Innumerate people aren’t inferior, they’ve just been the victims of poor educational methods.
When I finished school, I had only the most rudimentary grasp of arithmetic, and division and fractions made my head hurt.
The prettiness of fractals gave me a desire to improve my math abilities, and before I new it, I was a math geek.
Yes, I learned how to do spherical trigonometry because it seemed like fun. I can remember calling a friend, ecstatic, because I was able to visualize a problem in phase space mentally. What a rush.
Same with symbolic logic. How the hell do people get by without it? Sure would make debates around here less frustrating if it was still part of the basic curriculum.
How the hell do educators present these things in such a way as to make them seem dull? Ah well, they manage to work the same voodoo on history, I guess it’s possible to suck the excitement out of anything.
Not necessarily. I think some people are “number” oriented and some people are “word” oriented.
Spelling always came easy for me. I was an early reader.
I still love to read. I usually read two books at a time (not simultaneously, but I alternate between them).
I’m a grammar Nazi.
Much like Cranky’s OP, I am going to go apeshit if I see ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ mixed up one more time. Or if someone spells it 'wie**rd.’ Or doesn’t capitalize ‘I’ or use proper punctuation.
Don’t even get me started on those damned extraneous apostrophes.
It’s just so easy. Why doesn’t everyone get it?
Math on the other hand…ugh.
I don’t even like to balance the checkbook.
I too am mathematically-challenged (although not arithmetically for some reason).
And I also wish I’d been exposed to better teaching methods in my formative years: It might have helped, but it might not have either.
And stats are WORSE than a foreign language.
And all you clever-dicks who reckon that ANYONE can do it if they put their mind to it, or who get pissed-off with those of us who aren’t competent with numbers/symbols, Get Naffed.
One of the stated goals of the current administration at my school district is for 90% of all students to score at or above the 50th percentile on the big end of the year norm-referenced test. When I pointed out that this is impossible, I was criticized for not believeing our students could meet high standards.
One of the problems in the 5th grade textbook asked students to find the perimeter of a triangle with sides of 10cm, 10cm, and 25cm. Three of my students were able to spot the obvious mistake without any prompting, and more than half found it when I told them there was a big problem with this triangle. How this got past the editors, I’ll never know.
The innumeracy gaff that grates on my nerves every time it see/hear it–and I hear it on the news all the time–is using “x times greater than” to mean “x times as great as”. These are not interchangible.
It also irritates me to hear something described as “100 times smaller than”, as if it were the opposite of “100 times as great as”. Dammit, nothing can be more than 1 time smaller than anything else. If a is 100 times as great as b, then b is 99% smaller than a.
Yeah, it is definitely more a probability question. The answer depends on how many choices are available for each question. Obviously, you’ve got a better chance of getting your questions right on a true/falese exam than you do on a multiple choice exam. A statistics question would consist of something like taking the test scores for the entire class and then finding a percentile rank for a given score. Or perhaps, given raw data from a ficticious experiment, running a T-test to see if there is a correlation between actually trying to answer test questions correctly and high test scores vs. just blindly guessing.
BTW, in the last year I actually read in a newspaper a blurb that said that some particular change in maritime shipping policies would result in “a savings of over 400% in some products”
Kinsey, what you describe isn’t inconsistent with Larry’s statement. I am probably just as much of a word buff as you are, but I also am good at math and have a PhD in engineering. Being good at one doesn’t mean you have to be bad at the other - it’s entirely possible that you would be much better with numbers if you had had different teachers when you were younger. Many people aren’t math-phobic when they enter school, but at some point, they decide that they just can’t do that stuff, and stop trying. (I know that there is such a thing as dyscalculia, and I’m not trying to say that everyone who has a problem with numbers had a bad education or whatever. But the number of people who don’t like to read is a heckuva lot higher than the number of people with dyslexia, and I don’t see why numeracy should be that different).
“X times greater than” indicates that the quantity has been increased by the stated factor. “X times as great as” indicates that the quantity has been modified by the desired factor.
When you say a is x times as great as b, you are starting with a value, b, and multiplying that value by x to find the result, a.
a is x times as great as b --> a=bx
When you say a is x times greater than b, you are starting with a value, b, and adding to that value an amount equal to bx.
a is x times greater than b --> a = bx+b or a = b(x+1)
Think of it another way. Would you rather have a salary that is 50% more than your current salary, or one that is 50% as much as your current salary? If the two phrases mean the same, there would be no difference between these two. Personally, I’d go for the 50% more.
These are both examples of purchases with negative expected returns. However, the insurance reduces one’s uncertainty, whereas the lottery ticket increases it.
An early utlity theory paper by Milton Friedman and ___ Savage created a theoretical utility scale that would justify both purchases.
