Failure of the New Media

When looking for the official BP info about the status of the well in the gulf, I found the following comment on the Huffington Post's Social News prominently in the news stack on Google:

FREEDOM BELL

“Me either. When did Wells of BP issue email and comments during the past attempts. When did Obama ever go on TV during a past attempt?”

(This was a comment on a Huffington Post article reporting the great news that the well had been "shut in".)

Since Wells of BP issues a comment twice a day, and this one came during his regularly scheduled briefing, the answer is he always does this. How do I know? The link I was looking for when I Googled "BP" was their Gulf of Mexico response page. The schedule and transcripts of those briefings is the top link on that page, and shows a 2:30 CDT (3:30 EDT) briefing, the second of the day.

And anyone with a modicum of knowledge of politics knows that the President will hold a press conference or give a speech whenever he feels like it, usually several times a day.

Conclusion: This contributor to the New Media has no critical thinking skills and/or no ability to use the web to answer this question, or only has an interest in using rhetorical questions to malign the motives of the engineers trying to solve this problem and the politicians making sure they do what the law requires them (not the government) to do.

Much the same can be said of the following comment

Equinator

85 days, 16 hours. Why was this not done the first day? All that planning to watch out for the walruses must not have helped much.

Correct, but even if the planning had said they would try this, they would still have had to build the device after being sure it was engineered to work in this specific situation. I don't know what they teach the great unwashed masses in school, but nothing of any complexity can be done in a day. (It takes years to take a new car model from design to showroom floor. I saw a version of the Ford Fusion in 1999.)

The reality is that this is a magnificent accomplishment. No other failure of this type (there have been others) was stopped prior to the drilling of a relief well, let alone one at this depth.

Now, even if the casing below lacks integrity and they have to keep the valve open (which is what they have expected all along), they can connect this to surface ships and keep any more oil from going into the Gulf. Lets hope the pressure and seismic tests show no oil leaking down in the drill hole itself. That would be even better news.

Read Entire Article......

Ten Twelve

Today is the ninth anniversary of 10/12.

Lots of people commented on 9/11, including myself and some other bloggers I follow, echoing the media emphasis on that important and memorable event. But the media gets it wrong when they assert that it was Al Qaeda's second attack on US territory. It was the fourth. And it says something sad about us as a nation that we give more importance to an attack on a civilian office building than one that left dozens of our servicemen either killed or wounded.

I am, of course, talking primarily about the attack on the USS Cole on 10/12/2000, which killed 17 sailors and left 39 others wounded. (The other event I allude to was "8/7", the attack on two US embassies on 8/7/1998. Embassies, like US flagged military vessels, are considered sovereign US territory.) Al Qaeda's first attack on the World Trade Center was not viewed as an act of war. Oddly, even their attack on a US naval warship was not viewed as an act of war. Even more oddly, it was their second attack on the World Trade Center -- not the simultaneous attack on the Pentagon and/or the White House and probably the Capitol -- that got recognized as an act of war.

This attack on our warship is so far off of our cultural radar that, when I alluded to this event on Dean Dad's blog last week, even my reference to "naval warships" left him scratching his head about 10/12, thinking I was talking about Hitler rather than Japan. No, I was not talking about Japan invading China or Germany invading Poland or France. I was talking about Japan attacking US Navy ships while in port at what was then US colonial territory (Hawaii) as well as on the seas in and around another US colony (the Philippines). Al Qaeda attacked a US Navy warship visiting a port in Yemen, almost a full year before it attacked the Pentagon. Both attacks on naval vessels provided an abundantly clear indication that they were at war with us, whether we liked it or not. Some might argue that both were wars of "choice", we could have chosen to let Japan control the Pacific as its own private lake and we could have disengaged completely from the middle east (including Saudi Arabia and Israel), but neither were likely choices for us to make.

Al Qaeda's timing was perfectly bad, by the way.

They hit a pair of embassies in the summer of 1998, when the US was totally preoccupied with a sex scandal and the subsequent impeachment of the President. The Clinton administration, weakened as it was by those events, seemed to view it as an isolated act of terror rather than part of a growing campaign against the US. That view seemed to be shared by the professionals in the DoD and CIA, as reflected in the refusal to attack bin Laden when we had him in our sights.

They hit the USS Cole in the late stages of the 2000 Presidential campaign, and the information about the connections to Al Qaeda were developed during the interregnum period that included a delayed handover because of the contentious recount in Florida. The report of the 9/11 Commission makes it pretty clear that the Clinton administration, having been unable to get the CIA and DoD to attack bin Laden himself for previous acts of war, did not even try to push that point during its last weeks in office. It also makes it very clear that the Bush administration seemed to think that those were attacks on the Clinton administration rather than on the United States, blowing off the new information developed in December and January by the FBI and others.

Forgetting the USS Cole seems typical of the way we have, as a nation, downplayed the significance of the war against Al Qaeda in response to its war against us. We had 8 years of the Bush administration talking about how much it cares about US servicemen, yet they did nothing when 17 of them were killed by Al Qaeda and continued to do nothing when reports surfaced that the same people were planning more of the same. When they complained that Oh, we didn't think they would attack the US, all I could think was What do you think a ship flying the US flag is, if not part of the US? Did Bush and Cheney really think it would be no big deal if Al Qaeda sunk more ships?

The people questioning the war in Afghanistan need to remember that there is at least one target on their list that they haven't hit yet, the Capitol, and that past history says they will not rest until they carry out their plans ... unless we stop them first. We need to remember 10/12, or 9/11 won't be the last we hear from Al Qaeda.

Read Entire Article......

Failing Grade on Significant Figures

This analysis is second hand (I have not read the journal article); it is based entirely on the article in today's Inside Higher Ed titled "Failing Grade on Alcohol".

According to the press release, the study came up with an allegedly shocking result

Using figures from government databases and national surveys on alcohol use, researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) found that drinking-related accidental deaths among 18- to 24-year-old students have been creeping upward -- from 1,440 in 1998 to 1,825 in 2005.

that was published in the "Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs".

What is wrong with this? Everything, if IHE described the study accurately.

The IHE reporter says the authors did the following:

Researchers from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism multiplied the number of 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States, as reported by the Census Bureau, by the estimated percentage of deaths among 18- to 24-year-olds that were alcohol-related, as provided by 331 medical examiner studies. That number was multiplied by 30 percent, since three-tenths of 18- to 24-year-olds are in college.

Do you see the mistakes?

The biggest error is that "three tenths" has only one significant figure, although it might have had two before they wrote that sentence. That means their values should be stated as 1400 and 1800 (appropriate in either case because many people think that a leading 1 does not convey a full significant figure). Their choice conveys a hugely false sense of precision, as if they KNOW it was 1825 students, rather than 1824 or 1826, that died - particularly when it is quite likely that they don't know whether it was 1700 or 1900 that died as a result of alcohol use in that year.

The important point is that they don't know whether the people who died were actually students.

But there are several other errors inherent in this approach.

Are there equal percentages of men and women in college within this age group? The data I showed the other day suggest they aren't. Are men and women equally likely to show up in those morality statistics? Unlikely, given what I see in our newspaper.

There is also an unstated uncertainty in using a small sample of coroner data. (How many counties have a college in their coroner district?) What was the standard deviation in the mean value they used? Could it be that they are comparing 1400 +/- 200 with 1800 +/- 200 to get an increase of 400 +/- 400? Or worse?

Finally, all of this might be dwarfed by the use of a highly subjective term like "alcohol related". That box can get checked on a traffic incident report if one of the drivers reports having had a drink recently, regardless of whether there is a legal finding of intoxication or even fault for the crash. That means a totally sober student could have been counted if s/he was killed in a car accident with someone who had had a few drinks with dinner.

That doesn't even count concerns such as those of one person quoted in the article, who pointed out that many college students live within walking distance (or a short drive) of the parties they go to, in contrast to others in the same age group.

At least the abstract of the article said the "aim of this study was to estimate" [emphasis added] the mortality from alcohol use in the 18-24 age group, but that didn't stop them from giving a 4 sig fig value for a 1 sig fig result. This is particularly pathetic when the lead author believes "that it would have been better to have data on every injury death, but maintains that from the information he used, the results were a conservative estimate of the number of deaths" according to the author of the IHE article.

That means he knows that both the 1400 and the 1800 values were very uncertain, and that the true value of the first value might even be bigger than the second. This doesn't stop him from quoting "exact" numbers and omitting any estimate of the uncertainty in the calculated values. Surely, having risen to the position of Division Director at a national institute, he knows how to use a stat package to estimate the uncertainty? Oh, right. I almost forgot about this true story. Maybe there is a chance that he used the raw numbers from his calculation without a hint of a clue of how to estimate the uncertainty in the number of deaths from the uncertainties in the coroner data and in the fraction attending college.

Read Entire Article......

Media Mania

It was a quiet day on campus: Final's week in the spring leaves the place almost as deserted as the tail end of the summer semester. With no dorms, the only people on a CC campus this week are in class writing an exam or the faculty giving them. I was there only to be sure mine were printed and ready ... and to start getting ready for my summer class.

So I spent most of the day at home, stunned into disbelief at the media mania that was the daily press briefing and coverage of The Flu Story. I'm not making light of it, since my Grandfather told me about the pandemic in 1918, but seriously: if it is so freaking dangerous in Mexico, why do all of the networks have people doing live stand-up reports in busy public places in Mexico City?

But what really entertained me was the coincidence of some of our faculty giving a final exam in a (very) basic "college level" (scare quotes intended) math class that would be required for journalism majors. You see, they happily read the report that says the incubation period for the disease is 3 or 4 days, and then ask inane questions about the health of President Obama - who visited Mexico on April 16, which was 11 days ago. Let's see if we can figure out this "college level" problem that seems to escape the entire White House Press Corps: 11 days minus 4 days is 7 days, and 7 days is a week. Yep, that means he would have been deathly ill one week ago if he had been exposed to the swine flu during his visit.

Oh, and so would the Press Corps, who were along on the trip. I think Obama's press secretary finally made that point - that they should be concerned about their own health if they are concerned about the President's health.

The rest of the story seems to be that the conspiracy theorists among the Press are simply calling the Mexican authorities liars for saying that the man who died of pneumonia a week after Obama's visit did not have influenza while reporting as factual every other statement from the health authorities in Mexico. They must be some kind of cross between idiots who don't read their own news and racists who would never think to question similar statements from US health professionals.

They really need to stick to facts, and help people learn the common sense aspects of public health that are needed to contain the small outbreaks, the difference between the flu and food poisoning, and put particular emphasis on what to do if you think you have been exposed on a trip to Mexico by yourself or an acquaintance.

And they could also explain the role of Evolution in what is taking place.

PS -
I also really like the panic-engendering graphics that color the entire state of Texas in panic yellow or red because it has two (non-fatal) cases of flu somewhere in that huge state. BBC did them one better in this map: they colored all of Canada red for something like 6 confirmed cases.

Read Entire Article......

Saving the Past

Triggered by a BBC article about plans to demolish a landmark Kabuki theater, a rare piece of pre-war architecture that survived the fire-bombing of Tokyo.

The most stunning thing in the article was a lack of any "historic" designation for buildings other than temples. That is sad, because architecture can be part of the soul of a society. Creative people can find a way to integrate the new in with the old, like buying that piece of crap building in the background and using it's site for the desired complex, connected to the old building to provide the needed amenities for a modern audience. (More toilets.) Right. They need to tear it down so they can have more toilets.

There is another threatened area, called "Omoide Yokocho" or "Memory Lane", that they want to tear down - but plan to keep in a sanitized version in a museum. Probably will be a cross between Henry Ford's "Greenfield Village" and Walt Disney's "Epcot Center". That's like replacing hot dog vendors on the streets of NYC with a single robotic one in a museum. Not. The. Same. Thing. The name of that place, along with the observation that "Japanese culture does treasure nostalgia: a yearning for things lost - childhood, school friends, a way of life - is a frequently voiced emotion. But the quest for modernity arguably runs deeper." triggered a quick search for a movie with that word in its Japanese title.

"Omohide poro poro" (titled "Only Yesterday" in English) is a feature-length anime by Isao Takahata. I saw it once, late at night on TCM, in Japanese with subtitles. If you look at the TCM info about this movie, you will see it is #12 on their list of "movies not yet on DVD". It is at the top of my list. It is an amazingly well-told story of a young woman looking back at memories of her childhood, and all of the events that put her where she is today - which is on a train heading from the city into the countryside for a vacation.

I was hooked as much by the background as by the story. The fragments of home and school life provide an interesting insight into Japanese life and culture. It also conveys a nostalgia for a simpler life, away from the hectic life of a modern city.

Read Entire Article......

Holiday Catalogs!

Monday, Oct 21, marked the arrival of the first Holiday Catalog of the season ... that I noticed.

Today, three more arrived. I sense a trend.

Remember last year?

Should I repeat the exercise this year?

I'm worried that I missed some earlier this fall, messing up the data collection process, but it could be that they held off because of (a) the massive election mailings or (b) the economy or (c) I did not notice the first ones because of the massive election mailings.

Read Entire Article......

GM at $10 per share

The media makes a big deal about the value of GM stock being back where it was in 1954, but its not clear to me if they are correcting for inflation as well as stock splits. But that is not what I am writing about.

While posting this observation

Where is the alliance between GM and the U of M and Michigan State physics and engineering departments on cost-effective Lithium-Ion battery production methods? When will those Pointy-Haired Bosses at GM realize that they could build a Chevy Volt with NiMH technology and develop it on the highway with bleeding edge techno types like those of us who bought a Honda Insight in 2000 at a price well below cost? Its not like they couldn't upgrade it later, but they don't think like that even at $10 a share.

at the end of a followup comment on the Quantum Pontiff's blog, I remembered what really pisses me off about the absurdly slow development of products like the Chevy Volt.

The bombing of Hiroshima.

Not the fact that Mazda made my car in that city, despite its having been leveled by an atomic bomb, while it took GM more than a decade to try to make something even comparable to it. No, the fact that NOTHING used to carry out that mission EXISTED just three years earlier. I don't think history books get across the magnitude of what the US managed to accomplish in a few short years during WW II.

In August 1942 there was no atomic bomb, just 20 pages or so of general notes that constitute the Los Alamos Primer. There were no factories to separate uranium and no reactors to produce plutonium. There was a log building at Los Alamos. There were no B-29 Superfortresses, which were being prototyped and designed at about the same time that summer, for a September test flight. Its engines were a joke. Airborne radar in the cm range had been developed just a year or so earlier, but using it to trigger a bomb at a specific altitude had not been tried (or maybe even thought of).

Nothing except a lot of vaporware.

Yet three years later, the sky was blackened with 400 or more B-29s over a single Japanese city, and we were on track to produce an atomic bomb with a radar trigger every few months. The comparison to the MRAP program for Iraq is not a very favorable one. And just as "shade tree mechanics" produced the first up-armored Humvees out in the field in less time than it took to think we needed to draw one, garage operations have produced working plug-in hybrids while GM looks to market something in another couple of years (current goal is the end of 2010). We built an atom bomb in less time than that! Sell it to me for 20 grand or so and I will test the batteries for you for free! And guess what: since there are probably thousands of people who would do the same thing, that is 50 million dollars GM could have that they don't have today.

It can be done.

Read Entire Article......

Free the Energy!

I was amused by last week's What's New by Bob Park where he wrote about seeing 5 perpetual motion machines in an average year.

I got got visited by a Free Energy crank a few weeks ago. This one wanted to use motors to drive flywheels that would drive generators that would do some work while driving motors that drove flywheels ...

I'd guess that even a professor of English could spot the flaw in that one, but it took some doing to convince him that the first law of thermodynamics was not going to let him get more energy out than he put in.

Despite the obvious fact that even a tiny bit of friction or resistance anywhere in the system would result in a loss of energy, the magic of the word "theorem" (referring to unrelated proofs by Carnot, et al.) seemed to do the trick. You see, he was convinced that the losses were only a problem if there was one motor and generator. Ten of them would make those losses go away rather than get worse. Classic.

I didn't ask him if he wanted to buy mail order device a friend told me about, a device that alters the quantum mechanical phase of gasoline to increase the mileage you get on your car.

Read Entire Article......

Christmas Catalog Count

Final update:
Below is a graph of the data collected during this exercise. Details are all below the fold. (Publication date shifted with each update. The initial version was published back in September.)

Graph of "holiday" catalogs (blue) and "winter sale" catalogs (pink) received through January 2.

August

3rd week - 1

September

1st week - 2
2nd week - 1
3rd week - 1

All of those arrived before the first day of Fall!

4th week - 1

October

1st week - 1
2nd week - 2
3rd week - 9
4th week - 5
5th week (to 11/3) - 6

November

1st week - 6
2nd week - 12
3rd week - 13

Peak day so far:
7 catalogs received on Wednesday, 21 November, the day before Thanksgiving! (And only 1 on the following Friday and Saturday.)

4th week - 11

December

1st week - 10
2nd week - 1 !!

They are not going to waste money once it is almost too late for delivery by Christmas.

3rd week - 0
4th week - 12 for winter sales

The last block includes mail that would have been delivered on 12/31 and 1/2 as well as the week that included Christmas Eve and Christmas, but later deliveries suggest it all came right after Christmas.

Read Entire Article......

Technology, for Better or Worse

Dug out of the draft files from back in April, when Dean Dad's Brother posted this title as a good one for a job talk.

Could not resist. Now it is time to fill it in.

My first thought was not about laptops and SmartBoards, topics that dominated the recent discussions that brought this back to the top of my list. My first thought was about graphing calculators. I banned them years ago from my physics exams because of cheating, but I'll admit that three factors had an equal weight:

• A student using "study cards" downloaded from TI themselves to cheat on an exam
• Learning that professional engineering exams ban them because they can also be used to communicate between students as well as cheat
• Seeing a student solve a linear equation by graphing it and tracing to the zero while proctoring from the back of the room

The kid can't solve 3x+17.5 = 9.76 using algebra? [Certainly explained the ones who got points taken off for not showing their work.] What would happen when (not if) he gets a problem where the values are given symbolically rather than as numbers? How can you do a "u substitution" integral if you can't solve a linear equation? Short answer: you can't. That student should never have passed his pre-calculus algebra classes without taking some tests where he had to show his work without ever using a calculator.

So the NYTimes (May 4, 2007) article "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops" cited in several places plus a group of articles over the weekend by the kitchen table math folks from the K-12 wilderness about budgets eaten alive by SmartBoards got my attention. And not just because I cannot imagine how a SmartBoard would replace a book or a smart teacher in my 3rd grade experience.

I like the SmartBoard when it is in its place -- which is not in the middle of the room. I like it next to a blackboard, where the real process of problem solving can play out. I love it as a tool for annotating and correcting what is in the textbook. I love it as a tool for displaying a problem, and sometimes for animating a sequence of events. But entire lectures on it? No way. Entire classes structured as a dog-and-pony show? Where all they do is watch, entertained? TV on, minds off, I say. I can even see the evidence on tests. A problem that was worked entirely on the SmartBoard is always harder than one that was worked out on the board, because they watched the first one and put pencil to paper on the second one.

But my conclusion would be "for Better and Worse". I am far more effective having certain tools available. My students learn better now that they get problems with realistic numbers rather than the few that could be memorized or looked up in tables, and then manipulated on a slide rule. My use of a computerized homework system has demonstrably helped learning, but only because it is fully integrated into my teaching style. Yet my students also have to work harder to learn that 10^7 meters is not the likely answer to a projectile motion problem, and I don't let the availability of a certain technical tool dictate what I am going to do in the classroom.

Read Entire Article......

Clean up on Aisle Four!

Another year, another disaster area to deal with. And this doesn't even show the semi-organized piles on the left where each class has its own stack of books and notes ready to be grabbed for class. Most of what you see is the detritus of committees, books being reviewed for adoption next year, and campus junk mail from the last few weeks of the semester ... and one for the first week of Fall!

Yeah, you read that right. Our Provost sent out a memo detailing the schedule for our first week back in August. Time to get my Fall syllabus ready!

Read Entire Article......

RBoC for a Saturday

A few random thoughts from the weekend:

• Ran into a former student today. Learned that he is graduating as an Electrical Engineer next week, and that another student from that group graduated in December and is now working as an EE for Sprint. He was smiling, and so was I.
  
• Its great to live and teach close to the WFU that most of my students attend. I see them around town, hear how they are doing, learn what things they really use after they leave my class, sometimes I even get them to come back and pass on some wisdom to the next crop of students.
  
• One of them did just that on Friday, describing how he is required to solve an engineering problem and how many points get taken off for leaving something out.
• A computer programming student thought that modern cars are less safe than older cars because they sustain so much damage in a crash. An pre-engineering student set him straight, which pleased me no end, and I elaborated with examples from the 60s ... when cars survived the crash and the passengers died, rather than vice versa. I know one thing I will emphasize in my gen-ed class this time around.
  
• Profgrrrl may have a great new necklace, but what she really needs are donations for her marathon fund-raising effort. Pay her a visit and contribute what you can.
  
• I will not point out that the Supreme Court's new inequality [woman's life > fetus's life > woman's health > any other not-a-legally-protected-human life] is a much more slippery slope than any of the slopes they thought they were working on. I also will not tolerate comments on what I did not point out, but will say that the chattering classes on both sides had very little to say about this very fine line that got drawn in the sand. They were too busy shouting from their respective scripts.
  
• Today was a truly beautiful day.
  
• I can't believe my brother has been writing computer code that our lives depend on for over 33 years, but I sure am glad that he is doing it. We should all be glad that he makes sure the guy with a degree from a fancy name-brand famous university, rather than the Enormous State U he graduated from, does not write a program that drops all of the bombs off of one wing of the airplane before dropping some of the ones off of the other. Can you spell center of gravity, children? (Love that story of his, which came up back when he first pointed me to profgrrrrl's blog. She wrote about overhearing future math teachers complaining about math being on their math ed exam.) Keep up the good work, kid. Wish I could send you some of my graduates, but they think it is too cold up there even though they hardly ever go outside down here ... because it is too hot.
  

...

... plus quite a few left over from the past week's events:

• NBC owes 20 minutes of a network newscast and a full half hour of cable coverage to each one of the 32 murder victims, glorifying their lives much as they glorified the killer.
  
• The other networks need to do the same, since they used NBC's actions as an excuse to evade having to explain their equally slimy actions.
  
• For the news anchors who can't do arithmetic, that is one victim feature a day for the entire month of May, including weekends and holidays, plus the last day of April.
• I was speechless when a talking head on NBC/MSNBC said, almost in the same breath, that the killer's actions were clearly intended to use murder as a way to get a national soapbox for his insane rant, but they were going to do it anyway. Other people deserved that attention, not the murderer. Did you notice I did not mention his name?
  
• With a ratio of 5 faculty to 27 students killed, either he was targeting the faculty in each classroom or every one of them stood their ground and put the students first, just as we are trained to do in an emergency situation (such as a lab fire).
  
• I lost count of how many mental health professionals (some psychiatrists, some not, some possibly licensed in Virginia) talked about the situation without once mentioning the court cases from circa 1970 that make it impossible to hold a person who is not, at this particular moment, certifiably a danger to himself and/or others.
  
• I don't think I heard anyone, liberal, conservative, moderate, or progressive mention his parents. Perhaps this is because the living can sue for libel, but government agencies, NGOs, public figures, and universities cannot. Did they ever talk to his teachers during a PTA meeting? Did they know about his mental health treatment (or was that blocked by FERPA)? Or was this the other parallel to Columbine? Did they assume he would just turn out like his older sister if they went about their business?
• All sides of the gun control question are as insane as the shooter. Apparently Virginia, like the state I live in, makes it illegal to have a gun on campus unless you are a law enforcement officer. He was not a felon, mentally incompetent, etc etc and he even followed the restrictive rules on time delays between purchases. If handguns were illegal, he probably would have legally bought a shotgun and sawed it off. If he needed a hunting license to buy a shotgun, he probably would have gotten one. If concealed carry was allowed on campus, what are the odds that freshmen in a french class or graduate students in engineering would be carrying guns on a random spring day on one of the safer campuses in the country?
  
• That said, I do feel a bit safer in my classroom than I would at most universities, because I know that my classes contain persons who are perfectly capable of killing an armed gunman with their bare hands, and might even have done so in service to their country. A CC has quite a few returning veterans making the transition to university. I'd trust them with my life, just as they trust me with their (academic) future.
  
• Someone pushing his website says parents should use it to check how safe a campus is before sending their kids there. He forgot to say that doing so would have told them that Blacksburg is a really safe place to go to school. Useless self-promotion, enabled by the cable news folks who never asked him what his site said about VaTech last spring. And is it now, on average, more dangerous than Columbia or Chicago?
  
• Did the people who said this was the worst murder rampage ever in US history forget the mass murder that took place in Oklahoma City because it was more than a decade ago? What an insult to those families, and so close to the latest anniversary of that event.
  

I think that emptied the "clip" of bullets on the control panel, so that must cover everything. If not, it is close enough.

Read Entire Article......

2.76E-3 is not scientific notation!

In Uncertain Principles' "Pick a Number" challenge, a pair of comments by a student used TI-83 notation to write mu_0 as 4piE-7 rather than 4pi x 10^{-7} (using pseudo-TeX due to the absence of superscripts and greek letters in this forum). This is an abomination perpetrated (in part) by math faculty at various levels, including at good old ICC.


It is bad enough when they tolerate using 3E-7 as if it conveyed the mathematical idea of exponentiation rather than the subtraction of 7 from three times the Erdos-Borwein constant E, but some will even tolerate 3e-7, when every child knows that this is seven less than 3 times Euler's (or Napier's) number e. [And, I might add, e is one of the most important numbers in mathematics, right up there with its friends pi, i, and -1. See my pi-Day observation posted back in March.] In my not so humble opinion, this is the equivalent of teaching BASIC in programming 1 to computer science majors.

It starts, of course, with the adoption of a particular graphing calculator (the TI-83 at ICC and elsewhere) that does not display numbers in correct scientific notation. It is reinforced when algebra instructors grade students on whether they correctly copy the exact contents of the display that results from carrying out a trained task (such as pointlessly using "trace" to "solve" an equation) in the prescribed fashion and never ask the student to also provide the correctly written value after rounding to, say, 3 significant figures. [Don't even get me started on whether they also look at any of the work the students have done, grading them on its correctness and clarity.]

Yes, computers and calculators often cannot handle data input of numbers in standard mathematical form, but that is no excuse for confusing expediency with correctness. Students must be taught to translate the expression shown by their calculator into the form used by all professionals in their published [*] work. They could also be told that much cheaper calculators, such as the Casio fx-115ms (for numerical integration and uber-cool symbolic prefixes in engineering mode) and many Sharp models, actually display a power of 10. For instructors, these other calculators also have the virtue of reducing cheating off of electronic formula sheets.

[*] Journals have, and probably still do, accept tables reproduced directly from computer printouts that use this FORTRAN format, but that is the exception that proves the rule.

Read Entire Article......

DeLay calls Bush a traitor?

Today, on Meet the Press, the chattering classes included Tom Delay, pushing his new book. He saved the worst for last, when no one had time to reply:

From page 6 of the transcript:
FMR. REP. DeLAY: .... When you tell the enemy what your strategy is, that's aiding and abetting the enemy because they can use that strategy to come back and harm your soldiers.

Tom DeLay was clearly hoping everyone would think he was talking about war protesters such as Tom Andrews (also on the program), because he said it while commenting on Andrews' efforts to set a withdrawal deadline. However, what he actually said also applies to President Bush.

Bush gave "the enemy" more than a month's head start when he announced the latest Surge in his "surge and run" cycle. Plenty of time for them to alter their strategy and stay inside the US military's decision loop. Clearly aiding and abetting them. Maybe DeLay has a point.

And, of course, DeLay was also attacking the Secretary of Defense and most Generals involved with the war in Iraq. At various times each of these have articulated our strategy in Iraq. They have told the various insurgent groups exactly what they needed to do to get us to leave (be real quiet during the election, for example, which they did). The insurgents simply seem to lack the patience to wait the six months or so that Bush needs to claim victory. If the insurgents had taken a decent history class, they would know that Nixon needed a cease fire to justify a peace agreement in early 1973 that led to a full withdrawal of all US troops by late March (before Congress "cut off" funds for the war in Indochina, by the way) and might guess that Bush needs a similar bit of political cover for him to get out. Maybe they want the US to stay.

And, I'll ask in closing, was DeLay calling a notable conservative such as Ed Meese (Reagan's Attorney General) a traitor because, as a member of the Iraq Study Group, he supported deadlines for specific actions by the Iraqi government with specific consequences? DeLay must be, if he consistently attacks anyone who supports the proposals in that document.

Read Entire Article......

March (announcer) Madness

Speaking of a freshman player: "He's not a freshman any more."

I'd take them seriously if they also said, about other players, "He's not a sophomore any more" or "He's not a senior anymore". Then what is he, a pro? The fact is, he is an experienced freshman, and some have learned more than others from that experience.

Read Entire Article......