Reminds me of Louis Benezet's experimental elementary math education system (ca. 1930s), and Sanjoy Mahajan's Street Fighting Mathematics. What a clever idea.
While funny, that is the worst advertisement for learning math I have ever read. If you are of anywhere near normal intelligence, and put in anywhere near normal effort and don't 'get math', your parents, teachers, superintendents, school boards, and departments of education sucked, not you.
Applied math is about finding, stating and solving problems. Strategy instead of tactics. Writing a cookbook, not reading one. Teaching mathematics-as-recipes is the reason most people don't "get" math, even if they score decent grades in school. It is the reason they don't think they will use math in "real life"--because they learnt a bunch of equations, and didn't learn what they mean, because they don't need to know what the equations mean to pass the exam. So, because the exam sucks, and teachers have to teach to the standard exam, the teaching sucks, students have to study textbooks that suck, do homework problems that suck, and take tests that suck. Imagine that: Most of the students end up sucking! Instead of fixing it, let's have yet another round of blame the victim!
I wouldn't blanket blame the teachers/etc because a lot of students feel if they don't get it right away, they dismiss it out of hand and don't give it much effort after that. Prof Hawking can't teach a 3yr old long division.
Mine has gotten hot once, when I had it in an enclosed space while charging it. If the grandparent had a hot one in his hand, it certainly wasn't from what I've experienced in normal use.
Just checked for Pennsylvania (2009-10 academic year), and while the biggest spenders are over double the lowest spenders, there are no order-of-magnitude-difference pairs. Also, only two of the top ten spenders (per student) were in the top 10% academically.
This is nonsense. I'm all for civil disobedience, but the author is demanding that others defy courts on his behalf. The sense of entitlement is at least impressive.
Certainly, if anyone is to defend Mr. Sfarzo's speech in an Italian court it should be Mr. Sfarzo himself. If anyone wants to host his writing and take on potential liability, let them do so willingly (as, indeed, they have since the linked article was posted).
I think what's at issue is that Google will bow to court orders from any jurisdiction, no matter how tiny or corrupt and no matter how detached from American ideals of press freedom. A prosecutor in the US would have a hard time obtaining this kind of court order.
