The notion that humans often take actions and pursue goals due to subconscious desires and instincts dates back to Sigmund Freud, who suggested, among other things, that repressed sexual urges underlay some human behavior. Freud’s theories were later judged unreliable and largely nonfalsifiable. In any event, until recently it was assumed that conscious decisions are essential for the mental processes involved in setting and pursuing a goal. Indeed, goal pursuit has been considered nearly synonymous with conscious thought.
But a number of recent studies suggest otherwise. In one of the first studies of this sort, some U.S. students were seated
Continue reading Latest research indicates we unconsciously pursue goals
Many readers will be familiar with the Jeopardy! television show, which is the most popular quiz show in North America. One of the present bloggers confesses to watching it almost every weekday evening when not on travel (and hardly any other television program). The other blogger is also a keen armchair contestant.
In this show, clues are presented on a video screen to the three contestants, and after Canadian host Alex Trebek completes reading the clue, contestants must first ring in with a handheld button. The first contestant to ring in then has five seconds to provide the answer, which
Continue reading IBM’s “Watson” to compete against Jeopardy champs
[This article has also been posted Here.]
A large fraction of the public still does not accept the most basic facts of modern geology, such as the notion that the earth is many millions of years old. For example, fully 45 percent of Americans insist that the earth was created at some time within the past 10,000 years [Gallup2004].
Much of this skepticism stems from the creationist movement, which has gone to great lengths to criticize the radiometric methods used to date rocks and fossils, such as Carbon-14, Rb-Sr and the K-Ar methods. Creationists cite “anomalies” that have
Continue reading How reliable are the radiometric methods used for geologic ages?
In the summer of 1950, while having lunch with colleagues who were chatting about recent reports of “flying saucers” in the news, nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi suddenly blurted out, “Where is everybody?” [Web2002, pg. 17-18]. Behind his question was the following line of reasoning: (a) There are likely many other technological civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy; (b) It is highly likely that other technological civilizations are many thousands of years more advanced than us (since if they are less advanced by even a few decades they would not be technological); (c) In a few million years, they could have
Continue reading Fermi’s Paradox and Stephen Hawking
Recently considerable attention has been drawn to the fact that some errors were found in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, and the fact that, as revealed in a set of emails exchanged by some leading climate scientists in the U.K., the report had been “dressed” to some extent. Many now claim that there is a full-scale conspiracy of the scientific world to hide the “truth” from the public, a view now apparently held by 16% of Americans, according to a recent poll [Broder; Vanderhooft].
Similar claims have been made about modern evolutionary biology. The recent movie
Continue reading Creationism, global warming denial, and scientific integrity
Introduction
Question: What mathematical discovery more than 1500 years ago:
Is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, single discovery in the field of mathematics? Involved three subtle ideas that evaded the greatest minds of antiquity, even including geniuses such as Archimedes? Was fiercely resisted in Europe for hundreds of years after its discovery? Even today, in historical treatments of mathematics, is often dismissed with scant mention, or else is ascribed to the wrong source?
Answer: Our modern system of positional decimal arithmetic with zero, which was discovered in India in the fourth or fifth century.
Why?
Continue reading The greatest mathematical discovery?
Copyright law has always been a confusing arena, but recent developments have grave future consequences.
We begin by noting that most of the world lives under different copyright laws: European Union, Commonwealth, Japanese, and other dispensations differ widely. See the CEIC’s writings for a record of details relevant to mathematical publishing. For instance, under Canadian copyright law, known as “Cancopy,” library use often generates royalties which the government gave away to publishers without individual ability to demur. Margaret Atwood does see them; small fish do not. Originally copyright was the concern of printers eager to protect their investment.
Continue reading The confusing morass of copyright laws
The latest results for math and science education in first-world nations such as the U.S., the major European nations, and Australia are not particularly encouraging. In the following table, the first two columns contain the latest results from the “Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study” (TIMSS) for Grade Four and Grade Eight, respectively [Institute2009], while the third column contains rankings of math performance among 15-year-olds in a separate study by the OECD [OECD2003]:
Grade Four TIMSS Rankings
Hong Kong (607) Singapore (599) Chinese Taipei (576) Japan (568) Kazakhstan (549) Russian Federation (544) England (541) Latvia (537)
Continue reading Sad state of math and science education
[This is a condensed version of a paper written by one of the present bloggers (Borwein). For the full article, with references, see http://www.carma.newcastle.edu.au/~jb616/psychology.pdf.]
Some years ago, my brother Peter surveyed other academic disciplines. He discovered that students who bitch mightily about calculus professors still prefer the relative certainty of how-and-what we teach-and-assess to the subjectivity of a creative writing course or the rigors of a physics or chemistry laboratory course. Similarly, while I have met my share of micro-managing Deans–who view mathematics with disdain when they look at the size of our research grants or the infrequency of our
Continue reading The psychology of mathematics
Recently, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote a very interesting, in-depth article on the recent economic collapse and economists’ part in the failure. His full article (which we highly recommend) can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html
Krugman’s introduction presents a valuable synopsis of the problem:
As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories
Continue reading How did the economists get it so wrong?
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