Positive Feedback

A while back, one of my co-workers caught me reading a popular physics book on my lunch break. She asked me if I would be willing to tutor her son in Physics. Evidently, he was failing miserably and she hadn't been able to find a tutor anywhere. I was a bit reluctant, since despite being embroiled in a physics related book, it has been some time since I had to actually solve kinematic equations. I figured it would all come back to me, but I felt unsure of committing myself. She convinced me that I couldn't possibly do any harm, so I decided to give it a try.

The back story on the situation is a good example of how inept administrations can really mess with a kid's education. Her son was allowed to enroll in Honors Physics as a Freshman. He is concurrently taking Algebra I. If that sounds odd to you, it should. He is missing approximately two years of math background required to understand basic physics. He has never encountered rates of change. He has not even studied trigonometry. It's no wonder he was failing! This is inexcusable.

Just before I began meeting with him, he had downgraded to CP Physics, meaning he switched classrooms and teachers. Unfortunately, this did not have an immediate effect on his grade. He had just received a 40% on the most recent test. Enter me. As i got to know him, I quickly realized that he wasn't terribly excited about the subject matter, yet he was determined to improve. Even when I pointed out that he may be in such a large hole, all of his best efforts may prove fruitless, he still insisted on pushing forward. So we went to work. I started by walking him through some problems, and then let him take over. I saw improvement quickly, and was able to give him some tips for better problem solving strategies. A lot of his problem lied in some bad habits he had picked up. These habits would have been broken with more math experience, but he wasn't given that chance. Anyway, a week later, there was another test. He earned a solid "C." I was extremely pleased, as were his parents. More tutoring, more tests, more improvement. On his most recent test he made an 89% and just got back a 95% on a quiz.

I'm not trying to prove causality here. He has a new teacher, and is in a class moving at a slower pace. He has parents that care enough to have gone to all the trouble to get help. He has been working hard, and deserves much recognition. But I have to feel like there's at least some correlation here. I must have something to do with it. At least, that's the way I feel. It makes me think I have chosen the right path for myself.

Open-Source Education

Apparently, the prestigious technical school MIT is going to be the first institution of higher learning to make all of its courses available free online. You won't be able to get college credit, but you can audit classes with some of the most respected instructors in the country. Any student, anybody with web access, can learn anything from quantum mechanics to chaos theory and everything in between for free. It turns out Will Hunting was wrong. You can now get a college education for much less than "a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library."

Spring Forward

Thankfully, I had the day off today. I didn't have to worry about losing a precious hour of sleep. In fact, I didn't stumble out of bed until ten. I was one of the lucky ones. Millions of other working men and women had to pry their eyes open with crowbars and slap their circadian rhythms into shape, because of a wonderfully silly mandate we like to call Daylight Savings Time. DST, originally conceived by Benjamin Franklin, is designed to provide more usable hours of sunlight during the summer months. It is alleged to conserve energy as well, since artificial light is used for less time each day. Congress even decided to make the switch earlier this year to save more energy.

Look, I'm all for saving energy, but I sincerely wish DST would go the way of the dodo. It is ridiculously inconvenient and stupendously counterproductive. Any energy saved at night is surely lost each morning, when (Surprise!) early-risers have to turn on the lights to get ready. Our biological clocks have been built into us by evolution. There's not much we can do about the fact that the earth rotates about the sun on a pivoting axis and sometimes it's light and sometimes isn't. The 24 hour day is a function of life on this planet.

Which brings me to an interesting point. How will we measure time when we finally get off this rock? Will space-travelers remain harnessed to earth seconds or will they develop a new unit with which to sub-divide the day? What will happen if and when we encounter alien life? The odds of their planet rotating on its axis in the same period as hours isn't terribly good. Will the universe have to agree on a Greenwich Mean Time for the cosmos?

I think Poor Richard was a genius and by all accounts a snazzy dresser. I love his almanac, his high-flying kite, and his public libraries. But this Daylight Savings Time needs to go.

Worshipping Algorithms

I found this video entitled Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth, which quickly and accurately demonstrates the popular misconceptions of math held my many in our culture. In the clip, a meteorologist, a scientist that must use math on a daily basis and ought to know better, launches a public campaign against a series of grade school math texts being used in local curricula. She is essentially complaining about new-fangled ideas that are different from the ones she learned when she was a kid, and blames the crazy liberal hippies that wrote the books for dumbing-down our kids by not drilling the standard algorithms into students' heads. She is particularly married to that word, and seems to think that her ability to define algorithm gives her the right to shepherd her viewing flock away from these radical ideas.

And would you like to know what these wacky ideas are? They are this: math is not about algorithms. Nor is it about numbers, though they are often used. Math is about patterns. It is critical thinking at its finest. As many times as the author utters the word, one would think that she truly understands what an algorithm is. She does not. It is a tool. You can't hold it in your hand, but it is a tool nonetheless. The standard algorithms that she demonstrates are the ones whose combination of speed, efficiency, practicality, accuracy, and fashion have allowed them to survive natural selection. It is this combination of factors, but no one alone. For example, only when paper technology became affordable were these methods even possible, and even then, skilled abacus operators could beat them for speed. But once paper was readily accessible, written methods won the day. Well guess what, the digital age has brought us a new tool. Its affordable, lightning fast, and never gets bored- the calculator.

I'm not suggesting that we discontinue learning arithmetic. What I am suggesting is that this woman has overlooked the intentions of the textbooks she is critiquing. These books are teaching how to think mathematically. In order to solve the examples she gives, students must master concepts like the distributive and associative properties. They must understand place value. They must think for themselves. Yes, I believe the standard algorithms should be taught, but as a companion to these other ideas. There is no need to memorize times tables or perform speed tests. Proficiency will come with time, but not unless it is accompanied by reason, rationality, and not a small amount of enthusiasm.

I would much rather students understand why they are doing something, to appreciate what the question is really asking, and to think mathematically. This woman clearly misses the point.

V is for Vagina

It seems that our nation's Puritanical heritage just can't be legislated away. On the same day that the Senate passes a much needed bill mandating medically accurate sex education in public schools, three high school juniors are suspended in New York for uttering the word "vagina" as part of a play reading in a school forum. The popular play "The Vagina Monologues" necessarily requires mention of that part of the female anatomy, but the girls were forbidden by the administration to say it. Instead they were to abbreviate it as simply "V." The school is claiming that the punishment is not about censorship, but insubordination.

First of all, how are we going to provide comprehensive sex ed if we can't say "vagina?" I can think of myriad other terms for that organ that are rightfully considered offensive. (I won't mention them, don't worry.) Secondly, school administrations need to accept that minors are still US citizens. They are still protected by the Bill of Rights. The Supreme Court has been a little wishy-washy on this issue. Certain things, like hate speech, that are protected in society, are restricted in schools. Even me, civil libertarian that I am, understand some of this. Children are different from adults, and we ought to be sensitive to this. But in this particular situation, the school went way too far and the girls were right to make an issue of it. You cannot restrict a person's freedom to speak the name of a part of their own body.

I'm certain that the very officials who were so queasy over the "vagina" will claim to be against teen pregnancy. Well you're not going to keep young girls from becoming young mothers if you force them to speak in code.

Update: Eve Ensler, the author of "Monologues" has agreed to appear on the girls behalf, calling the suspension "a throwback to the Dark Ages."

Scientific Semantics

Being a skeptic, it often troubles me how many Americans reject such carefully tested theories as evolution through natural selection or the Big Bang. There is so much data to verify these theories that it is mind-boggling to me that someone would choose to ignore them. Until recently, I have blamed this phenomenon on ignorance and confusion. I heard people say evolution was "just a theory" as though it were merely a hunch or a guess, no better or worse than any other. This, of course, is not at all what scientists mean by the word "theory." They mean a clear, usually simple, explanation for gathered observations that is both predictive and falsifiable. The general public simply doesn't grasp this.

Recently, however, it occurs to me that certain chunks of the scientific community are not practicing what they preach. Consider the present predicament in physics. There have been no major advancements in the understanding of physics in thirty years, except for possibly the discovery that neutrinos have mass. Instead, the vast majority of the theoretical community are plugging away at string theory or M theory or some other background-dependent scheme that as beautiful and elegant as it may be, has not been supported by any experiment thus far, nor likely to be in the future. Instead, the theories (because there are something like 10^1500 of them) hide just out of reach. That's not the way it is supposed to be. Either it agrees with experiment or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, we throw it out. The music of the spheres theory of planetary orbits was elegant as well. Beauty doesn't keep something from being wrong.

So we can't expect the general public to understand what constitutes a theory if our own scientific priesthood is breaking the rules to suit their own needs. It's just bad science.

The Hawkman Cometh

Beware of Link, It is Rated R


CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who wrote the best-selling book, "A Brief History of Time," soon will experience a brief history with weightlessness.

Hawking, who uses a wheelchair and is almost completely paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, plans to go on a weightless flight on April 26, officials at the flight operator said Thursday.

The flight, operated by Zero Gravity Corp., a Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based space tourism and entertainment company, will take off and return to a landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center.

"As someone who has studied gravity and black holes all of my life, I am excited to experience firsthand weightlessness and a zero-gravity environment," Hawking said in a statement.

The modified Boeing 727 generally soars to 32,000 feet at a sharp angle and then plunges 8,000 feet so passengers can experience 25-second snippets of zero gravity during the descent. As the plane climbs, passengers experience 25 seconds of being pushed down hard, as they feel 1.8 times the normal pull of the Earth.

Zero Gravity CEO Peter Diamandis said assistants will be onboard to help Hawking.

"The key thing here is that weightless and personal spaceflight is something available to everyone, even someone like Professor Hawking," Diamandis told The Associated Press. "This something that almost everyone can now experience."

Zero Gravity will pick up the bill, which normally is $3,750. The company also plans to have two seats on the flight auctioned off by two charities.

The company began offering the flights in 2004.
Virgin Galactic promises Hawking space flight

Last year, Hawking publicly spoke of his desire to go into space and made an appeal to Sir Richard Branson, whose company, Virgin Galactic, is building a suborbital spaceship that could be flying passengers as early as 2009.

Branson has decided he will personally finance Hawking's ticket into space -- a flight that would normally cost $200,000.

"He's one of the greatest physicists of all time," Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn told AP earlier this year.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.