Mea Culpa. They suckered me, and I fell for it. I should know better, really, than to just take an Atlantic Monthly chart and post it just because it happens to support my fervent belief that America's schools need radical improvements in science and math education. A hat tip to Chad over at Uncertain Principles who tipped me off to the (now) obvious.Some of you may remember the chart on relative test score performance of eighth grade science students from different countries (reposted here for your review.)Looks pretty dismal, huh? Well, take a look at this re-plotted version of the test score chart from Chad's blog, which has been normalized on a scale of zero to one, as many physicists prefer. (Note that the original test score chart only ranged from 500 to 600.)Okay, that doesn't look so bad. Now which should we believe? Is there evidence here for an international crisis in American science education?This time, I actually did go all the way back to the original source, "Highlights From the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 2003." Surprisingly enough, despite all of the media teeth-gnashing, there was nothing in the ...

George Bernard Shaw once said, "One man who has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't." If he is right, we're in trouble. According to a report from the Asia Society on"Math and Science Education in a Global Age: What the US Can Learn From China," While we can certainly talk the talk, let's just say we're not really walking the walk.Article and photo credit goes to the Atlantic.Interesting lessons abound surrounding humility and achievement, as well as a pretty strong message that we are deceiving ourselves as to how competitive we are. Sound like a recipe for disaster to me.

Many people, myself included, consider sports to offer invaluable lessons in discipline, commitment, delayed gratification, and teamwork. "A Healthy body breeds a healthy mind."But apparently, whether the sport makes the individual or the already-defined individual picks the sport, the following table shows some interesting correlations.Division I Graduation Rates for Entering Classes of 1996-99, by Sport Men's Sports GSRp> Federal Rate Baseball 65% 46% Basketball 59 45 Cross Country/Track 74 60 Fencing 87 68 Football 65 55 Golf 78 61 Gymnastics 86 73 ...

Having trouble in your math class? Physics problem sets getting you down? Behind on that term paper?Just do what most American companies are doing these days. Outsource your Homework.For $2.50 an hour (or $100 per month for unlimited hours) you can receive live, personal, online tutoring from a trained educator holding at least a Master's degree in your field of study through TutorVista of Bangalor India. This obviously spells trouble for the American companies struggling to demand rates of over $40 an hour."We've changed the paradigm of tutoring," said Krishnan Ganesh, founder and chairman of TutorVista, which offers subjects ranging from grammar to geometry for children as young as 6 years old to adults in college."It's not that the U.S. education system is not good. It's just that it's impossible to give personalized education at an affordable cost unless you use technology, unless you use the Internet and unless you can use lower-cost job centers like India," he said over a crackly Internet-phone line from Bangalore. "We can deliver that." Many of the tutors have masters degrees in their subjects, said Ganesh. On average, they have taught for 10 years. Each undergoes 60 hours of training, including ...

Check out this story on Seed about billionaire ex-mathematician Jim Simmons who has committed $50 million to improving math education across the US.

Jo Anne over at Cosmic Variance just posted a truly sad statement on our country's reputation, even within itself.from her post:I arrived in the San Francisco airport on Monday night, passed passport control, picked up my luggage, and went to hand in my customs form, which is the last step in the arrivals process. The customs agent stopped me dead in my tracks. He first asked, "Are you an American." Obviously I answered "yes" straight-away. Then he asked, "OK, then, what is the square root of 98?"So, after I gave my intelligent answer of "HUH," the guy burst out laughing and said, "Yes, of course you're an American. You don't know anything!" I wonder what would have happened if I had been awake. My normal, instantaneous response would have been "7 times the square root of 2". I wonder if I would have been arrested if I said that....

The TED blog has posted a great video of Steven Levitt's talk on the economics of drug dealers. Levitt is the author of the NYT best seller Freakonomics, which I highly recommend.

Many of you probably caught the story posted in USA Today about life-expectancy variations across the US. But in my effort to bring science closer to the common man, I would like to recommend everyone check out the actual research paper online. You can find "Eight Americas: Investigating Mortality Disparities across Races, Counties, and Race-Counties in the United States" by Christopher J. L. Murray1,2,3, Sandeep C. Kulkarni2,4, Catherine Michaud2,3, Niels Tomijima3, Maria T. Bulzacchelli3, Terrell J. Iandiorio3, Majid Ezzati1,2* on the Public Library of Science web site.There are some very interesting details that never made it into the more distributed articles.This graphic depicts County life expectancies by Race and Sex.A) Life expectancy at birth for black males and females. Only counties with more than five deaths for any 5-y age group (0-85) were mapped, to avoid unstable results.(B) Life expectancy at birth for white males and females.Just the distribution of Blacks in America is interesting alone, not to mention the life expectancy variations. This next graph shows the results of a clustering analysis that was able to detect 8 broad clusters of citizenry that displayed common health statistics.Here is how Life expectancy by ...

One of the principle arguments that the Intelligent Design advocacy offers in their refutation of the theory of Evolution, is that life is so "irreducibly complex" that the likelihood of its having evolved to its present state is so vanishingly small that we must have been explicitly designed by some more complex outside entity. The group tends, on a regular basis, to trot out "Math" in order to support their claims.The ID "Math" argument goes something like this: In order for life to have evolved, a very long series of mutations must have occurred over a very long period of time, and each individual mutation has a very low probability of occurring. When you look at the entire chain of necessary fortuitous events (multiply each of the tiny probabilities together) the resulting likelihood is, as John Paulos has said "so minuscule and wildly improbably as to be essentially impossible." Therefore, some other larger intelligent power must be at work explicitly guiding the process.It sounds rational to the layman, and it even supposedly has math to back it up and lend credibility.But consider the following. Last week, Valerie Wilson of Long Island, NY won the "$1M" jackpot*(see ...

David Coulter, a Harvard economist, has examined mortality and healthcare statistics to determine that there have been significant extensions to life-expectancy over the past forty years, but that the healthcare costs to support longer life spans are growing even faster.In his paper due to be published tomorrow in the New England Journal of Medicine, Coulter reports that someone who reaches the age of 65 can expect to spend an average of $158,549 on healthcare over their lifetime. But this investment has increased a whopping 13.8 times (when adjusted for inflation) since 1960 when the costs would have amounted to $11,495. What does it buy the hopeful 65 year-old? Less than four more years. Today's new retiree can now expect to live another 18 year instead of 14.4 years on average.And while it might seem callus to discuss diminishing returns when thinking about life extension, there will clearly come a point when the additional spending for extreme measures will not significantly improve a patient's quality of life or material extend life expectancy despite the investment. Tough decisions abound.The study also points out that part of the driver for these cost increases might be that hospitals ...