And They Invented Math!

Posted on by

Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds

The Greek debt crisis.

When Papaconstantinou arrived here, last October, the Greek government had estimated its 2009 budget deficit at 3.7 percent. Two weeks later that number was revised upward to 12.5 percent and actually turned out to be nearly 14 percent. He was the man whose job it had been to figure out and explain to the world why. “The second day on the job I had to call a meeting to look at the budget,” he says. “I gathered everyone from the general accounting office, and we started this, like, discovery process.” Each day they discovered some incredible omission. A pension debt of a billion dollars every year somehow remained off the government’s books, where everyone pretended it did not exist, even though the government paid it; the hole in the pension plan for the self-employed was not the 300 million they had assumed but 1.1 billion euros; and so on. “At the end of each day I would say, ‘O.K., guys, is this all?’ And they would say ‘Yeah.’ The next morning there would be this little hand rising in the back of the room: ‘Actually, Minister, there’s this other 100-to-200-million-euro gap.’ ”

This went on for a week. Among other things turned up were a great number of off-the-books phony job-creation programs. “The Ministry of Agriculture had created an off-the-books unit employing 270 people to digitize the photographs of Greek public lands,” the finance minister tells me. “The trouble was that none of the 270 people had any experience with digital photography. The actual professions of these people were, like, hairdressers.”

Chirp

Posted on by

Finally signed up for “The Twitter.” When I first learned of it, I thought it would just be a compendium of noise, since the threshold to tweet is so low. And this is precisely why I don’t do Facebook very much — I am just not all that interested in the level of minutia of my friend’s lives, and I shudder to think they are that interested in mine (or feel that they’re missing out because I don’t post such trivialities very often). But today I found out that Steve Martin is tweeting, so I signed up to follow that.

I don’t want it to be a collection of “Boy, I could use more fiber in my diet” or “De-linting my belly button!” tweets. On the other hand, I do have these random thoughts, which I occasionally blog. That’s the kind of stupid stuff I’ll probably tweet. Probably.

Twitter: Swansontea

I understand it’s protocol to follow those who follow you, but … no. I’m not going to return the favor in order to be a statistic, or even to be polite. I am a physicist, and have no social skills. Follow only if you have some slight possible interest in the content.

Legislating Reality

Posted on by

Senate set to slam science

There are certainly ample political reasons to sometimes ignore science. Fine. Say that. But discounting or demonizing science for political ends needs to stop. Science is not subject to legislation. It’s one thing to make the case that we cannot afford to deal with greenhouse gasses right now. It’s another entirely to claim greenhouse gasses are not putting us at risk.

The Needs of the Many Outweighs The Needs of the Few

Posted on by

Self-organizing traffic lights

The key is that this kind of control does not fight the natural fluctuations in the traffic flow by trying to impose a certain flow rhythm. Rather, it uses randomly appearing gaps in the flow to serve other traffic streams. According to their simulations, this strategy can reduce average delay times by 10%–30%. Remarkably, the variation in travel times goes down as well, although the signal operation tends to be non-periodic and, therefore, less predictable. You can’t say precisely how the lights will go on and off, but you can be sure your drive will be shorter.

So it sounds like if you’re in a dense group of cars, you’ll see more green lights, but if you are alone or in a sparsely bunched group, you’re likely to get a red, Which bunches you up, et cetera, et cetera. IOW, opposite of the way lights seem to run.

A View of the Neighborhood

Posted on by

The Big Picture: Around the Solar System

With dozens of spacecraft currently orbiting, roving or otherwise and traveling through our solar system, I thought it would be interesting to get a general snapshot in time, using images from NASA and ESA spacecraft near Mercury, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Saturn and a few in-transit to further destinations. Collected here are recent images gathered from around our solar system, at scales ranging from mere centimeters to millions of kilometers.

How Do I Requisition Some Inspiration?

Posted on by

Inspiration, Funding Cited as Top Needs for Math and Science Education

“I mean think about it,” Greene said. “Through the power of thought, through the power of calculation, we have been able to figure out how stars shine, how black holes form, how space expands, how time elapses. We’ve been able to peer back to a mere fraction of a second after the beginning to try to understand how the universe began. We have pried apart the atom and been able to understand its constituents with absolutely fantastic precision. This is fantastic material. This is material to die for.”

“And yet,” he added, “if it is taught in a way that we usually teach it, where we focus in so quickly on the details in order to get kids to solve the equation, know the parts of the cell, balance the reaction, without a commensurate focus on the big wondrous ideas, the ideas that get us up in the morning … what we do is we leave science lifeless.”

First off, let me say I am on board with the message. But I saw a statistic that had me wondering what it really meant:

In 1995, the U.S. ranked second in college completion rates, and it now ranks 15th.

This is followed up by

Competitor countries, [Hockfield] said, “are doing a better job of recruiting, training, compensating and celebrating highly qualified teachers of math.”

One might conclude from this that it’s a problem with a drop-off in the quality of the teachers. Not that paying teachers better and recruiting better talent is bad, but let’s take a closer look at the numbers. 1995 graduates probably entered school in 1991 (or 1990), and there were 1.11 million freshmen entering 4-year institutions that year. In 2005, that number was 1.56 million — an increase of 41%. The us census population data I found doesn’t break down by year, so we have to make do with 5-years sums of 15-19 year-olds; the increase in that span was 17.25 million to 21.2 million, or an increase of 22.5%. So attendance at 4-year institutions increased significantly faster than the traditional target population. Since college isn’t getting any cheaper, I’m going to argue that the attendance boost isn’t driven by the affordability of college, though I’m certain that students are more likely to drop out due to financial considerations as tuition has risen faster than inflation, and this contributes significantly to the lower completion rates. I suspect this increase is fueled by people being pushed into college by the notion that a college degree is the only way to make real money, and a corresponding drop in quality of the students attending school, where “quality” is a combination of motivation and ability. If we have lower-quality students, or ones who run out of money, this is going to contribute to a reduction in graduation rates, as students drop out because of lack of desire, cash, or substandard grades. I’m not sure how much schools have lowered admissions standards or how widespread this is, but to the extent they have, they are complicit in this as well for accepting higher-risk students.

The other issue I have is that the ranking of the percentages of high-school and college graduations are given, but not the rates themselves. The dropout rate from high school went down from ~27% in 1960, to 15% in 1970, to less than 11% in the 2000s. If we look at the percentage of Americans with college degrees, we see it is generally going up over time, while high school seems to have topped out in the upper 80’s but is definitely higher than in the 60’s.

I think what this means is that graduation rates may not be the right metric here. We’re doing better in terms of the fraction of people with degrees, it’s just that other countries must be getting better too, and faster than we are. What we can do is also look at where we rank worldwide in citizens with degrees, and see that we are 12th in the 25-34 age group, and this ranking is lower for these recent graduates than it used to be. I you look at the countries above us in the list, you’ll see Canada, Japan, and several European countries, where college costs are heavily subsidized by the government — their students aren’t fighting the same battle of trying to pay exorbitant tuition costs. I wonder how much of the difference this accounts for.