Back to Nerdville

I'm sure that every one of my blog friends has missed being kept up on the goings-on in Nerdville. Thanks to Slashdot.org, I'll put an end to that drought.

Study Suggests the Number-Line Concept Is Not Intuitive 352

Posted by samzenpuson Wednesday April 25, @10:56PM
from the learning-to-count dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Yupno people of New Guinea have provided clues to the origins of the number-line concept, and suggest that the familiar concept of time may be cultural as well. From the article: 'Tape measures. Rulers. Graphs. The gas gauge in your car, and the icon on your favorite digital device showing battery power. The number line and its cousins – notations that map numbers onto space and often represent magnitude – are everywhere. Most adults in industrialized societies are so fluent at using the concept, we hardly think about it. We don't stop to wonder: Is it 'natural'? Is it cultural? Now, challenging a mainstream scholarly position that the number-line concept is innate, a study suggests it is learned."

 

Microsoft's Hotmail Challenge Backfires428

Posted by samzenpuson Wednesday April 25, @05:50PM
from the not-the-desired-outcome dept.

Barence writes "Microsoft challenged the editor of PC Pro to return to Hotmail after six years of using Gmail, to prove that its webmail service had vastly improved — but the challenge backfired when he had his Hotmail account hacked. PC Pro's editor say he was quietly impressed with a number of new Hotmail features, including SkyDrive integration and mailbox clean-up features. He'd even imported his Gmail and contacts into Microsoft's service. But the two-week experiment came to an abrupt end when Hotmail sent a message containing a malicious link to all of his contacts. 'What's even more worrying is that it's not only my webmail that's been compromised, but my Xbox login (which holds my credit card details) and now my PC login too. Because Windows 8 practically forces you to login with your Windows Live/Hotmail details to access features such as the Metro Store, synchronization and SkyDrive,' he writes."

 

'Gaia' Scientist Admits Mispredicting Rate of Climate Change697

Posted by Unknown Lameron Wednesday April 25, @10:05AM
from the captain-planet-will-still-kill-you dept.

DesScorp writes "James Lovelock, the scientist that came up with the 'Gaia Theory' and a prominent herald of climate change, once predicted utter disaster for the planet from climate change, writing 'before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.' Now Lovelock is walking back his rhetoric, admitting that he and other prominent global warming advocates were being alarmists. In a new interview with MSNBC he says: '"The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened," Lovelock said. "The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," he said. "The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that," he added.' Lovelock still believes the climate is changing, but at a much, much slower pace."

Comments

[Ole Phat Stu]

Humanity discovered the number-line concept slowly over many centuries. Look how the Egyptians struggled with fractions (reciprocals) and Pythagoras with irrationals.
Even in the middle ages people had problems with the concept of negative numbers.
And imaginary numbers as a number-line at right angles to the real numbers is a fairly recent concept.

There was also a discussion about whether time is fractal (a series of Cantor-dust points) rather than the continuum which is convenient for Newtonian physics. I lost track of that though, following instead Sean's papers on the Arrow of Time (aka entropy).

Thanks for the heads-up :-)

[Darlene]

Don't talk numbers to me. I was the class dunce in arithmetic and I avoid the subject even now. I blame my step-father who convinced me that girls were poor in math. I accepted his belief and didn't really try.

I am pleased that the experts are walking back the doomsday scenario on climate change, but I do think we need to be cautious.

Your yard photos in the previous post are spectacular. In my other house I had a Pyracantha hedge around my back fence and some years it was covered with white blossoms. The birds get the berries on my small one in my current yard, so I don't have the pretty red berries to look at.

[Cop Car]

Stu--I think I was fine with numbers and numerous theoretical dimensions until, in Kinetic Theory of Gases, I came up against negative probability densities. It took a day or two for me to wrap my mind around that! (BTW: Lagrangian mechanics rule!)

Darlene--It's too bad that your step-father held that belief, and worse that you were led to accept it. I feel for you! However, it is hard for me to accept you as any kind of dunce.

It will be interesting (if you and I last long enough) to see what becomes of the climate change debate.

The comment stream on Bogie's posting of her beautiful plant went as follows (I hope she doesn't sue me for stealing from her):

Bogie--Beautiful bush! Ours did well in producing berries this year, too - only because, each time we watered the grass during drought conditions, the bushes got watered.

BTW: You did plant the bush to provide berries to the birds, did you not?!!!!
Posted by: Cop Car at Sep 25, 2011 4:45:56 PM

I planted the shrub because I thought it was cool looking - and it was a bonus that it produced berries that birds eat.
Posted by: bogie at Sep 26, 2011 4:31:04 AM

Great choice of plant, bogie!
Posted by: buffy at Sep 30, 2011 11:40:06 PM

[Ole Phat Stu]

Imagine if the UCSD cognitive scientists/anthropologists had missed one tiny detail in their number-line paper :
The primitive natives were placing numbers on the line on a logarithmic scale, because that is how they multiplied (aka slide rule).
Or even more subtle : placed the numbers (on a 0-100% of c scale) relativistically ;-)

Wouldn't that be mind-blowing! Hey, there's an idea for an SF short story right there!!

[Cop Car]

Well, Stu, take it and run with it. I'll look forward to your short story. I am particularly taken with measuring relativistically. Go, guy, go!

[bogie]

I'm not particularly suprised about the number thing. As one who struggles with anything over basic math (i.e. statistics or calc - which is still pretty basic stuff), I am pretty confident I never thought that any of this was inate knowledge.

[joared]

I always liked math and don't recall ever hearing girls shouldn't. Maybe that was because my high school algebra teacher was a woman. I still enjoy working with numbers.

[Cop Car]

Joared--My high school algebras and plane geometry teachers were male; but, my trigonometry and solid geometry teacher was female. After that, it was a long dry spell until I met another mathematics teacher who was female - it took the death of our male teacher of vector analysis for me to be taught mathematics by another woman. And she was the last - so far, at least! It amazed me how simple vector analysis became for me once the woman took over our class. I attributed it to the "fact" (in my own mind it's a fact) that each sex communicates better among its own members. Thought: Are people who are androgynous universal communicators?