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Gene Ellis

Picking Lesser of Two Climate Evils - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...te-methane-global-warming.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Picking Lesser of Two Climate Evils
  • ound for pound, methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But in stark contrast to CO2, methane breaks down quickly in the atmosphere.
  • He argues, essentially, that the world has yet to mount a serious effort to control carbon dioxide, which will be vastly more harmful in the long run, and that methane and other short-term pollutants should largely be ignored until that bigger problem is fixed.
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  • The methane is like a hangover that you can get over if you stop drinking,” said Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago and the author of a textbook on planetary atmospheres. “CO2 is more like lead poisoning — it sticks around, you don’t get rid of it, and it causes irreversible harm.”
  • Aggressively controlling methane, they say, would help slow the warming sharply over the coming decades.
  • By contrast, “our success in controlling CO2 emissions is likely to make very little difference on temperature over the next 40 years,” said Drew Shindell, a longtime NASA climate scientist who is leaving for Duke University.
  • Experts say that, looking at the more distant future, it is hugely important to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere now, even if that requires burning more gas. Dr. Pierrehumbert and Dr. Shindell largely agree on this point, with Dr. Pierrehumbert discounting the gas-is-worse-than-coal argument as “bunkum.”
Gene Ellis

Economic Statistics Miss the Benefits of Technology - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...he-benefits-of-technology.html

benefits of IT

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • “Pretty much every human on earth can access all human knowledge,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist.
  • o how to measure the Internet’s contribution to our lives? A few years ago, Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago and Peter J. Klenow of Stanford gave it a shot. They estimated that the value consumers gained from the Internet amounted to about 2 percent of their income — an order of magnitude larger than what they spent to go online. Their trick was to measure not only how much money users spent on access but also how much of their leisure time they spent online.
  • Earlier this year, Yan Chen, Grace YoungJoo Jeon and Yong-Mi Kim of the University of Michigan published the result of an experiment that found that people who had access to a search engine took 15 minutes less to answer a question than those without online access.
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  • the consumer surplus from free online services — the value derived by consumers from the experience above what they paid for it — has been growing by $34 billion a year, on average, since 2002. If it were tacked on as “economic output,” it would add about 0.26 of a percentage point to annual G.D.P. growth.
  • The consumer surplus from television is about five times as large as that delivered by free stuff online, according to Mr. Brynjolfsson’s calculations.
  • As the economist Paul Samuelson once pointed out, if a man married his maid, G.D.P. would decline.
  • “We know less about the sources of value in the economy than we did 25 years ago,” wrote Mr. Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders of the University of British Columbia. If we really want to understand the impact of information technology on our future well-being, we first need to find a consistent way to measure it.
Gene Ellis

Why Do Americans Stink at Math? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...o-americans-stink-at-math.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Why Do Americans Stink at Math?
  • The Americans might have invented the world’s best methods for teaching math to children, but it was difficult to find anyone actually using them.
  • In fact, efforts to introduce a better way of teaching math stretch back to the 1800s. The story is the same every time: a big, excited push, followed by mass confusion and then a return to conventional practices.
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  • Carefully taught, the assignments can help make math more concrete. Students don’t just memorize their times tables and addition facts but also understand how arithmetic works and how to apply it to real-life situations. But in practice, most teachers are unprepared and children are baffled, leaving parents furious.
  • On national tests, nearly two-thirds of fourth graders and eighth graders are not proficient in math. More than half of fourth graders taking the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress could not accurately read the temperature on a neatly drawn thermometer.
  • On the same multiple-choice test, three-quarters of fourth graders could not translate a simple word problem about a girl who sold 15 cups of lemonade on Saturday and twice as many on Sunday into the expression “15 + (2×15).” Even in Massachusetts, one of the country’s highest-performing states, math students are more than two years behind their counterparts in Shanghai.
  • A 2012 study comparing 16-to-65-year-olds in 20 countries found that Americans rank in the bottom five in numeracy.
  • On a scale of 1 to 5, 29 percent of them scored at Level 1 or below, meaning they could do basic arithmetic but not computations requiring two or more steps.
  • One study that examined medical prescriptions gone awry found that 17 percent of errors were caused by math mistakes on the part of doctors or pharmacists.
  • “I’m just not a math person,” Lampert says her education students would say with an apologetic shrug.
  • In the 1970s and the 1980s, cognitive scientists studied a population known as the unschooled, people with little or no formal education.
  • For instance, many of the workers charged with loading quarts and gallons of milk into crates had no more than a sixth-grade education. But they were able to do math, in order to assemble their loads efficiently, that was “equivalent to shifting between different base systems of numbers.”
  • Studies of children in Brazil, who helped support their families by roaming the streets selling roasted peanuts and coconuts, showed that the children routinely solved complex problems in their heads to calculate a bill or make change.
  • The cognitive-science research suggested a startling cause of Americans’ innumeracy: school.
  • Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.
  • In the process, she gave them an opportunity to realize, on their own, why their answers were wrong.
  • At most education schools, the professors with the research budgets and deanships have little interest in the science of teaching
  • The answer-getting strategies may serve them well for a class period of practice problems, but after a week, they forget. And students often can’t figure out how to apply the strategy for a particular problem to new problems.
  • Some of the failure could be explained by active resistance.
  • A year after he got to Chicago, he went to a one-day conference of teachers and mathematicians and was perplexed by the fact that the gathering occurred only twice a year.
  • More distressing to Takahashi was that American teachers had almost no opportunities to watch one another teach.
  • In Japan, teachers had always depended on jugyokenkyu, which translates literally as “lesson study,” a set of practices that Japanese teachers use to hone their craft. A teacher first plans lessons, then teaches in front of an audience of students and other teachers along with at least one university observer. Then the observers talk with the teacher about what has just taken place. Each public lesson poses a hypothesis, a new idea about how to help children learn.
  • The research showed that Japanese students initiated the method for solving a problem in 40 percent of the lessons; Americans initiated 9 percent of the time.
  • Similarly, 96 percent of American students’ work fell into the category of “practice,” while Japanese students spent only 41 percent of their time practicing.
  • Finland, meanwhile, made the shift by carving out time for teachers to spend learning. There, as in Japan, teachers teach for 600 or fewer hours each school year, leaving them ample time to prepare, revise and learn. By contrast, American teachers spend nearly 1,100 hours with little feedback.
  • “Sit on a stone for three years to accomplish anything.”
  • In one experiment in which more than 200 American teachers took part in lesson study, student achievement rose, as did teachers’ math knowledge — two rare accomplishments.
  • Examining nearly 3,000 teachers in six school districts, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently found that nearly two-thirds scored less than “proficient” in the areas of “intellectual challenge” and “classroom discourse.”
Gene Ellis

Ricardo Hausmann explains why technological diffusion does not occur according to econo... - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...r-according-to-economic-theory

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The Mismeasure of Technology
  • As Moses Abramovitz aptly noted in 1956, this residual is not much more than “a measure of our ignorance.”
  • As the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi would say of such tacit knowledge, we know more than we can tell. CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph
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