A survey of 3000 pupils aged from seven to 18 for City & Guilds is reported by the BBC to have found that “maths lessons are seen as difficult, irrelevant and boring by about a third of teenagers” and that the subject could be “geared more towards real life”, but that “most agreed that maths would be useful once they had left school”.
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Japanese researchers create a crab-based computer
This is the platonic ideal of an entry in my Interesting Esoterica collection: two scientists from Kobe University and one from UWE’s excellently-named International Center of Unconventional Computing have written a paper, Robust Soldier Crab Ball Gate, claiming that swarms of soldier crabs Mictyris guinotae can be persuaded to act as logic gates, from which a universal computer could be built. The paper first describes how they modelled swarms of crabs, then how the logic gates are implemented, and ends with data from an experiment with real soldier crabs. The AND gate worked about two thirds of the time, which isn’t bad.
It looks like this paper is a follow-up to the earlier work, Slime mould logical gates: exploring ballistic approach, which did basically the same thing on a smaller scale. I can only think that the next step must be to use humans.
I’ve given a talk about other unlikely computing machines: I can’t believe it’s a universal computer!
(via Slashdot)
Press release mayhem
On Google+ (sadly in a post with limited visibility, so I can’t link directly to it), Rongmin Lu (via David Roberts) highlights a case of “american whispers”, where a piece of research is helped along by press releases and media paraphrasing to become a completely different result.
Here’s how American whispers works:
1. You publish a paper, say on a new approximation to the discrete Fourier transform. To show the relevance of your work, you then say something like your new algorithm “improve[s] over the Fast Fourier Transform”.
2. Next, your institution’s press office issues a press release. To make it sound fun, they come up with a snazzy title “Faster-than-fast Fourier transform”. Pretty neat, huh?
3. Finally, some news website picks it up and then, suddenly, it’s all about “a new way of calculating Fast Fourier Transforms”. Ta-da!
I think you’d all agree that it’s way better than Chinese whispers.
Sergey Ten commented, saying that the press release in question wasn’t too bad, and mentions the idea that “random” data from real-world measurements is usually spread around a manifold of lower dimension than the sample space, which I think is the idea behind the paper Barcodes: the persistent topology of data, which I linked to in my last Interesting Esoterica summation.
On a similar note, Nalini Joshi points out that it isn’t news when centuries-old maths is used to solve a new problem: http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-combining-centuries-old-mathematical-theorems-efficient.html
Update: Rongmin’s original post is hidden to the public, so I’ve pasted it in here. I hope the limited visibility was a side-effect of the way Google+ works and not a deliberate decision to restrict the post’s audience.
Math Awareness Month: Mathematics, Statistics, and the Data Deluge
The American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics announce that the theme for Math Awareness Month, April 2012, is Mathematics, Statistics, and the Data Deluge.
Bacteria may “play” Prisoner’s Dilemma
The American Chemical Society (ACS) are reporting research presented at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the ACS about game theory in bacteria. The research investigated chemical signals exchanged between cells, which the press release calls “chat”. The press release reports that:
Faced with drought, radiation, over-crowding or other harsh environmental conditions, B. subtilis engages in quorum sensing, with individual microbes releasing chemical compounds that enable it to check out how their neighbors are responding to the unfavorable environment. Members of a colony of B. subtilis may decide to respond to the stressful environment in one of two ways.
Advance in snowflake growth simulation
Scientific American are reporting that “a team of mathematicians has for the first time succeeded in simulating a panoply of snowflake shapes using basic conservation laws, such as preserving the number of water molecules in the air”.
This explains that previous simulations often simulate the crystal surface using interlocking triangles, but that:
the triangles often deform and collapse in simulations, leading to singularities that bring the simulation to an abrupt halt… Garcke’s team got around this difficulty by devising a method to describe the curvature and other geometric information about the snowflake surface so that it could be appropriately encoded into a computer.
NASA Angry Birds partnership
You may have thought Angry Birds is a waste of time. Information Week are reporting that the new Angry Birds Space game was “developed in collaboration with NASA through a Space Act Agreement”, a kind of commercial partnership NASA has used for “more than 50 years”. The article explains:
NASA seized on Angry Birds Space as an opportunity to educate the public on the law of physics that’s fundamental to everything it does: gravity. On NASA.gov, it used the occasion to explain the difference between normal gravity ($1g$), zero gravity ($0g$), and microgravity ($1 \times 10^{-6} g$), and to point out that experiments on the International Space Station happen in a microgravity environment. In a video demo of what that looks like in practice, astronaut Don Pettitt used a slingshot to catapult an Angry Bird across the interior of the Space Station.
The article outlines a series of experiments NASA will be undertaking in microgravity, though really the game is an outreach activity:
NASA hopes that Angry Birds Space will spark kids to take a keener interest in math, physics, and engineering careers… Of course, there’s a gigantic leap from the animated world of flying feathers into the real world of astronomy, aerospace science, and propulsion systems.