Standard math education destroys math ability?

The New York Times on Sunday published this article on the problems Americans have with math.

It turns out that American math education isn't just less than perfectly effective, it even has been shown to mess up the ability of street vendors in Brazil to do the calculations they were doing in their head successfully before being subjected to this "education."

The article focuses on a Japanese researcher who's moved to the U.S. to try and help U.S. schools implement the more successful strategies for math education in Japan and elsewhere.

We've got to do something ... the article also says that a rival to McDonald's quarter pounder that was 1/3 pound failed because most of those in a focus group though 1/4 was bigger than 1/3 and the new burger was a "rip off." 

Have direct experience with poor math education? Comments please!

C'mon, can't I leave spaces in my credit card number? It's 2014!

Probably you've had this experience ... filling out a purchase form to buy something online and entering the credit card number exactly as it appears on the card, say:

4444 5555 6666 7777

You click Submit and you get back (quickly via Javascript or less quickly with a page refresh) something like:

Why the hell should I have to remove the spaces in the form in this day and age?

To be fair, a few companies get this right, Amazon among them. Others refuse to let you put in a space some Javascript trick as you're typing. This is better than an error message, but not much. Finally, some remove spaces after you hit submit but before you finalize your purchase on another page. This is silly but tolerable.

Let me say this clearly: the display of the credit card number does not need to look exactly like the credit card number that's transmitted to the back end system.

Humans aren't good at parsing a 16-digit number; we need spaces or dashes to break up the pieces of the number.

Web geeks must just be missing the code to do this, so I will provide some examples here in hope of putting this issue to rest for all of us for the future.

Javascript:

var card = '4444 5555 6666 7777';
var cnostr = card.replace(/\s+/g, '');
alert('card b4:' + card);
alert('card after:' + cnostr);

Python:

import re
card = '4444 5555 6666 7777'
(cnostr,ign) = re.subn('[\s+]','',card)
print 'card = %s' % card
print 'cnostr = %s' % cnostr

Other languages are left as an exercise for the reader.

How about this, folks? Please send a link to this page to the purveyor of any web form that doesn't allow you to put spaces in a credit card number. We can start to get this fixed!

A virtual war over virtual hells

I just finished my favorite work of SF since Charles Stross' Singularity Sky.

Iain M. Banks was also a Scot, like Stross; Banks died in 2013. He produced 9 books in a "Culture series" about an advanced civilization, the Culture where AI-run ships and drones have achieved full sentience and are granted equal citizenship and rights.

The first four chapters are just setting up the main characters, so do give it at least until chapter 5.

The protagonist is Lededje, an "Intagliate" who was tattooed at birth right down to her DNA. This marked her as the property of Joiler Veppers, the richest and most powerful man of the Enablement, a less technically and politically (and morallly!) advanced civilization than the Culture.

I won't spoil the story by giving details on how Lededje gets away from Veppers and into dealing with the Culture. But the basis of the story runs several complex threads around a war that several civilizations have agreed to fight only in a virtual environment (like a computer game) to decide the fates of several Hells. These Hells are also running as virtual environments, and the technology exists to transfer the consciousness at death from the body of an unfortunate into one of these Hells.

The complexity of the story threads and the way Banks brought them all together with their interplay with the Culture ships (notables of these named Sense Amid Madness, Wit Among Folly and Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints) is just dazzling. There's also quite a bit of discussion of the sociology and political interplay between the Culture and several other intergalactic civilizations that exist at the same time and several of which are competing in the War Over Hell.

Five stars! You may want to read one previous Culture novel to get your bearings; I'd recommend The Player of Games if you want to read one before this one.

I experienced this as an Audible audiobook, which is the way I "read" almost all fiction these days.

Change your break hours, make $15 million?

I just finished Social Physics, a book by MIT professor Alexander Pentland:

His basic idea is that progress and wealth are generated by group interaction that's balanced between existing connections and new ones, avoiding both "echo chambers" and isolation.

One example is eToro, a social connection site for day traders. Those who found the "sweet spot" between isolation and echo chamber were richly rewarded: "When traders had the right balance and diversity in their social network, their return on investment increases 30 percent over individual traders." (p. 33)

Even more amazing: the consulting practice Dr. Pentland works with suggested that a call center that was sending agents to break individually start sending groups together instead. This worked in an initial test so well that the large bank involved moved all call center break schedules to this plan and average call times dropped to the extent that it produced an extra $15 million profit for the bank.

I'm mostly working from home these days but after reading this am certainly going to make a point to get out to more user's groups and meetups of various kinds. Who knows what riches are waiting in the folds of the social fabric?