Math is White Privilege...

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remember that while Blacks may have a lower mean IQ , there are a lot of v ery high IQ blacks. It other words you have to judge individuals.

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ity was something from the MAA where it was found females on average are be tter than males at math, but the spread on male performance was much greate r, and in particular, the exceptionally good males were way beyond anything seen in the female population.

search for SAT math scores

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GH

Reply to
George Herold
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[snip]

I think math success/failure is comprised of two main parts:

(1) Fear. There's so much BS going around about math that many, particularly females, freeze up when exposed to math.

(2) Lousy LOUSY teachers...

I spent a couple of hours last evening (back-and-forth E-mails) helping a granddaughter in Rancho Mirage cope with a trick-rigged question about complex roots. ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

On Oct 29, 2017, snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote (in article):

If this were really true, the gaussian tails would disappear visibly in plots covering millions of individuals, and we would be reading articles about this strange effect. After a century, the gaussian nature of the tails is well established. That said, there has been much debate on such issues. One thing that is mentioned is that the high-IQ tail may be heavier than expected from strict gaussian - this would support the smart-fraction theory.

The log histogram is particularly useful for figuring the tails out.

Hmm. China?s population is about four times that of the US, and Griffe finds that the mean IQ of the Chinese is 116, one SD above the 100 seen most other places. Somehow, I doubt that it?s all the Flynn effect, as this is present versus present, not present versus past.

Your point is basically that because a ruler doesn?t measure weight, it?s useless.

IQ scales were designed to sort people into categories. Here is a scale by occupation. The referenced source has more information.

In any event, if IQ were useless, it would not have survived for a century, despite all those criticisms.

High IQ is no guarantee of effectiveness, or of innovation, or even of success. But low IQ pretty much defeats them all. And we?ve all met people who ?can do _anything_?.

Joe Gwinn

Reply to
Joseph Gwinn

I bought my daughter an algebra book when she was in HS. We went though some of it, but in the end math was not what she was interested in. (I don't know how much was fear, since her dad had her back.)

My son is now taking 'pre' calculus in HS (calc next year.) According to him, he's basically learning all the algebra that his previous teachers failed to teach. My message was basically to get use to it. Lousy teachers are a fact of life, and you often have to teach yourself and/ or find a group of peers to learn with.

(He's taking physics in HS this year too, teacher is also weak... I was thinking I could go in some afternoons and maybe help some... I asked him and he's a little uncertain how he would feel having his dad there... we'll see.)

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

You might find out if his high school has a science club and volunteer there. I did that and I think teachers like to be in charge. But at the science club, it was more informal.

I made a few things to illustrate how things work. Little things like a strong magnet dropping thru a copper pipe.

Dan

Reply to
dcaster

Good luck at "volunteering". My experience is that the teachers don't want you around.

I've clashed with many a teacher over the years... always successful, but that's the advantage we of the "bully" designation enjoy >:-} ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

Is it possible that the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already making humans dumber?

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Artist

Only the AGW true believers.

Reply to
krw

Oh, I think I'd be OK with the teacher. I would do any contradicting that might have to be done, as quietly as I could. Well maybe not, I guess it depends somewhat on the teacher.

If I brought my own demo it might be OK. A mic, amp, into a digital 'scope is nice. My rigol does simultaneous time domain with the FFT frequency. That's pretty cool to see.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

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Reply to
Artist

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It's not that many individuals. And the effect isn't strictly some people g etting everything right and some people getting nothing right - it's more t hat a test centred on the mean performance necessarily provides less inform ation about the performance of the tails, and if you want to find out about them you need new tests that spread out the performance numbers of the unu sually good so that you've got enough variance in their results to have som ething to look at.

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If memory serves, the test results were originally normalised to give a gua ssian distribution, and one has to suspect that the test items ended up bei ng selected to avoid that arithmetically demanding operation - which would have happened when the arithmetic was still being done by the research assi stants, rather than the computing hardware that hadn't been invented back t hen - I'm old enbough to have done a least squares analysis on an hand-cran ked mechanical calculator, a year of so before Melbourne University bought an IBM 7040/44.

We did have CSIRAC in the physics department

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but the fast paper-tape readers had broken down before then, and it doesn't seem to have been used after 1956 (which was a few years before there).

Because they smear out the fact that there isn't much information there.

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China has had a few thousand years of selection for literacy - which is dif ficult to attain and sustain with the Chinese writing system, making the in dividuals who can attain and sustain competence correspondingly valuable t o their society.

I'd imagine that the capacity to decide daft ideograms correlates with the capacity to score well on culture free IQ tests.

Whether it correlates well with the kind of tasks that require an intellige nt comprehesion of what's going on in the real world is open to question. t here have been a lot of Chinese for a long time, and they've invented their fair share of useful techniques, but they are less famous for exploiting t hem.

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It more that if a scale measures weight, colour and furriness, it's not a p articularly reliable guide to any one of these properties.

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What it tells you is what we already know - you can't get into medical scho ol if you don't score well on an IQ test. The spread within each group is l arge enough to make it clear that IQ doesn't have much to do with performan ce, and medical occupations are the only one where there aren't practitione rs with sub-average intelligence (as measured by IQ tests).

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If you don't score well on IQ tests, you chances of getting into an educati on stream that will let get into a job where you can be innovative, or effe ctive on scale where it can be noticed, aren't all that great.

There's a certain element of self-fulfilling prophecy here.

Sure. I can remember one who had a wife with social ambitions which meant - in practice - that he changed jobs a bit too frequently to ever make the m ark he should have. He was a really useful guy to have around, while he las ted. Being able to come up with the innovations, or being able to see what' s going on, is only a part of what makes people successful.

Nobody tests for "character", persistence and application, but they all mat ter too, and defects along any one of those axes can be just as fatal as st upidity.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

The Flynn effect suggests otherwise.

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At a more physical level, the air we exhale contains about 5% CO2. That's 50,000 parts per million. A change in the CO2 of the inhaled air from 270ppm (pre-industrial level) to the current 400ppm doesn't seem likely to be significant.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Just a couple of years of (2) gets a lifetime of (1).

A teacher trying to demonstrate how smart he is?

When I was a kid, I always hated word problems where the English was harder to parse than the problem was to solve. We had a really good math program in elementary school and high school, with three years of wasted time between.

Reply to
krw

Point made.

Reply to
krw

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Since what we exhale contains 50,000 parts per million of CO2, the chance t hat an increase from 400ppm to even 3,000ppm is what's making the differenc e seems remote.

One has to wonder where the researchers got the CO2 that they used to boost the CO2 content of the air in the lab.

From my time at Haffmans NV in Venlo

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I'm aware that CO2 gas is a useful by-product of the brewing industry, and a lot is sold to soft-drink manufacturers to make soft-drink fizzy.

The odds are that the academics used brewer-generated beverage CO2 to spike the air in their test areas. It would be interesting to see what other gas es came with the CO2. Brewers CO2 is purified before it is sold on, but I d on't know how, nor to what extent. Beverage grade CO2 is 99.9% pure CO2, wi th most of the residue nitrogen, but that still leaves room for interesting impurities. Nitrous oxide comes to mind ... it is used in the food trade t o froth whipped cream, and some people use the cartridges to get a cheap a nd more or less legal high.

I'm reminded of a sociological study that used fake liqueurs versus real li queurs to test the psychological component of drunken behaviour.

The fake liqueurs didn't contain any ethyl alcohol, but the flavourings use d to make them similar to real liqueurs were esters of higher alcohols, whi ch are rather more effective than ethyl alcohol in messing up human brain c hemistry ...

That story came from my third year organic chemistry lecturers - one of man y cautionary tales about being careful about the minor components of your t est materials.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman
[snip].

Possibly. What symptoms are you experiencing? ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

Just being good at math isn't enough. You also have to learn to translate real life problems into mathematical form, so that you can then *apply* the whole maths toolbox to find a solution. Yes, I found that hard too, in my high school days. I've gotten the hang of it since, I think.

Jeroen Belleman

Reply to
Jeroen Belleman

Yes indeed.

And if you haven't met them, you can watch them on "The Apprentice". Unfortunately some youngsters are getting the idea that's a good way to run a business.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

[APPLAUSE!]

Mark L. Fergerson

Reply to
alien8752

Mark L. Fergerson does seem to have been exposed to a lot more CO2 than most. Having your head up your own ass can do that, or so I've been told.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

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