The regime of standardized testing in the nation’s public schools is expanding. Soon, children as young as 5 will devote weeks of the school year to preparing and sitting for multiple-choice exams. What is a parent to do?
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Innumeracy, in a data-driven age, means ceding control and understanding of an substantial chunk of yourself – your online reputation, the scores that colleges and employers use to screen out undesirable candidates – to others.
Sabermetrics shows us that every time Tim Tebow touches the ball he costs his team points in comparison to the performance of the average NFL quarterback. And yet, he wins.
Math Problem for Today: 111111 X 111111 = ? Follow Daniel Honan on Twitter @DanielHonan
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, author of The Predictioneer’s Game, shares his foolproof method for getting your next car for the lowest price possible.
There’s been some interesting responses to my post on our obligation to eat headless, legless chickens (aside from the vague namecalling and useless expressions of outrage and disgust. Something is […]
Listening to Mozart won’t make your child a mathematician, but Shakespeare can help make her more social.
Many, including myself, wondered if today’s Apple announcement would be the kiss of death for digital textbook startups like Kno, Inkling and Chegg. Now, it seems as if Apple as […]
Read the recap of Day 1 here. Day 2! I have to admit I missed the first talk of the day by Joe Nickell (see my previous post about goings-on […]
With SETI’s search for extraterrestrial life running on all cylinders again, two questions must be raised: How do we make contact? And how do we make meaningful contact? Big Think asked Bill Nye, aka, ‘The Science Guy,’ who heads The Planetary Society.
What’s the Big Idea? As the Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration, Educational historian Diane Ravitch became known for her push to establish national standards for K-12 […]
As was so aptly said just a few days ago: It is hard to make an argument that there are many desirable post-secondary educational or career scenarios for current high […]
In today’s excerpt – thanks to the work of Daniel Kahneman and others, we now increasingly view our cognitive processes as being divided into two systems. System 1 produces the […]
Bruce Beuno de Mesquita’s Selectorate Theory explains how bad behavior is good politics. Unfortunately, well-intentioned foreign aid could be enabling bad policies and bad politicians to remain in power.
Statisticians and business professors have developed a mathematical function to detect the presence of stock market bubbles. LinkedIn was a bubble, they say. Gold prices are not.
The hilarious swami of style and fashion egalitarian Simon Doonan, author of Gay Men Don’t Get Fat, offers some efficient guidelines to personal style for the mad scientist whose mind is on loftier things.
More women than ever are choosing to pursue a life in science, but high-ranking positions are still held disproportionately by men. What does it take to rise to the top – and why do so few make it?
I’m back! As you may know, I’ve spent the last three days in Springfield, Missouri, having a blast at Skepticon IV. The convention was a weekend of great talks that […]
It was a dark and stormy night. By starting A Wrinkle in Time with the most famous “bad” opening in literary history—the same Edward Bulwer-Lytton line later adopted by Snoopy—Madeleine […]
What’s the Big Idea? For some of us, it was Spock. For others, a humiliating performance as a pilgrim in the kindergarten musical. For me, it was William Blake’s relentless […]
Coming from an upper middle class family, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita says, he could have afforded to pay some college tuition. Instead, he was the beneficiary of the tax dollars of less well-off New Yorkers. He argues that “tuition discrimination” makes private universities a fairer option.
How a riddle involving one river, two islands and seven bridges prompted a mathematician to lay the foundation for graph theory
The Italian Renaissance remains one of those amazing hinges of human history where civilization made a great leap that continues to be felt today. For German art historian Hans Belting, […]
The typical American kindergarten now resembles a really bad first-grade classroom. Even preschool teachers are told to sacrifice opportunities for imaginative play in favor of drilling young children until they master a defined set of skills.
This week got me thinking – what are the chances that New York City could experience shaking from > M5 east coast earthquakeand potentially be struck by a Category 2-3 […]
Cities symbolize opportunity, but the same practicality that is prized during boom times can come to seem opportunistic following a tragedy. When do we move forward? And how often should we look back?
From stock trading to lawmaking to data-driven school reform, we are becoming increasingly dependent on mathematical models to explain the slippery complexity of human nature.
While satellites and infrastructure crumble, we are also witnessing an explosion in space tourism that is exposing the gap between the Haves and Have-Nots in space.