The Bristol Chaotic Pendulum

The church of St Mary Redcliffe is a stone's throw from my new home in Bristol, and with its soaring gothic architecture is well worth including on any visit to the city. But for a mathematical tourist there's an extra treat: the 'chaotic pendulum' in the north transept.
Posted: August 28th, 2010
at 7:17pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: architecture,science,education
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Curious Reef
A place to learn collanoratively by exploratory social learning.
Posted: August 28th, 2010
at 7:11pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: development,internets,education
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Academic Mumblespeak
This phenomenon is related to my recent post about why digital printing won’t save academic publishing. In that post I discussed the low costs of printing, and I suggested that instead of trying to reduce costs by marginal amounts, academic presses would be better off planning better catalogs and investing in editing and promotion to realize the sales potential of key titles.
Academic mumblespeak is a silent enemy that is destroying scholarly publishing from within. (Note that I didn’t say, "I want to suggest that academic mumblespeak is a silent enemy that is destroying scholarly publishing in many ways.")
Mumblespeak makes potentially interesting works unreadable, contributing to their esotericism. Good editing does not involve cutting material, but cutting chaff. I’d wager that the average scholarly book’s length could be reduced by 1/3 to 1/2 without removing any actual content. Such effort would do two things: first, it would reduce the size of books, making them more approachable, affordable, and legible to a broader readership. Second, it would incrementally reduce the costs of printing, since fewer pages costs less on a digital or an offset press.
Posted: August 28th, 2010
at 5:14pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: games,et cetera,education
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Mitochondrial Eve
The most robust statistical examination to date of our species’ genetic links to "mitochondrial Eve" — the maternal ancestor of all living humans — confirms that she lived about 200,000 years ago. The Rice University study was based on a side-by-side comparison of 10 human genetic models that each aim to determine when Eve lived using a very different set of assumptions about the way humans migrated, expanded and spread across Earth.
The research is available online in the journal Theoretical Population Biology.
"Our findings underscore the importance of taking into account the random nature of population processes like growth and extinction," said study co-author Marek Kimmel, professor of statistics at Rice. "Classical, deterministic models, including several that have previously been applied to the dating of mitochondrial Eve, do not fully account for these random processes."
A.J. Jacobs’ year of living biblically
Posted: August 23rd, 2010
at 7:55am by Black Ock
Categories: life,keynote speakers,education
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Research in the Wild: Making Research Work in Industry
How to do research in academia is well established.A You get grants to fund your group, attract students, publish papers, and pump out PhDs.A Depending on who you ask and how cynical they have become, the goals are some combination of impacting the field, educating students, and personal aggrandizement.
Research in industry is less established.A How to organize is not clear.A The purpose is not even well understood.A The business strategy behind forming a research group sometimes seems to be little more than a variant of the underpants gnomes’ plan.A Phase 1: Hire PhDs.A Phase 2: ?A Phase 3: Profit!
Generally, researchers in industry are supposed to yield some combination of long-term innovation, improving the sophistication of technology and product beyond simple and obvious solutions, and helping to attract talented and enthusiastic developers.
Posted: August 14th, 2010
at 8:55pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: development,education
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John Cleese on Creativity

Students' Understanding of the Equal Sign Not Equal
COLLEGE STATION, Aug. 10, 2010 a Taken very literally, not all students are created equalaespecially in their math learning skills, say Texas A&M University researchers who have found that not fully understanding the "equal sign" in a math problem could be a key to why U.S. students underperform their peers from other countries in math. A"About 70 percent of middle grades students in the United States exhibit misconceptions, but nearly none of the international students in Korea and China have a misunderstanding about the equal sign, and Turkish students exhibited far less incidence of the misconception than the U.S. students," note Robert M. Capraro and Mary Capraro of the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture at Texas A&M.
Tourism Forecasting Competition
Tourism is one of the most rapidly growing global industries and tourism forecasting is becoming an increasingly important activity in planning and managing the industry. The time series in this competition have already been studied in detail in a paper by Athanasopoulos, Hyndman, Song and Wu (2010) (to be published in the International Journal of Forecasting). For part one of this contest, entrants must submit forecasts of the next four yearly observations. Forecasts will be tested against the actual future observations for each series.
The overall winner will collect $AUD500 and will be invited to contribute a discussion paper to the International Journal of Forecasting describing their methodology.
Posted: August 12th, 2010
at 11:03pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: competitions,travel,internets,education
Comments: No comments