued by the Greeks.  The creation of the Roman calendar organised by Julius Caesar, which included a leap day every four years in a 365-day annual cycle, involved some tricky mathematics. But it was a Greek astronomer, Sosigenes of Alexandria, who carried out the design. His scheme stood for 1,500 years until it was replaced by the Gregorian calendar used in modern times.  Boethius, a philosopher and statesman who lived around the end of the Empire, has been described as one of the foremost mathematicians of ancient Rome, but this says little. He wrote textbooks on the four mathematical branches of the liberal arts, but they were no more than elementary summaries of earlier Greek classics.  His Geometry comprised only statements of the simpler theorems of Euclid’s Elements, without any proofs. His works on Arithmetic, Astronomy and Music were little better. Nevertheless, these books had widespread influence and were used extensively in medieval monastic schools, including the Irish monasteries. Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville, contemporaries of Boethius, also wrote mathematics books, but neither contributed anything original.  During the Second Punic War, the city of Syracuse was besieged by the Romans. The great geometer Archimedes, who lived there, invented ingenious war machines to hurl stones, hooks to smash the Roman ships and mirrors to set fire to them. Alas, when the city was sacked in 212 BC, Archimedes was slain by a Roman soldier. The murder of Archimedes was perhaps the most profound impact of the Roman civilization on mathematics.  Peter Lynch is emeritus professor at UCD School of Mathematics & Statistics, – he blogs at thatsmaths.com


theirishtimes--2019-09-07--Literacy campaign launched to help adults with reading and maths

A campaign aimed at Irish adults who have difficulty with reading or maths will be launched by the National Adult Literacy Agency (Nala) at the weekend to mark Unesco International Literacy Day.  One in six, or 550,000 Irish adults, find reading and understanding everyday texts difficult. They may struggle to read a leaflet, bus timetable or medicine instructions, and this affects how they communicate or fail to communicate with the people they need to reach.  Speaking about the campaign, Emilie Pine, author and associate professor of modern drama at University College Dublin, said she was passionate about adult literacy.  “I think it is a fundamental right and everyone should have the right to read and write. It is essential for life,” she said.  “And I think it’s really brave of adults to go back and take the first step into their local adult education centre.”  Nala has linked up with the Education and Training Boards Ireland and Solas, the Further Education and Training Authority, to help adult learners improve their skills in reading, writing, maths and technology.  Andrew Brownlee, chief executive of Solas, said literacy, numeracy and digital skills are fundamental to employability.  “The campaign is designed to raise awareness about Ireland’s skills needs and to ensure that our population are equipped to progress at pace with our changing environment,” he said.  The campaign encourages adults who have literacy or numeracy difficulties to contact a Freephone support line, 1800-202065, to free text LEARN to 50050 or to contact their local Education and Training Board to avail of the service.  Once they make contact, Nala will put them in touch with their local Education Training Board (ETB) adult education centre or tell them about other free services to meet their needs.  Currently in Ireland there are about 63,000 adults attending literacy courses in ETB adult education centres nationwide.


theirishtimes--2019-09-11--Most secondary school girls face confidence gap over science technology and maths

Most secondary school girls face ‘confidence gap’ over science, technology and maths

Many secondary school girls face an “information and confidence gap” over so-called Stem subjects such as science, technology, engineering and maths, according to a new survey.  Some 64 per cent of girls say they don’t know enough about Stem , while 26 per cent of students say here are easier ways of getting CAO points than choosing to study Stem.  The findings are based on a survey of more than 3,000 girls at second level conducted by I Wish, an organisation that seeks to promote Stem careers to female students.  Caroline O’Driscoll, one of the founding members of I Wish, said that sharing information, role models and empowering girls to be confident in their choices were key to closing the gap for girls in Stem.  “Year on year, the girls tell us that they want a career where they can help other people, or change the world for the better,” said Ms O’Driscoll, who is a tax partner with Deloitte.  “Yet with 64 per cent of them telling us they do not know enough about Stem, they don’t see how Stem can facilitate that.”  Ms O’Driscoll said students were losing out, as well as the needs of the wider economy.  “We are limiting their choices, limiting their chances to follow their dreams and the world loses an extraordinary talent opportunity,” she said.  “We need to change that narrative. We need to equip teachers and students with knowledge, give them access to female role models who have blazed their own trail. We need to better empower girls, to give them the confidence and support to break down stereotypes and misconceptions, to be the generation of change.”  Ms O’Driscoll said there were “many amazing women in Stem” involved in world-changing projects who could inspire the next generation of leaders.  I Wish has been operating since 2015 and holds showcase events in Dublin and Cork.  The organisation says registration is now open for secondary schools across Ireland to attend its 2020 I Wish showcases which will take place in City Hall Cork and the RDS early next year.


theirishtimes--2019-12-05--Particle physics gives maths potentially powerful new tool

Although abstract in character, mathematics has concrete origins: the greatest advances have been inspired by the natural world. Recently, a new result in linear algebra was discovered by three physicists trying to understand the behaviour of neutrinos.  Neutrinos are subatomic particles that interact only weakly with matter, so that they pass easily through a wall, the Earth or a star. The American poet John Updike described them beautifully in his poem Cosmic Gall: Neutrinos, they are very small. / They have no charge and have no mass/ And do not interact at all./ The earth is just a silly ball/ To them, through which they simply pass, / Like dustmaids down a drafty hall/ Or photons through a sheet of glass.  Neutrinos are produced in vast numbers within the sun, and trillions pass harmlessly through our bodies every second. Almost nothing can stop them. Dune (the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment) aims to unlock the mysteries of neutrinos. This international experiment will use particle accelerators to send an intense beam of high-energy neutrinos from Fermilab in Illinois 800 miles through the earth to massive detectors a mile below ground in South Dakota. The experiment may lead to life-saving applications in medicine and could change our understanding of the universe.  Neutrinos come in three “flavours”, and can switch suddenly from one form to another as they travel at close to the speed of light. Recently, three physicists, Peter Denton, Stephen Parke and Xining Zhang, studying these sudden changes, stumbled upon a new algebraic identity. The mathematical description of how neutrinos interact with matter involves square arrays of numbers called matrices. Every matrix has a set of characteristic numbers called eigenvalues; and along with each eigenvalue goes a direction in space called an eigenvector.  Eigenvalues and eigenvectors turn up in a wide range of contexts. Operations that stretch, shrink, shear, reflect or rotate objects in a linear way are described by matrices. The eigenvectors give the directions that remain unchanged under transformation, and the eigenvalues determine the change of length or angle of rotation.  The physicists noticed that the eigenvectors of their matrices could be expressed as combinations of the eigenvalues. Since the latter are much easier to calculate than the former, the new identity provides a powerful tool. It applies to symmetric matrices, known as Hermitian, after French mathematician Charles Hermite. The formula gives the eigenvectors in terms of the eigenvalues of the matrix and of sub-matrices called minors.  The background mathematics has been studied for centuries, and the physicists felt sure that the result must already be known. But they could not find it anywhere in the literature so they contacted a world-leading mathematician, Terence Tao at the University of California, Los Angeles. Tao responded within hours that he had never seen the result, and included in his email three independent proofs of the formula.  The result has already benefited the study of neutrinos. Tao is confident that it will be important elsewhere too. He is quoted in the online magazine Quanta as saying: “It’s so pretty that I’m sure it will have some use in the near future.”  Peter Lynch is emeritus professor at the school of mathematics and statistics at University College Dublin. He blogs at thatsmaths.com


theirishtimes--2019-12-17--Ask Brian: My son is struggling with primary school maths. How can I help?

My son is in fourth class in our local primary school and is struggling with maths. I help him with his homework, but try not to end up doing the work for him. Are you aware of any maths resources which I could get him to engage with to support the work his teacher is doing in class?  This is an age-old question and one that all parents and teachers face. Trying to manage the learning of your child or in the case of teachers, up to thirty children in a classroom, whose comprehension of maths and other core competencies are varied, is no easy task.  There is a wide range of online content from websites from all over the world available to parents and teachers , supporting the acquisition of mathematical skills by students of all ages.  However, very few are linked to the Irish curriculum, thus making it difficult to marry the work undertaken by the teacher in the classroom with relevant online maths support material which will work effectively alongside parental support at home in the evenings.  As I have stated above, in a classroom of 30 students, a busy teacher is striving to identify and intervene when students are struggling with lessons or strands within lessons. It is the essence of the skill of teaching.  The very basis of all good teaching requires you to be able to assess a student’s knowledge. Unless you do so effectively, you really don’t know who has internalised your lesson and who hasn’t.  There are some maths resources for primary pupils online, such as Scoilnet (www.scoilnet.ie) and the PDST (www.pdst.ie/Mathematics). They are worth checking out, although these are aimed more at teachers.  I recently came across the work of one Irish company, Kildare-based “Achieve Online Learning” (www.aoll.ie), who have developed an online tool to support the teaching of the maths curriculum at primary level. This is aimed specifically at pupils (there may be others, though I’m not aware of them).  It has a section called A+Maths which includes online assessments (automated marking) which produce reports, allowing parents or teachers to understand and assist the student with strand units they may be struggling with, and thus closely monitor the child’s progress.  The programme is designed specifically for students from second to sixth class with lots of maths questions available in both English and Irish.  It is linked directly to the Irish curriculum, written by Irish teachers and each lesson is linked with page references to the Irish maths primary school curriculum.  The programme provides teachers and you as a parent with the tools you need to apply early intervention and assisted learning for your son, using engaging interactive lessons, and is available in both Irish and English.  Significantly, from a school’s perspective, A+ Maths is eligible for funding under the Department of Education digital strategy fund for schools 2019-2020.  If your son’s school doesn’t use the A+Maths software package, the company provides free trial, after which it costs €5 a month.  The Irish version has been partially funded by Foras na Gaeilge and “An Chomhairle um Oideachas Gaeltachta & Gaelscolaíochta” and is one of the very few websites supporting online maths through Irish.


thepoke--2019-04-12--This maths teacher gives his pupils hilarious bonus questions and we wish theyd taught us

This maths teacher gives his pupils hilarious bonus questions and we wish they’d taught us

Well here’s a way of making maths more interesting, a teacher who includes a bonus question on exam papers to keep students focussed all the way until the end.  Well, that or they forget about the maths questions entirely and just skip to the last bit (but let’s assume they don’t do that).  Here are eight brilliant examples, as highlighted by the good people of twentytwowords.  We really, really wish theyhad been our maths teacher. This one wasn’t them, but we like this one too.


thesun--2019-01-31--MH370 Brit mathematician calculates crash site with underwater sound waves but claims key data f

MH370 – Brit mathematician calculates ‘crash site’ with underwater sound waves but claims key data from US defence facility is ‘missing’

A BRITISH mathematician said he has calculated the MH370 crash site with underwater sound waves but claims key data is "missing" from a US defence facility.  The Malaysian Airlines jet vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014 - and has yet to be found.  Dr Usama Kadri, a professor at Cardiff University, said he has been able to identify two possible locations of where the missing plane crashed into the water.  One is closer to Madagascar and the other is further north in the Indian Ocean than the search has covered so far, News.com.au reports.  He used data from underwater microphones he says picked up sound waves from the plane's impact in the water - although 25 minutes of recordings has mysteriously gone missing.  Dr Kadri,whose work focuses on physical oceanography and wave power harnessing , explained that when an object hits the water the surface waves get smaller and smaller until they are no longer visible.  The waves do keep travelling through the water and even though they can no longer be seen the “acoustic-gravity waves” can travel for thousands of kilometres without disruption.  He added that these waves are “carrying vital information on the source of the impact, before dissipating.”  When the flight carrying 239 people crashed into the Indian Ocean, three underwater microphones called hydrophones were active.  One of them, called HA08s, is at US bomber base Diego Garcia, in the Chagos Archipelago, in the Indian Ocean.  Dr Kadri says there is 25 minutes of missing data from that hydrophone that is unexplained.  He wrote in an article: “The locations of signals found using HA08s data do come with high uncertainty but still require further detailed and careful analysis.  “Unfortunately, on top of the noisy recorded signals, 25 minutes of data from HA08s is missing.  “The signals we have analysed indicate that the there was a 25-minute shutdown that has gone unexplained by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation, which is responsible for the hydrophone stations.”  Some experts have claimed that rogue pilot Zaharie Amad Shah deliberately crashed the jet in a “suicide mission”, killing all 239 people on board.  And now Victor Iannello, who works for the Independent Group (IG) - which is assisting Australian officials search for the missing plane – is supporting this theory.  In a report that has used civilian radar data, he says that Shah may have used a particular flight path to deceive radar operators into believing the plane was planning to land at Penang Airport.  Mr Iannello created a flight simulation in order to better understand the route taken.  But despite experts’ observations, the Malaysian government, which has signed a “no find, no fee” deal with Texas-based company Ocean Infinity to resume the hunt for the plane, remains silent on the question of Zaharie’s possible involvement.  Ocean Infinity started the search on January 22 this year, following a previous failed £111million search for the plane. At the time, experts said they expected to have answers within a matter of weeks.  The company has 90 search days to look for the plane, which has been spread over several months. Officials said there was roughly an 85 per cent chance of finding traces of the wreckage in a new 15,000 square mile search area.  The investigation is expected to end in mid-June and many people fear MH370 may never be found.  We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368. You can WhatsApp us on 07810 791 502. We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours.


thesun--2019-12-04--UK schools surge up world rankings for reading and maths after Chinese style-lessons were introduced

BRITISH schools have shot up the international league table for reading, maths and science after tougher Chinese style-lessons were introduced.  Boris Johnson hailed the “great progress” and said it was down to Tory reforms to relentlessly drive up standards.  The Pisa tests showed that in maths Britain is now 18th in the world — up from 27th three years ago.  And the UK is ranked 14th for reading and science — up from 22nd and 15th respectively.  The tests, carried out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, rank 79 countries and territories.  Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s education director, said the UK was making “positive” progress. The big leap forward in maths came after Chinese methods of teaching were rolled out in English classrooms.  The south Asian “mastery” approach involves kids being taught as an entire class and learning to master the basics such as their timetables.  Schools Minister Nick Gibb said: “I am quietly confident we will continue to see the UK rocket up the Pisa league in years to come.”  China again topped the charts for maths, followed by Singapore and the Chinese territories of Macau and Hong Kong.  Mr Schleicher warned it would take a “very long time” for the UK to catch up with the highest achieving countries at its current rate of progress.  And while Britain nudged up one place in science, the nation’s overall score in the subject continued its downward trend from 515 Pisa points in 2006 to 505 points in 2018.


thetelegraph--2019-01-15--Could maths really solve our future fashion dilemmas

Could maths really solve our future fashion dilemmas?

Unlike many, I’m a fan of the beginning of the year. It feels pregnant with hope and possibility. It also brings with it interesting predictions and assertions about what the next 12 months may bring. The current woeful state of the high street, which can only hope for Christmas trading results to reach the heady heights of “not as bad as expected”, is depressing. But with a downturn comes creativity of thought and a renewed interest in how to change things for the better.  Personally, I don’t blame Brexit or the rise of online shopping for the decline in high-street sales. Shops, often governed by out-of-touch corporations, have been slow to adapt and innovate. Crucially, there is a lack of...


thetelegraph--2019-03-17--10-year-old boy believed to be the youngest Briton to recite Pi to 220 places after performing feat

10-year-old boy believed to be the youngest Briton to recite Pi to 220 places after performing feat in school assembly

A ten-year-old boy is believed to have become the youngest Briton to recite Pi to 220 decimal places, after performing the feat in his school assembly.  Charley Thomas, of Wycliffe Preparatory School in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, achieved the feat during a school event to mark Pi Day of March 14, after rehearsing for a week.  Pi is calculated by dividing a circle's circumference by its diameter.  The first digits, 3.14, are well known, but the number is infinitely long and extending the sequence is difficult because the number follows no set pattern.  Charley said: "I'm not very good at standing up and doing something in front of people so I was a bit nervous at assembly.  "I had rehearsed at home and knew I could get to 220 places. I really like maths."  The number is used in engineering, physics, supercomputing and space exploration - because its value can be used in calculations for waves, circles and cylinders.  According to the Pi World Ranking List website, which names Indian Suresh Kumar Sharma as the person to recite the most digits of pi at 70,030 in 2015, Charley places 451st in the world.  Charley's headmaster, Adrian Palmer, said: "This is an incredible achievement and one that no Wycliffe pupil has done before.  Charley received a standing ovation for his efforts in assembly and it was so richly deserved."