Science has an image problem

Im not going back to recount the exact clips on the CA intracell transmission. However, spooky as it is, your inability to recall your own product is a bit of a reminder that Jamensons and Brain cells are not a match made in heaven.

As far as Joyce, perhaps Im a bit more sensitive to his JAbberwocky and laugh at people who expound as is both Joyce (and Dylan for that matter0 actually mean things greater than was penned.

Simple declarative sentences, good dialogue, clear points of reason. I believe that, if you strive for these things, your writing will improve immeasurably. Our writing styles arent a "talleyboard" for us to display last weeks words from the geniuses at your pub, they are for communication. Thats where you fail to see that much of your clabber is the result of stale ale not deep reason.
You are too impressed with your own style and , by so being, you dont add much to the threads(except within the confines of your own skull).

Ill trell you what, Im going to ignore any further of your ad hominems and will stop mine. That ay we can keep from further destroying Wolf's great thread topic. Together, you and I , have done a disservice to him and we should try to stay on topic.

Ive still not been shown that "mathophobia" is not a central cause of sciences greater appreciation. Because the priesthood of science , in most all cases, requires a fairly heavy handle on higher order calculus, expansions, vector and tensor aanalyses statistics, ( and in my case) "drum head theory) and a whole bunch of others, much science (except the obvious collection based ' stuff like paleo or ornithology or EO WIlsons field) is unapproachable to the majority of people and many of these people could be practising scientists (like engineering), if they only had better and more creative math teachers.

In the US , a math teacher is usually made the baseball or swimming or soccre coach (that implies that their worth isnt in their chosen fields) Also, Ive seen the math instructors in summer NSF programs and am often amazed how ignorant they are wrt topics (like dimensional analyses, which can be exceeding fun). They know their text books and dont spend anytime outside trying to make their topics relevant to students who, at any moment are ready to turn a light on or off.

fm, i have a marginally on topic question for you. have you ever watched the network show *Numbers*? my wife, and several of her friends i think, love it. the premise is a police detective who has a math wiz younger brother, who helps big brother solve baffling crimes with his math insight. the math is supposedly legit...i don't watch much TV anyhow, and this setup seems too contrived to me, but maybe it's a step in the right direction?

Exactly. MAth can be made fun and challenging. Kids and even adults can pick up on math analyses by becoming exposed to real world situations and examples. There was a teacher in Trenton NJ who became nationally famous because he developed a bunch of calculus whizz kids froma previous bunch of ghetto kids who were headed for lives of despair and drugs. (It wasnt Mr Clark , that guy was kind of a maniac) This math teacher developed his own curriculum based on how to figure things out in terms of new dimensions and differentials etc.

These are the unsung creative folks that Bill and Melinda Gates foundation spend lavishly on so that American education doesnt fall behind.

Spendi,
You seem to be missing the simplest of references.

Is the following sentence your example of great writing?
I thought it was rather obvious. Your sentence followed by my question.


Wordy booing?

All the time you missed the progression from washerwoman to soap to streetcorner to the box the soap is in. You admit to using soap when you stand on the box it comes in but one dare not use your phrase to show how you get that box without being guilty of bum fluffing it seems.

Perhaps you shouldn't spend so much time flogging the assertion that your literary capabilities are far beyond us mere teenage girlie mortals, Spendi. It leaves you open to ridicule when you claim assertions rely on nothing but the loudness of the voice.

fm-

Do you think that there is a mathematical possibility that we might on this thread make mathematics more fun for just enough high IQers (the polar opposite of ID-iots) to provide enough mathematicians for the future whilst avoiding the extremely self destructive possibility of everybody becoming mathematicians.

What I mean, and I do feel a need to explain as I am often accused of being incoherent, is, could we achieve such a highly desireable objective objectively more efficiently than the mathematics teachers currently in charge of that difficult task and thus prove the superiority of the WWW over that old fashioned institution known as The Educational System not just in efficiency but also in costing a damn sight less and allowing our future mathematicians to develop as they see fit rather than how a bunch of attention seeking plaintiffs with an average IQ of about 100 see fit.

If the mathematicians of the future develop in the way that a bunch of silly sods with not enough to do see fit won't they end up like a bunch of silly sods with not enough to do?

So let's see if you can make mathematics fun?

I only try where I can have some impact in the areas I teach. (Economic geo, geochemistry, isotope geochronology) the most I can do is to try to get the students (whove already made it to grad school) recall and recommit their "once mastered but long forgotten " math skills.

Im a firm believer in "dimensional analyses" not M theory but the analysis that allows you to use the equations of one physical system to solve problems in another. Eg problems in hydraulics canbe solved in terms of the flow of electricity, or can be compared to drum head theory or chemical diffusion. This can be mastered and the creative part is that sometimes a student need not spend a humongous amount of time merely memorizing math functions, they can see the problem take shape in their heads. Math is just the abstract language, many scientists brute their way through the problem in a phenom manner without math. They can set up an experiment to solve a problem and the math functions can be a result. If a students frame of reference includes just one or more areas, the dtudent can then master the other system by "dimensions"

I hope this makes sense.
I, fortunately had a great calc instructor , a Jezzie that was , to me, a rennaissance man, He knew so much about so much. He knew so much that he didnt mind speaking in our language. His explanations of similitude were outstanding. He left in my mind the lesson that " a given quantity or a measurable unit need not be excat" Exactness is not how stuff is solved. Be not afraid to jump in the problem and get it "sorta" right, then come back and straighten out the quantities. Small minds dwell on the exact values, the great minds always say "sorta"
He was a master in chemical diffusion, I had him in Math and in Physical chmistry I. (He was the "go-to" guy to understand how the equations worked and why they were relevant.

This is missing in a lot of todays science . Kids are separated from the math underpinning by two separate teaching and adsorption methods. The guy teaching math are usually teaching rote and the guys teaching the science assume a certain proficiency in the math. I think that science is attainable and able to be mastered by a greater statistical cross section than we report in the papers. Kids are like sponges, we just dont know how to get them to sop up the learning.

Professional "teachers" are, in most cases in the US, those with the least drive and the lowest SATs. ANybody can be a teacher. In colleges the only people who teach with "teaching certificates" are those in the education departments. These are departments that almost nothing of value goes on. Ive read PhD dissertations for candidates that asked me to be on their committees because they want to be earth science teachers. The Dissertations are usually quite pitiable. The candidate has crossed the threshold and become a teacher, not a member of a professional corp of earth sciences.
MAth is the worst, the average teacher comes out with 15 hours of math skills and 45 hours of educational gobbledegook. "EDUSPEAK" we call it.

Their students dont speak, they "verbalize"

To me , its like a social science degree, a vocabulary in search of a discipline to play in.

I am probably now gonna get asked to leave A2k.

Re: Science has an image problem


Just out of curiosity, if the number of 15 year olds has plunged by 70%, then what are they doing instead of science?

Has educational interest proportionally increased in other areas? Or is there just a general malaise in education?

Did 70% of students suddenly take up music, or art, or history? Or did they all just start chatting on the Internet and asking for answers to homework on A2K?

fm wrote-



Well-I won't be asking. In fact I'm surprised that you think anyone might ask.



It's just the same here "in most cases". It's just a job whereas it is supposed to be a vocation. Some hopes. Anyone with a vocation soon becomes disabused of such silly utopianism. It's a business fm and the prime objective in any business bureaucracy is to rise to a position where contact with the product has been left behind and the selling of the business ideals becomes paramount and "EDUSPEAK" is essential for that and for that decisive activity of ordering books and equipment which brings the successful apparatchik into close and intimate contact with the suppliers.

Sexing it up a bit gets the kids attention.

Re: Science has an image problem


Sorry, I accidentally left out the phrase "exam entries". Don't know how that happened.

And from what I've seen those that didn't go on to do A-Level sciences went on to do Politics with Economics instead.

Part of the problem may be that students no longer need to work problems out on a pad of paper. They have calculators, and have little incentive to learn analog thinking. I've had young men or women ask me the time, and having shown them my watch, i've been obliged to tell them the time, because they only know digital, and actually cannot read an analog watch face.

They have calculators, and that is how they solve the problems. They enter the numbers, hit the appropriate button (the calculators have square-root buttons, fer chrissake), and await the response.

When i was taking advanced mathematics in high school, i had a slide rule. You got an approximate answer which allowed you to work backward, with pencil and paper, to the exact answer. The method for finding square and cube roots on paper involves such estimation. I would suspect that as students progress through courses in mathematics these days, they simply learn the appropriate entry method on a calculator, as opposed to learning what it is the calculator is doing to arrive at the correct answer.

None of this is to say i was ever very good at math, because i wasn't, and i didn't like it. The only math course in which i did well was geometry, because i could draw it. The only science in which i did well was chemistry, for precisely the same reason.

I would have hoped that you would check in set. If anyone constantly demos an understanding of the interplay and cross relationships between and among happenings and data, you should have been a math whizz. I submit that your teachers sucked and you got as far as you did in spite of rather than because of the teaching style. Most of the nuns I had in my early years in school could have "phoned in" their lessons, they were terrible. With the exception of ARt History in 4th grade. Sister MAry "BigHat" Consolata opened my art eyes and I still study paintings for what they are telling me, rather than standing back then quickly looking at the signature , as if the signature validates the paintings worth.

My 7th grade (pubic school) teacher was a great one because he stressed solving problems in applied math, even equations were shown their utility ( our class was always head and shoulders above the other sections (It was a huge consolidated school) as long as I had this one teacher.

fm wrote-



I went nowhere near that level of approval and compliment with one poster and your new idol advised us to "get a room".

Not within a thousand miles too.

I will refrain from counter punching in this case in order to preserve your dignity. But do not think I am unable to.

Most of my math and science teachers read out of prepared notes which they had probably been using for years. They rattled **** off about as fast as they could read, and everyone in the class would be head-down writing furiously, frantic not to fall behind--no one even took the time to ask if "this is going to be on the test." In those days, you didn't dare, because wise-ass students or anyone expressing boredom was found occupation quickly enough to make your head spin.

I had always enjoyed drawing, and did well with it. I aced all the drafting classes i had, even with 3D projections and rotations. I got my hands on an old Euclid even before i entered high school, and i found it a snap, because i could draw it if i didn't understand it. Some kid came here with a question about finding the dimensions of a triangle the area of which was equal to a rectangle of certain dimensions. I not only had his answer in a snap, i was able to explain to him about the relationship of the area of a triangle to that of a rectangle, and explain how i got the figure i had--i could "show my work." That's forty years after my last geometry class.

When i leafed to the back of the chemistry textbook in the first few days of class, and found chemical diagrams, i was off and running. It reached the point where i'd fill a notebook and have to start a new one, because i diagramed absolutely every chemical and every reaction we discussed. The teacher stopped calling on me because: "You're not the only student in the class Mr. ______."

I loved that stuff--hated the rest of it.

And then they wonder why science has an image problem.

Which is foolish really because the stuff I'm reading here has about as much to do with science as the catwalk at a fashion show has to do with the beauty of the female sex.

Set, thats what dimensional analysis is about. Kids have an amazing facility to creatively search through various media to learn phenomena about others .

I believe that Launce has passed out for the evening

Wolf wrote-



There was a longish item on Sky News just now about the meeting to decide on the resumption of whale hunting.

The Japanese announced that they wished to resume whale hunting for scientific reasons. Accompanying the discussion was graphic film of a whale being harpooned. It was thrashing about in a pool of its own blood and was then shown being hauled up a slipway into the ship with blood flowing out of it.

Hence "science" was linked to whale hunting in the perception of some members of the public if not most.

Another possible cause of the problems science needs to overcome is that many of those who try to speak on behalf of it are self-evidently arrogant, bigoted and solipsistic and are often to be seen presenting personal biographies of themselves and their daily doings whenever an opportunity arises. These are invariably designed to show their personas in the "best possible light" as Kenny Everett used to say when he crossed and recrossed his legs extravagantly.

They tend to overuse words like "I" and "my" and relate trivial personal experiences as if they mean something of importance both of which signify a subjectivity which is at odds with a proper scientific mentality.

This profound lack of humility in those attempting to speak for science is counterproductive as it must grate on the nerves of those members of the public who are exposed to it as must the reciprocal backslapping and mutual cloying cosiness in which they often indulge when they come together in an orgy of exclusiveness. It is as if they believe the rest of us are complete idiots and they address us accordingly.

Wow, spendi, you can always be counted on for an opinion, no matter from which orifice it eminates.

What does it matter fm when it's as classy as that was even if I do say so myself.

I was tittering all the way through the composition and wished I had had time to expand it a little. You see fm-I know if the composition causes the writer to titter it will also cause at least a wry smile on those who have a similar disposition to the author. Others can suit themselves.

It is an absolute necessity for decent writing that it be composed with exactly that objective, as Stendhal teaches, and when he teaches you stay taught. To attempt to write for a wider audience is to fall into the trap that Dan Brown has fallen into and,though he may well have made a great deal of money to see him through his brief stay on our lovely earth, in the fullness of time he will be shown the door in the Heavenly Writer's Club, a club which I aspire to join on the grounds that I don't fancy an eternity of you lot, in a manner which can sometimes be cleverly imitated by Robert Mitchum when he was playing a grouchy sheriff. We wouldn't wish to see the Club cluttered up with a load of boring old farts who had lost the plot if only because it would make it more difficult to get served and have the bar staff playing hard to get like they always do when their services are in demand.

When a writer makes a deliberate effort to rope in fans with the usual tricks, most of which a dog can learn under the tutelage of a strict mistress, he sells something of himself and usually for very little or no reward.

A writer must be himself at all times and hope someone finds amusement in his work even if he is unaware of their existence and he knows that the someone won't care which orifice it is extruded from if it gives him or her the sort of slight smile which comes from a faint recognition of a fellow traveller through this vale of tears in which smiles are highly prized and moreover free.