"Evolution is as natural as gravity"

Darwin at Home is an open source software project that aims to bring the process of evolution into your computer at home so that you can see it working. From the initial projects to evolve locomotion it is now moving towards a more generic framework for evolution in general.

US girls are discouraged from doing math it seems. Math skills suffer big time in the USA  according to the recent New York Times article that states:

The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.

The study [link to pdf file] suggests that while many girls have exceptional talent in math — the talent to become top math researchers, scientists and engineers — they are rarely identified in the United States. A major reason, according to the study, is that American culture does not highly value talent in math, and so discourages girls — and boys, for that matter — from excelling in the field. The study will be published Friday in Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

“We’re living in a culture that is telling girls you can’t do math — that’s telling everybody that only Asians and nerds do math,” said the study’s lead author, Janet E. Mertz, an oncology professor at the University of Wisconsin, whose son is a winner of what is viewed as the world’s most-demanding math competitions.

Since math is a fundamental economic building block for science, medicine, and yes... finance and economics, this begs to ask the question: Can we afford to cheat our children out of something so basic and expect to our country to have a strong future?

They found that while girls can be just as talented as boys at mathematics, some are driven from the field because they are teased, ostracized or simply neglected.

"The U.S. culture that is discouraging girls is also discouraging boys," Janet Mertz, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who led the study said in a statement.

"The situation is becoming urgent. The data show that a majority of the top young mathematicians in this country were not born here."

Writing in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Mertz and colleagues described their analysis of data from international math competitions going back to 1974. They also looked at surveys of U.S. students.

"It is deemed uncool within the social context of USA middle and high schools to do mathematics for fun; doing so can lead to social ostracism. Consequently, gifted girls, even more so than boys, usually camouflage their mathematical talent to fit in well with their peers," they wrote.

FAIRLY EVEN DISTRIBUTION

They also challenged the widespread belief....

Read the rest:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081010/lf_nm_life/us_
math_usa;_ylt=Ap.1F4OMJ0niv2LDU4Nq4Kas0NUE

The current predictions are these:

Changed/Les prévisions ont changés: 2:48 PM 08/10/2008

		Conservatives Conservateurs	119
		Liberal Party Party libéral	75
		N.D.P. N.P.D.	29
		Bloc Québécois	41
X		Other Autres	2
		Too Close to call	42
		Total	308

Tulang One Year Ago

Ako ay may kaibigan,
at 'Jorcs' ang kanyang pangalan
Hindi maka-basag pinggan,
'pagkat 'to'y inaalagaan

S'ya'y lubhang napakagaling
sa kahit anu pang sining,
kaya't huwag mong hamunin
'pagkat 'di kayang talunin!

Ngayong kanyang kaarawan,
nagdiwang ang sambayanan.
Napuno ang kanilang tiyan
ng pagkaing mala-suman

Happy birthday, Sef! :D

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/topnav/materials/listbytype/Space_Math_III.html

Literacy Homework 09-10-08

Numeracy Homework 09-10-08 (1)

Numeracy Homework 09-10-08 (2)

We have finished our block on Myths now, so I thought we would do something different for homework this week.

Have fun, be imaginative and creative!

Mr W.

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/topnav/materials/listbytype/Space_Math_II.html

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/topnav/materials/listbytype/Space_Math_I.html

It got crowded.

Science and Mathematics

3-quarks daily pointed us to an article that talks about some of the most famous scientists to not win a Nobel Prize. So I went to the link that they provided and read the 10 frame "slide show".

I was distressed at the number of women on the list.

But I was also interested in a couple of the entries for other reasons.

One of the people was Ralph Alpher. He did some work on the Big Bang theory and predicted that the Big Bang would produce background microwave radiation. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Laboratories discovered this radiation (in part by accident!) won the Nobel but the person that predicted it would be there didn't! Stephen Hawking mentions this in his book A Brief History of Time.

The other "left out" person was one Josiah Gibbs (formerly of Yale University).

The reason this interests me is that Gibbs made some mathematical discoveries as well; one of them was the "Gibbs Phenomenon". I'll give an example of this:

If $latex f $ is piecewise smooth and periodic with period $latex \pi $, then $latex f$ can be
represented by a Fourier Series (a series in terms of sine and cosine
functions).

For example: the function $latex f(x)=1,x\in \lbrack 2k,2k+1)$ and
$latex f(x)=-1,x\in \lbrack 2k+1,2k+2)$ is represented by:

$latex f(x)=\frac{2}{\pi }(\sin (\pi x)+\frac{1}{3}\sin (3\pi x)+\frac{1}{5}\sin (5\pi x)+...)$

This formula "works" except for the values $latex x =k{\pi}$ where the original function is discontinuous. But the sine series is convergent at these points and converges to the average value (y-value) of the original function at the jump discontinuities. That convergence is called the Gibbs Phenomenon. Note that every finite partial sum of the sine series is continuous everywhere but the infinite sum is not convergent at integer values.

Politics

Note: McCain does NOT have a lock on every segment of the military vote.

The Military Times recently released its annual survey of subscribers, which shows McCain-Palin enjoying a commanding lead over Obama-Biden (68/23 percent). But this is not a random sample, by any stretch of the imagination. Military Times subscribers are significantly older than the active military population. Nearly half of those surveyed are retirees, and minorities are under-represented.

"Everyone I talk to wants change but on base you can't say certain things. At a bar or a party, everyone tells me they're voting for Obama," said Thomas Singleton, 27, a former military telecommunications specialist who was speaking to OffTheBus outside the National Museum of the Marine Corps. Perched on a hill in Quantico, the museum's stunning roof line can be seen for miles. Its design -- a 200-foot tilted mast atop a huge glass atrium -- was inspired by the famous Iwo Jima flag raising of World War II.

"My military friends are tired of being lied to," said Singleton. "They're told to deploy for six months, but it ends up being a year. And when they come home, they can't find a job. One of my friends is staying in the Army only because he can't find a civilian job."

The genuine patriotism these young people feel is complicated by events in Iraq, and grumblings about military miscalculations. "I was proud to go to Iraq, but when I got there all we did for weeks was play cards. We were unprepared. We had the wrong supplies," said Skye Spann, 27, a former medical specialist. "It didn't seem like we had a clear mission."

Deployed Troops Give Four Times More Money To Obama

People in all branches of the service are getting tired of repeated deployments. "I think more of them will vote for Obama than McCain," said Jennings. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, deployed troops are putting their money where their mouth is: they've given four times as much money to Obama as McCain.

"Any assumption that the military vote is overwhelmingly in favor of the Republican Party -- based on demographics alone -- is suspect, at the very least," said Donald S. Inbody, a retired Navy Captain who is on the political science faculty at Texas State University. Inbody also is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas in Austin, where he is researching the political attitudes and behavior of the American military enlisted person. [...]

The real non-calculus answer is depressingly simple.

Cast: 2 Uncles, An Aunty & 4 Cousins.

Last week, while reading newspapers, one of my cousins came across this riddle (won't tell you which newspaper it was) and we began drawing out possible answer. Some came out with algebra expression, logical explanation and even only-god-knows-what mathematics! (ok, laugh away!). As expected, we came out with different answers. Weh had great time arguing and finding a solution since the answer will only be provided in the next week (this week) issue. Hey, why don't you try it out as well? Here's the riddle:

It takes two gardeners 8 days to mow a lawn. One is lazy and one is energetic.

The energetic one would only take 12 days to mow the lawn on his own.

How many days would the lazy gardener take to do the work?

Feel free to flood the comment box with your a-z solution! Good Luck & Happy Trying, folks! (^__^)

However, there are some other questions on-line (zdf.de), and of course there are mathematical questions among them. Try yourself, and see how you do.

The question, which month is the longest in Germany is clever, since most people (including myself) might miss the switch from summer time to GMT taking place in October, which adds an extra hour. Others questions were silly, like the question how high a man could jump "with the force of a flea". The correct answer seems to me that he cannot jump at all. What they mean is: If you magnify a flea to the size of a man, how high would the jump magnify (unchecked answer is about 150m). By the way, a surprising observation with a mathematical background is that all animals that jump can jump almost the same height of about half a meter.

However, there was one question, which attracted my interest. If you make two cups from a paper, one with a square base and one circular base, which one is larger? The exact phrase was "deform" the area of a paper. If you put it like this, the problem sounds equivalent to the exercise to maximize the volume with given surface. Doing this for for the cuboid formed cups and for cylinder cups, we get that the cylinder cup is a bit larger. It has to be twice as wide than high, which is not really practical, by the way.

First problem: Verify this!

However, if we actually want to make a cup, things are different. We probably do not want to glue snippets of paper together to a circular form. So let us stick with very simple things, like one square cut out from a sheet of paper, and we cut out our circle from that square, plus some stripes of paper forming the upward walls of the cup. I did the computations for a DIN paper with edges 1 and square root of 2, and it seems that the cup with the square base can be made a bit larger in this case.

Second problem: Verify that!

It seems, things in real life math are never as easy as our school exercises.

In general the works of art were dire. This is not a reflexion on the intellectual abilities of the artists---most works of art are dire. I speak as a person with no ability in the art of drawing and painting but someone who, albeit limited by my red/green colour deficiency, can understand the excitement of seeing a great painting or drawing. Points of revelation and understanding in my life have included paintings---mixed in with reading Gödel's incompleteness proof, hearing Ligeti's first quartet, watching Richard II, reading Dermot Healy's When They Want to Know What We Were Like and so on for the first time, I have also been changed by Turner's Rain, Steam, Speed, Dürer's Oswald Krell and several of Rembrandt's self portraits.

My understanding is that a great painting requires:

1. a significant idea,
2. an impulse to express it,
3. an original manner of portraying it and
4. technical competence to execute it.

Ideas I have a-plenty. And the drive to express them. What I lack is the intellectual creativity to find a form in which to portray them (step 3) and the technical competence to put the portrayal on paper (step 4).

And this brings me back to the works we saw last weekend. They were generally dire not because of the execution and presumably not because of the idea (after all, they were produced by people trying to express their (largely justified) anger and frustration). The hardest step is to find a way of portraying the idea and that was the missing link. And this set me thinking further. I have never cared for or worked with a person with intellectual disabilities so am way out of my depth here but I always seem to hear of such people being told to use drawing, painting and sometimes music to express themselves and I wonder whether this is too limiting.

Compared with Littlewood or William of Ockham I am intellectually disabled. But that does not stop me creating (meta-)mathematics and philosophy. Littlewood and Bill would justifiably say that my scratchings are trivial but that neither dissuades me from creating them nor reduces my pleasure from the creation. And mathematical and philosphical ideas, however trivial, may be right or wrong but are never dire.

I wonder whether the people who created those works of art that I saw last weekend would get pleasure from creating mathematics; could they obtain pleasure from rediscovering some simple theorems, already well-known in the literature but not to them? I suspect that they are not given the opportunity because art is somehow seen as "suitable" whereas mathematics is not.

The intellectual engagement required to create mathematics beyond your current knowledge is no greater than that required to move across my step 3 above to produce a good painting. However, the difference would be one of quality---all mathematical proofs are good, however simple. Most paintings are bad, however complex. And that must affect the satisfaction of the creator.

«We use video animations to explain how Hamiltonian path, spanning trees, cosets in groups, and factor groups can be used to create computer generated symmetry patterns in hyperbolic and Euclidean planes.»

It was a really great talk: comprehensible even for non-specialists (there were lots of undergraduate students attending), yet sophisticated enough to arise the interest of chemists and crystalopraghs, who stayed after the talk to ask questions.

Now, what has really impressed me, was the level of energy and enthusiams he puts to his work. It reminds me of my professor — Algirdas Šukys — back in Lithuania. People with such a drive are invaluable in Science and Scientific Disciplines, I think.

Dear Uncle Ted,

What do you think about the new Mail Goggles feature from Google Mail?

- Norris Chucksworth, Nome-Ridicolo, FL

Norris - This is, without question, the greatest single innovation in email since the emoticon. Who knows how many tears cried, hearts broken, jobs lost and restraining orders issued could have been saved if only it had come along sooner?

For those of you who haven't heard yet, the premise is simple: during certain hours of the week (oh, say, in the wee hours of Friday and Saturday nights) whenever you, a Mail Goggles-enabled user, tries to send a pig-latin love sonnet to that cute account executive you were flirting with over lemon drop shots at the bar at the Marriott, Gmail responds with this message in a pop-up window:

"It's that time of day. Gmail aims to help you in many ways. Are you sure you want to send this? Answer some simple math problems to verify."

A timer begins counting down, and if you don't take some deep breaths, slap yourself a few times, squint at the screen and do some adding and subtracting - all within 60 seconds - you're prompted to try again. And, if the account exec was particularly charming, most likely again and again - until you realize the minor indignity of being told by an email program that you're too f*cked up to type or do simple sums is nothing when compared to your co-workers asking you on Monday if you're still eeply-day in-way ove-lay.

To be honest - I don't think the questions are NEARLY hard enough. The really determined, enamored drunk will figure out, after a few tries, that a calculator at the ready is the only thing standing between him or her and truly mortifying embarrassment. Maybe some truly difficult questions are in order, Google Labs developers? Like:

• Has your whole adult life been a lie?
• Do you eat like you do because you don't have anything else good in your life?
• Do you think God knows what you did to that sheep and is still punishing you for it, all these years later?
• Are the voices still telling you to kill Mrs. Schwartz?
• Have you stored the plastic explosive in a cool, dry, non-conductive container?

Sobering questions like these will keep bad poetry out of our outboxes, Google-Peeps. Think about it.

-Unk.

Mathematics education in the US: we know that our mathematics education at the lower levels. It turns out that we aren't doing a great job of educating our more talented mathematics students.

The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.

The study suggests that while many girls have exceptional talent in math — the talent to become top math researchers, scientists and engineers — they are rarely identified in the United States. A major reason, according to the study, is that American culture does not highly value talent in math, and so discourages girls — and boys, for that matter — from excelling in the field. The study will be published Friday in Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

"We're living in a culture that is telling girls you can't do math — that's telling everybody that only Asians and nerds do math," said the study's lead author, Janet E. Mertz, an oncology professor at the University of Wisconsin, whose son is a winner of what is viewed as the world's most-demanding math competitions. "Kids in high school, where social interactions are really important, think, 'If I'm not an Asian or a nerd, I'd better not be on the math team.' Kids are self selecting. For social reasons they're not even trying."

Many studies have examined and debated gender differences and math, but most rely on the results of the SAT and other standardized tests, Dr. Mertz and many mathematicians say. But those tests were never intended to measure the dazzling creativity, insight and reasoning skills required to solve math problems at the highest levels, Dr. Mertz and others say.

Dr. Mertz asserts that the new study is the first to examine data from the most difficult math competitions for young people, including the USA and International Mathematical Olympiads for high school students, and the Putnam Mathematical Competition for college undergraduates. For winners of these competitions, the Michael Phelpses and Kobe Bryants of math, getting an 800 on the math SAT is routine. The study found that many students from the United States in these competitions are immigrants or children of immigrants from countries where education in mathematics is prized and mathematical talent is thought to be widely distributed and able to be cultivated through hard work and persistence.

Science: Asexual reproduction does happen from time to time. We've now seen this in sharks.

RICHMOND, Va. - Scientists have confirmed the second case of a "virgin birth" in a shark.

In a study reported Friday in the Journal of Fish Biology, scientists said DNA testing proved that a pup carried by a female Atlantic blacktip shark in the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center contained no genetic material from a male.

The first documented case of asexual reproduction, or parthenogenesis, among sharks involved a pup born to a hammerhead at an Omaha, Neb., zoo.

"This first case was no fluke," Demian Chapman, a shark scientist and lead author of the second study, said in a statement. "It is quite possible that this is something female sharks of many species can do on occasion."

The aquarium sharks that reproduced without mates each carried only one pup, while some shark species can produce litters numbering in the dozen or more. The scientists cautioned that the rare asexual births should not be viewed as a possible solution to declining global shark populations.

"It is very unlikely that a small number of female survivors could build their numbers up very quickly by undergoing virgin birth," Chapman said.

The medical mystery began 16 months ago after the death of the Atlantic blacktip shark named Tidbit at the Virginia Beach aquarium. No male blacktip sharks were present during her eight years at the aquarium. [...]

Follow the link to read more.

Religion

Hat tip: Friendly Atheist.

Politics

From a Republican strategist:

Obama's donations (and McCain's) get scrutiny; not all are documented well:

Last December, someone using the name “Test Person,” from “Some Place, UT,” made a series of contributions, the largest being $764, to Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign totaling $2,410.07. [...]

An analysis of campaign finance records by The New York Times this week found nearly 3,000 donations to Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, from more than a dozen people with apparently fictitious donor information. The contributions represent a tiny fraction of the record $450 million Mr. Obama has raised. But the questionable donations — some donors were listed simply with gibberish for their names — raise concerns about whether the Obama campaign is adequately vetting its unprecedented flood of donors.

It is unclear why someone making a political donation would want to enter a false name. Some perhaps did it for privacy reasons. Another, more ominous possibility, of course, is fraud, perhaps in order to donate beyond the maximum limits.

There is no evidence that questionable contributions amount to anything more than a small portion of Mr. Obama’s fund-raising haul. The Times’s analysis, conducted over a few days and looking for obvious anomalies, like names or addresses with all consonants, identified about $40,000 in suspect contributions that had not been refunded by the campaign as of its last filing with the Federal Election Commission, in September. [...]

Obama buys 30 minutes worth of primetime coverage on major networks. Why?

You don't buy 30-minute chunks of national TV time if your goal is to eke out a narrow victory. You do it if your goal is to blow your opponent out of the water. And you do it if you realize that the bigger your margin of victory, the more you can get done in your first few months as President.

In short, you do it if you're as interested in governing effectively as you are interested in winning.

A McCain attack ad:

But Obama saw this coming a long time ago:

Now, what are the facts on ACORN?

From ACORN's memo:

Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field, but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.

ACORN can't not turn in bogus applications. They are legal documents, no matter who brings them in, and they are required by law to turn them in no matter what.

Fact: ACORN flags incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in, but these warnings are often ignored by election officials. Often these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards.

Fact: Our canvassers are paid by the hour, not by the card, so there is NO incentive for them to falsify cards. ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for deliberately falsifying registrations, and in the relatively rare cases where our internal quality controls have identified this happening we have fired the workers involved and turned them in to election officials and law-enforcement.

So who has an incentive to falsify cards? Ratfucking Republicans who wish to use this to suppress votes.

AND THIS ONE IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT:

Fact: Voter fraud by individuals is extremely rare, and incredibly difficult. There has never been a single proven case of anyone, anywhere, casting an illegal vote as a result of a phony voter registration. Even if someone wanted to influence the election this way, it would not work.

ACORN has registered over 1.3 million voters. Over 60% are people of color. This is a horrifying development for Republicans and the McCain campaign.

And since no one has ever been proven to successfully cast an illegal vote as a result of phony voter registration, the rabid hysteria by the right wing over this issue can only mean one thing - cover for their own crimes to steal this election.

McCain's Ayer's attacks: nonsense, says the attorney who prosecuted Ayres.

In a letter to the editor published in the NY Times today, William C. Ibershof, who was

the lead federal prosecutor of the Weathermen in the 1970s (I was then chief of the criminal division in the Eastern District of Michigan and took over the Weathermen prosecution in 1972)

says that he is

amazed and outraged that Senator Barack Obama is being linked to William Ayers’s terrorist activities 40 years ago when Mr. Obama was, as he has noted, just a child.

Although I dearly wanted to obtain convictions against all the Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, I am very pleased to learn that he has become a responsible citizen.

Because Senator Obama recently served on a board of a charitable organization with Mr. Ayers cannot possibly link the senator to acts perpetrated by Mr. Ayers so many years ago.

What is going on with people at McCain Rallies?

Recent rallies has seen open hatred:

The unmistakable momentum behind Barack Obama's campaign, combined with worry that John McCain is not doing enough to stop it, is ratcheting up fears and frustrations among conservatives.

And nowhere is this emotion on plainer display than at Republican rallies, where voters this week have shouted out insults at the mention of Obama, pleaded with McCain to get more aggressive with the Democrat and generally demonstrated the sort of visceral anger and unease that reflects a party on the precipice of panic.

The calendar is closing and the polls, at least right now, are not.

With McCain passing up the opportunity to level any tough personal shots in his first two debates and the very real prospect of an Obama presidency setting in, the sort of hard-core partisan activists who turn out for campaign events are venting in unusually personal terms.

"Terrorist!” one man screamed Monday at a New Mexico rally after McCain voiced the campaign’s new rhetorical staple aimed at raising doubts about the Illinois senator: “Who is the real Barack Obama?”

"He's a damn liar!” yelled a woman Wednesday in Pennsylvania. "Get him. He's bad for our country."

At both stops, there were cries of, “Nobama,” picking up on a phrase that has appeared on yard signs, T-shirts and bumper stickers.

And Thursday, at a campaign town hall in Wisconsin, one Republican brought the crowd to its feet when he used his turn at the microphone to offer a soliloquy so impassioned it made the network news and earned extended play on Rush Limbaugh’s program.

“I’m mad; I’m really mad!” the voter bellowed. “And what’s going to surprise ya, is it’s not the economy — it’s the socialists taking over our country.”

After the crowd settled down he was back at it. “When you have an Obama, Pelosi and the rest of the hooligans up there gonna run this country, we gotta have our head examined!”

Things have gotten so bad that even some top Republicans have called for some moderation:

The proliferation of angry, unbalanced mobs at Republican rallies over the past few days has not gone unnoticed, even by Republicans. Illinois Republican Rep. Ray LaHood is the latest to call out the ticket for permitting this kind of behavior.

LaHood supports the McCain ticket, but doesn't like what he sees at some of the McCain-Palin rallies: When Barack Obama's name has been mentioned by Sarah Palin, there are shouts of "terrorist," and LaHood says Palin should put a stop to it.

"Look it," LaHood said. "This doesn't befit the office that she's running for. And frankly, people don't like it."

LaHood says it could backfire on the Republican ticket.

He says the names that Obama is being called, "Certainly don't reflect the character of the man."

LaHood, generally perceived to be a fairly moderate Republican, is retiring this year, and he also hails from Obama's state. He certainly deserves praise for having the courage to call out the McCain-Palin ticket for enabling the politics of hate to dominate their campaign events.

John McCain has stepped up to calm things down.

AP) The anger is getting raw at Republican rallies and John McCain is finally acting to tamp it down.

McCain was booed by his own supporters Friday when, in an abrupt switch from raising questions about rival Barack Obama's character, he described the Democrat as a "decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States."

A sense of grievance spilling into rage has gripped some Republican events this week as McCain supporters see his presidential campaign lag against Obama. Some in the audience are making it personal, against the Democrat. Shouts of "traitor," "terrorist," "treason," "liar," and even "off with his head" have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them.

McCain changed his tone Friday when supporters at a town hall pressed him to be rougher on Obama. A voter said, "The people here in Minnesota want to see a real fight." Another said Obama would lead the U.S. into socialism. Another said he did not want his unborn child raised in a country led by Obama.

"If you want a fight, we will fight," McCain said. "But we will be respectful. I admire Sen. Obama and his accomplishments." When people booed, he cut them off.

"I don't mean that has to reduce your ferocity," he said. "I just mean to say you have to be respectful."

What is going on with these people? My guess is that these people see their hold on power slipping away and fear that their world will descend into anarchy.

For an 18 minute (or so) TED talk on how liberals differ from conservatives:

“There is something about the culture in American society today which doesn’t really seem to encourage men or women in mathematics,” said Michael Sipser, the head of M.I.T.’s math department. “Sports achievement gets lots of coverage in the media. Academic achievement gets almost none.”

Ana Caraiani, 23 and a graduate student in math at Harvard, is a two-time Romanian International Olympiad gold medalist. “In Romania, math is not considered as something you need to be a nerd to do,” Ms. Caraiani said. “Math is about being smart. It’s about having intuition. It’s about being creative.”

I appreciate the sentiment but the complaint that sports is valued more than math is really misplaced.  It suggests that there's a zero sum approach to appreciating talent - we can value athletic talent or academic talent but we can't do both.  The problem isn't sports.  The problem is that we exalt stupidity.  What does it say about our country when one of our major political parties uses words like "elite" as a pejorative?  Voters seems more impressed by the candidate that makes a better beer drinking buddy than by the one who actual spends his/her time trying to think seriously about complicated matters.  Gee, I wonder if our current financial mess has much to do with our disdain for basic numeracy?

The first two words are key as they sum up the elements that the areas of research I will be looking at are anchored by. In other words you can always relate the subject areas, I am interested in, back to one of these words if not both.

We usually think of shapes as pre-defined areas of outlined space that have specific names. We'll grow up knowing that these named shapes have properties that allow the shapes to be classed within certain gropus of shapes too. So a square is made of of 4 right angles at each corner and 4 sides. A triangle with three sides and of various angles and combinations of these.

But can a shape alway be defined? And should it be defined? And how about those shapes which have properties or characteristics that are overlooked? And which characteristics should we look more closely at because they've been overlooked in the past?

The second key word is space. My use of the word implies many senses of space including the mathematical and the scientific (these I believe overlap in some sense), as well as the physical, perceptual and conceptual. I cannot restrict my meaning at this point. I have no reason to restrict until I have conducted more research and found a reason to do so.

What about white space? Is it real? Does it mean something to everyone? What is it's role? Is it intentional? Should it be identified in more places?

An area of study that connects to this idea of space around shapes (and here I wonder - is this space not then a shape too?) is that of Geometry. These shapes are formed from vertices (easier to think of as dots in an invisible grid of any size). These vertices may then be connected with a line from one to another. these lines will be joint in such a way to form a shape. Various shapes are then placed together to form a larger formation. They could arguably be described as a system of shapes. This system could be called a pattern. these patterns can then become quite complex and due to their placement, repetition and possibly the ability to tesselate them - they can be endless and seem to go on for infinity.

One of my biggest aims in my project is to look into the history of Geometry - how it was developed and how it has been used over the centuries (more specifically in art work).

Then there is the branching off of Geometry in nature. I think this is a highly important and interesting subject to delve into. Not only because it entails many mysteries and brings into question the secrets of the Universe. But also because there is a tie with religion and sprirituality which is something that I can relate to on a personal level. Believing in God means that when I see the beauty of nature and proofs of perfection in nature (such as the way the body works and the structures and symmetry in plants and flowers to name a couple) I link it to Divine Creation. This is another aspect I would like to look into further. Especially as belief in this isn't restricted to just one religion.

Geometry allows for the representation of space in 2d, 3d and even 4d and beyond:

http://www.science.ca/scientists/scientistprofile.php?pID=5&pg=1

These main topics then branch off into other areas but are still anchored by the main theme of shapes, space and I guess now geometry too. By always having my main question along the lines of ' the place of geometry in the world around us' I will have something to refer back to. Is that what I am looking at? Am I any closer to finding the answer? Am I looking into something that is relevant or have a veered off too far down a small cobbled street?

Outcomes for project: My background has been predominantly in expressing some form of communication and his has been mostly interactive. I would like to continue this by producing work that compels the user/viewer to become involved with it. I believe that the most interactively creative works are those that captivate the viewer and involve them within a process. This can be in many forms such as when using sensors to trigger some kind of behaviour or change in the work (lighting, sounds etc). This could be on an abstract level too where triggering thoughts and movements in people and influencing these is enough of a form of interaction. Only that this can be more difficult to measure.

However, my interpretation of an interactive work would be using multimedia as a possible option. My work has always been either viewable of a computer screen (short video clips), graphics, websites. Or viewable on some form of small physical and traditional media such as paper or canvas. I would really like to create some sort of installation to take my experience and work to the next level or beyond for this project. This installation would be my blank slate. Possibly like a box or container that allows a person to fully submerge themselves within it - literally or mentally. The key is for it to be thought provoking. I would want the person to question their surroundings, the purpose of the installation and investigate it too. Possibly manipulate their thoughts by pre-determining the factors the could influence their senses and perceptions related to the space around them.

And that is the end of my notes from my journey to Uni. Yes I am one of those people who can write loads of notes whilst travelling on the tube/bus/camel :)

We had a sort of informal feedback session after one of the Critical Framework lecture where we were required to write in one sentence what our project was about. I knew it would be a bit crazy to even attempt this so I decided to use the key words to form almost a sentence. I came up with 'Shapes and space - the place of these and geometry in the world around us' using my notes from the journey in. It could be the closest I've got to a working title yet so I just let that be discussed in the group.

After some discussion with Andy (course leader) and some feedback and questions from fellow students it would seem that perhaps I should narrow my field of research down a tad bit so that I can concentrate on finding the niche in which my project would excel. Something no one else is questioning, expressing or even addressing. Or maybe they will have but I'll be doing it from a different angle? a unique p.o.v?

Only time will tell.