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From Our Own Mathematics Correspondent

You may remember I contributed a piece last month to the Pod Delusion Podcast on the unplanned impact initiative. Well, this week I’ve done it a second piece. This is becoming a habit.

The Pod Delusion describes itself as

a weekly news magazine podcast about interesting things. From politics, to science to culture and philosophy, it’s commentary from a secular, rationalist, skeptical, somewhat lefty-liberal, sort of perspective. A bit like From Our Own Correspondent but with more jokes.

This time my item is about the recent report of the Vorderman taskforce into mathematics education. You may remember I wrote a recent blog post on this topic, ‘People may not like Vorderman, but her report?‘ This piece covers similar ground but in audio and with a couple of days more experience. Plus you can hear me make the “spelling/grammar/literature, arithmetic/algebra/mathematics” argument.

What about the rest of episode 98 (19th August 2011)?

We speak to Craig Reucassel from The Chasers about why satirists should be allowed to use Parliamentary footage, find out about our care footprints, and find out why the arms trade is like slavery (and other cheerful stuff like that).

In the introduction to my piece (starts at 08:45), host James O’Malley describes me as the Pod Delusion’s “mathematics correspondent”. Does that mean there’ll be further contributions (and that I’ve been type-cast)? We’ll see.

(will not be published)

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