[math-fun] Even Jeb Bush is smarter than the NYT
Lest anyone be under the illusion that the New York Times has even the slightest degree of credibility in their scientific articles, I quote from the July 7, 2004 issue, page A17. FLORIDA: MATH QUESTION STUMPS JEB BUSH. At a speech to high school students in Orlando, Gov. Jeb Bush was stumped on a math question from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which he has championed. A student, Luana Marques, 18, posed the question: "What are the angles on a three-four-five triangle?" The governor gave a steely grin. "The angles would be -- if I was going to guess," he said. "Three-four-five, Three-four-five. I don't know, 125, 90, and whatever remains on 180?" Ms. Marques had the correct answer: 30, 60, 90. "The fact that a 51-year old man can't answer a question is not really relevant," Mr. Bush, a Republican, said. "You're still going to have to take the FCAT and you're still going to have to pass it in order to get a high school degree." (AP) (So blame the AP for this one.) Gene __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
Gene, There's plenty of fault to go around. Assuming the story is accurate (which is already suspect), you can't really fault Jeb for not knowing the answer off the top of his head, or even for coming up with two angles that add up to more than 180. And it's not a surprise that Ms. Marques didn't know the right answer either (at least if one is cynical about U.S. public education). What would be somewhat dfisturbing is if Ms. Marques' answer is the FCAT's official correct answer. So just out of curiosity, I went to the FCAT website to look at their sample Grade 10 Mathematics test. I only got as far as question 10 (on molecular weights) before realizing that I was going to have a similar experience to my investigation of the MCAS when my kids were first subjected to it, namely that a bright kid might have difficulty deciding whether they should answer the questions correctly or give what is more likely the officially correct response. Who makes up this stuff, anyway? And why do we let them? --ms Eugene Salamin wrote:
Lest anyone be under the illusion that the New York Times has even the slightest degree of credibility in their scientific articles, I quote from the July 7, 2004 issue, page A17.
FLORIDA: MATH QUESTION STUMPS JEB BUSH. At a speech to high school students in Orlando, Gov. Jeb Bush was stumped on a math question from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which he has championed. A student, Luana Marques, 18, posed the question: "What are the angles on a three-four-five triangle?" The governor gave a steely grin. "The angles would be -- if I was going to guess," he said. "Three-four-five, Three-four-five. I don't know, 125, 90, and whatever remains on 180?" Ms. Marques had the correct answer: 30, 60, 90. "The fact that a 51-year old man can't answer a question is not really relevant," Mr. Bush, a Republican, said. "You're still going to have to take the FCAT and you're still going to have to pass it in order to get a high school degree." (AP)
(So blame the AP for this one.)
Gene
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
On 7 Jul 2004 at 14:49, Mike Speciner wrote:
... And it's not a surprise that Ms. Marques didn't know the right answer either (at least if one is cynical about U.S. public education). [answer to: what are the angles of a 3:4:5 triangle]
The right angle is easy, but am I missing some trick or is there a huge hole in my education in that I can't do arctan(.75) in my head? /bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <--
Bernie, No, I don't think you should be able to do arctan(3/4) in your head. I certainly can't. If one believes the story, Ms. Marques had gotten the question from the FCAT, and should have had adequate time to find out what the right answer was. She certainly should have known that 30-60-90 wasn't correct. (If it was a multiple-guess question, then the choices should have been sufficiently far apart to make the correct choice apparent; if it were a free response, then it becomes somewhat harder without a trig-enabled calculator; I believe non-trig calculators are required for the FCAT.) Speaking of free response, I went on to question 14 of that same (Grade 10 Math) sample FCAT, and discovered (by looking at the "correct" answer) that the word "part" means "proportion". I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have figured that out. --ms Bernie Cosell wrote:
On 7 Jul 2004 at 14:49, Mike Speciner wrote:
... And it's not a surprise that Ms. Marques didn't know the right answer either (at least if one is cynical about U.S. public education).
[answer to: what are the angles of a 3:4:5 triangle]
The right angle is easy, but am I missing some trick or is there a huge hole in my education in that I can't do arctan(.75) in my head?
/bernie\
Wednesday 07 July 2004 at 12:05 I have to confess that I must have had those two triangles confused all my life. At any event, my immediate reaction was 3-4-5: its the standard illustration of the Pythagorean theorem, it must be 30-60-90. Only after a side correspondence with Gene did it hit me that there can't be any 30 degree angle since no side is half the hypotenuse. Whit
--- Mike Speciner <speciner@ll.mit.edu> wrote:
Gene,
There's plenty of fault to go around. Assuming the story is accurate (which is already suspect), you can't really fault Jeb for not knowing the answer off the top of his head, or even for coming up with two angles that add up to more than 180.
I don't fault Jeb for not knowing the answer. Governors are not usually elected for their mathematical skills.
And it's not a surprise that Ms. Marques didn't know the right answer either (at least if one is cynical about U.S. public education).
I'm not surprised that Ms. Marques didn't know the correct answer, and yes, I am very cynical about U. S. public education.
What would be somewhat dfisturbing is if Ms. Marques' answer is the FCAT's official correct answer. So just out of curiosity, I went to the FCAT website to look at their sample Grade 10 Mathematics test. I only got as far as question 10 (on molecular weights) before realizing that I was going to have a similar experience to my investigation of the MCAS when my kids were first subjected to it, namely that a bright kid might have difficulty deciding whether they should answer the questions correctly or give what is more likely the officially correct response.
Did you persevere and find the official answer? You seem to have missed the essential point of my message. It was not an attack on Gov. Bush, or on an 18-year old student, or even public education. It was an attack on the New York Times.
Who makes up this stuff, anyway?
Which "stuff"? The exams are made up by "educational professionals". The requirement that students pass the test is made up by lawmakers who are responding on the one hand to public demand for better quality, and on the other hand to teacher organizations who don't want their members to lose their cushy jobs. It's funny that students alone, and not teachers too, are being tested. Actually, about 25 years ago in California, there was a proposal that teachers pass a literacy test. The political compromise enacted was that new teacher candidates would have to take the test, but already credentialed teachers would not. About 1/3 of the candidates were found to be illiterate.
And why do we let them? --ms
Who is "we", sir. This question is best answered by opponents of school vouchers. I do hope that the next step in the President's plan is to let "No Child Left Behind" evolve into "No Child Beneath His or Her Potential".
Eugene Salamin wrote:
Lest anyone be under the illusion that the New York Times has even the slightest degree of credibility in their scientific articles, I quote from the July 7, 2004 issue, page A17.
FLORIDA: MATH QUESTION STUMPS JEB BUSH. At a speech to high school students in Orlando, Gov. Jeb Bush was stumped on a math question from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which he has championed. A student, Luana Marques, 18, posed the question: "What are the angles on a three-four-five triangle?" The governor gave a steely grin. "The angles would be -- if I was going to guess," he said. "Three-four-five, Three-four-five. I don't know, 125, 90, and whatever remains on 180?" Ms. Marques had the correct answer: 30, 60, 90. "The fact that a 51-year old man can't answer a question is not really relevant," Mr. Bush, a Republican, said. "You're still going to have to take the FCAT and you're still going to have to pass it in order to get a high school degree." (AP)
(So blame the AP for this one.)
Gene
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
Gene, I don't disagree that the NYTimes is a questionable source of science and math info, but in this case they were merely disseminating an AP story. And it may even be an accurate report. As far as sample question 10, yes, I looked up the answer. The "correct" answer assumed that the table given in the question was correct, relevant, and should be used (despite the fact that any decent 10th grade chemistry student would know that it was nonsense). The actual question asked for the molecule with the largest weight, not the molecule with the largest [nonsense] value in the table. It reminds me a little of the question my daughter once had on her elementary school math homework, which began "19 people compete in a three-legged race..." For the political part of this discussion, if you want to pursue it, we should take it offline. --ms Eugene Salamin wrote:
--- Mike Speciner <speciner@ll.mit.edu> wrote:
Gene,
There's plenty of fault to go around. Assuming the story is accurate (which is already suspect), you can't really fault Jeb for not knowing the answer off the top of his head, or even for coming up with two angles that add up to more than 180.
I don't fault Jeb for not knowing the answer. Governors are not usually elected for their mathematical skills.
And it's not a surprise that Ms. Marques didn't know the right answer either (at least if one is cynical about U.S. public education).
I'm not surprised that Ms. Marques didn't know the correct answer, and yes, I am very cynical about U. S. public education.
What would be somewhat dfisturbing is if Ms. Marques' answer is the FCAT's official correct answer. So just out of curiosity, I went to the FCAT website to look at their sample Grade 10 Mathematics test. I only got as far as question 10 (on molecular weights) before realizing that I was going to have a similar experience to my investigation of the MCAS when my kids were first subjected to it, namely that a bright kid might have difficulty deciding whether they should answer the questions correctly or give what is more likely the officially correct response.
Did you persevere and find the official answer?
You seem to have missed the essential point of my message. It was not an attack on Gov. Bush, or on an 18-year old student, or even public education. It was an attack on the New York Times.
Who makes up this stuff, anyway?
Which "stuff"? The exams are made up by "educational professionals". The requirement that students pass the test is made up by lawmakers who are responding on the one hand to public demand for better quality, and on the other hand to teacher organizations who don't want their members to lose their cushy jobs.
It's funny that students alone, and not teachers too, are being tested. Actually, about 25 years ago in California, there was a proposal that teachers pass a literacy test. The political compromise enacted was that new teacher candidates would have to take the test, but already credentialed teachers would not. About 1/3 of the candidates were found to be illiterate.
And why do we let them? --ms
Who is "we", sir. This question is best answered by opponents of school vouchers. I do hope that the next step in the President's plan is to let "No Child Left Behind" evolve into "No Child Beneath His or Her Potential".
Eugene Salamin wrote:
Lest anyone be under the illusion that the New York Times has even
the
slightest degree of credibility in their scientific articles, I
quote
from the July 7, 2004 issue, page A17.
FLORIDA: MATH QUESTION STUMPS JEB BUSH. At a speech to high school students in Orlando, Gov. Jeb Bush was stumped on a math question
from
the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which he has championed.
A
student, Luana Marques, 18, posed the question: "What are the angles
on
a three-four-five triangle?" The governor gave a steely grin. "The angles would be -- if I was going to guess," he said. "Three-four-five, Three-four-five. I don't know, 125, 90, and
whatever
remains on 180?" Ms. Marques had the correct answer: 30, 60, 90.
"The
fact that a 51-year old man can't answer a question is not really relevant," Mr. Bush, a Republican, said. "You're still going to
have
to take the FCAT and you're still going to have to pass it in order
to
get a high school degree." (AP)
(So blame the AP for this one.)
Gene
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
What causes old books to have such a characteristic smell? Is it a bacteria that attacks the paper? Should I freeze my dear CRC Handbook? Hilarie
The Purple Streak asked:
What causes old books to have such a characteristic smell? Is it a bacteria that attacks the paper? Should I freeze my dear CRC Handbook?
Hilarie
Yes, you got it. Though it's often the binding and glues that are being digested, not the pages themselves. A story I heard as an undergraduate was that the trustees of Harvard were on a tour of the newly-opened off-site storage facility for University library overflow. (There had been much arguing over building it in the first place -- it meant infrequently- used books would have 24-hour turnaround instead of being immediately available on campus, and many people didn't seem to care that "infrequently-used" generally meant "not checked out since the late 1800s".) Anyway, the story goes that the curator had shown them all the climate- and atmosphere-controlled storage technologies, and as the crusty old trustees were getting to the end of their tour, one of them harrumphed, "Well, I still don't like it. It doesn't *smell* like a library!" The curator turned on him with teeth bared: "That, sir, is the smell of ROTTING BOOKS!" --Michael Kleber kleber@brandeis.edu
The Purple Streak, Hilarie Orman writes:
What causes old books to have such a characteristic smell? Is it a bacteria that attacks the paper? Should I freeze my dear CRC Handbook?
I'd guess it's mold, not bacteria. I'd recommend freeze-drying, not freezing, if you are serious, with an argon back-fill. A more serious problem is the acid used in post 1900 paper, which is making modern books almost useless after only 30 years.
I was at the NY public library a few years ago to look up some ~1900 math books on quaternions. One of the books I got back started falling apart in my hands as I turned the pages. The _only_ thing this book should be used for is making one Xerox copy to go into a digital scanner (the book is actually quite rare, although not particularly important). I suspect that many other books at the NY public library are in the same delicate shape. The problem of rotting books is only one example of the general problem of rotting data -- much of the NASA data from early explorations has already been lost because the tapes have already turned to goo or dust. Of course, even if the tapes were ok, just try finding a tape machine capable of reading them (and a computer with the correct operating system, correct release date, and a chain of other devices to copy from one to another until you can get the data to something like a USB (2.0, of course!) connector). At 01:58 PM 7/7/2004, Tom Knight wrote:
The Purple Streak, Hilarie Orman writes:
What causes old books to have such a characteristic smell? Is it a bacteria that attacks the paper? Should I freeze my dear CRC Handbook?
I'd guess it's mold, not bacteria. I'd recommend freeze-drying, not freezing, if you are serious, with an argon back-fill. A more serious problem is the acid used in post 1900 paper, which is making modern books almost useless after only 30 years.
Martin Frost and Lester Earnest made a heroic and successful effort to transfer the Stanford AI Lab backup tapes from 7 track tapes to 9 track tapes. Heroic because the tape drives had got out of adjustment and sometimes had to be realigned several times to read a given tape. Later Martin Frost and Bruce Baumgart transferred the files to disk. Now I think the data are safe, because the files can readily be transferred when new kinds of memory replace the old. Anyone who had an account at the Stanford AI Lab can get his files back.
On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 06:40:52PM -0700, John McCarthy wrote:
Martin Frost and Lester Earnest made a heroic and successful effort to transfer the Stanford AI Lab backup tapes from 7 track tapes to 9 track tapes. Heroic because the tape drives had got out of adjustment and sometimes had to be realigned several times to read a given tape. Later Martin Frost and Bruce Baumgart transferred the files to disk. Now I think the data are safe, because the files can readily be transferred when new kinds of memory replace the old.
The standard techniques for dealing with old tapes include baking the tape (in the oven!) for several hours to prevent sticky residue on the tape. Peace, Dylan
At 02:12 AM 7/11/2004, Dylan Thurston wrote:
The standard techniques for dealing with old tapes include baking the tape (in the oven!) for several hours to prevent sticky residue on the tape.
Not just any oven, I read that it must be a convection oven. And I think that applies only to tapes made of acetate.
Martin Frost saved many a file for me in grad school Q: Does the alias "More Whimsical" still survive for Les Earnest in Stanford AI Lab backups? I independently found the NYT 3-4-5 problem last week at Lake Tahoe and blogged it, but before I did I showed the article to quite a few people at Stanford Sierra Camp and was surprised how many of them (a surgeon, a political scientist) not only immediately expressed doubt about whether the 30 60 90 solution was correct but also seemed to know that the answer wasn't going to be "nice." Two other people, neither mathematicians, also immediately went on to speculate whether the 30 60 90 solution had found it into the Florida test. This experience cleared up for me the mystery of who is buying up all those math popularizations such as DFW's Everything and More, they must be surgeons and political scientists. Thane Plambeck 650 321 4884 office 650 323 4928 fax http://www.plambeck.org ----- Original Message ----- From: "John McCarthy" <jmc@steam.Stanford.EDU> To: <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Wednesday, July 07, 2004 6:40 PM Subject: Re: [math-fun] Old books
Martin Frost and Lester Earnest made a heroic and successful effort to transfer the Stanford AI Lab backup tapes from 7 track tapes to 9 track tapes. Heroic because the tape drives had got out of adjustment and sometimes had to be realigned several times to read a given tape. Later Martin Frost and Bruce Baumgart transferred the files to disk. Now I think the data are safe, because the files can readily be transferred when new kinds of memory replace the old.
Anyone who had an account at the Stanford AI Lab can get his files back.
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
participants (12)
-
Bernie Cosell -
dpt＠lotus.bostoncoop.net -
Eugene Salamin -
Henry Baker -
John McCarthy -
Jud McCranie -
Michael Kleber -
Mike Speciner -
Thane Plambeck -
The Purple Streak, Hilarie Orman -
Tom Knight -
Whitfield Diffie