jrells

6 ms·

1.
by jrells 9y ago
So clean and beautiful! Paper and blackboards always leave me disappointed when I do graph theory.
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by jrells 9y ago
I often worry that mathematics education is strongly supported on the grounds that it is about "learning how to think", yet the way it is executed rarely prioritizes this goal. What would it look like if math curriculum were redes
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by jrells 9y ago
It is common practice to cite things other than peer-reviewed papers (at least in math). There are even citations for "private communication", usually meaning a personal email or conversation.
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by jrells 11y ago
I deem my name to be a competitive advantage overall. I have never wanted to change it. I deem racism to be a problem, particularly because you can't just sign a paper and change your race.
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by jrells 11y ago
I only said it must be tough to face (non-mistaken) racism. I am curious how this is arrogantly shaking my fist, or is related to my political tastes. And I'm curious what you believe those tastes to be. EDIT: In my own rereading, my o
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by jrells 11y ago
As a white guy with a (very mildly) African American sounding name, I have had similar experiences. When I meet people in person after emailing them they sometimes seem surprised, and some later admit they expected me to be black. The worst
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by jrells 11y ago
"Subhuman" is an absurd term to use, especially since trying to look down on others is very much a human flaw.
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by jrells 11y ago
Isn't the blame falling to the pension managers who picked the hedge fund, and the victims are the individual pensioners who each have negligible influence over decisions? Or am I misunderstanding something?
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by jrells 12y ago
Fascinating stuff, I'd like to know more. Does anyone know a better source? I found the original article but sadly not freely available. This psmag.com article is thin and the graph of the data is so small I can't read much off of
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by jrells 12y ago
> Other research suggests that cyclists may actually spend more than drivers at some kinds of businesses because it's easier for them to pop in often and unplanned. This is probably due to a shortage of parking spots.
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by jrells 12y ago
There's a lot to take issue with in this article. Graduate institutional affiliation is huge because more and more research is being done by undergraduates, so top institutions can more easily pick out the best talent early. It is stil
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by jrells 12y ago
I could spend my whole life correcting people who draw an equivalence between legality and morality, and that would be a life well spent.
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by jrells 12y ago
> She should be ashamed: she appears to have violated immigration, pension and tax laws. She is an illegal immigrant, and a shameless criminal, but why should she be ashamed? Braking a law does not necessarily imply anything shameful, an
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by jrells 12y ago
True, this certainly skews my impression of driving in other countries. However, some of the examples I recall can not possibly be good driving in any culture (like making a ten point U-turn when there is ample room to make a single turn, o
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by jrells 12y ago
I would question the claim that Americans are bad drivers in general. Compared to driving I've seen in other countries (particularly India, China), even the worst drivers I've seen in America aren't so bad. And the worst driv
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by jrells 12y ago
It's not about the price of Beyonce in particular. It is standard practice to shoot models without any makeup and make changes afterward.
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by jrells 12y ago
I'm helping teach a math education course at an elite university. We should be teaching how to teach, but we actually teach elementary school math to education majors who struggle with the material. It blows my mind how difficult this
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by jrells 12y ago
While I'm sure your knowledge is aggregated over many sources, are there any particularly excellent sources (books, documentaries, etc) on the history of military tactics?
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by jrells 12y ago
I'm not sure there are any disagreements here beyond language. How about: "Try for equality, and understand that due to your own biases this might just feel like overcompensating."
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by jrells 12y ago
The Harrison Bergeron-ing all things is a terrible path and we should definitely encourage people to rise to the challenges of their environment, and celebrate those who do. But that doesn't have to be the end of the story. Some of the
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by jrells 12y ago
A nice explanation of privilege. I'm not super fond of the term, since I hear too many people use it as an attack instead of a conversation starter. Its hard to convince someone they're wrong, that has to be a delicate conversatio
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by jrells 12y ago
That's a great example, reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Barres
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by jrells 12y ago
I like this article, but I wish it would do more to point out that high-education low-wage workers, like adjunct university teachers, are usually in their low-wage jobs by choice, and their education gives them a lot more opportunities even
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by jrells 12y ago
The article says the hackers "can inject themselves seamlessly into email threads". Its hard to judge that without reading the specific conversation but I doubt they'll become public. The hackers may have simply spent some go
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by jrells 12y ago
I'm surprised so many people engage in a Soylent vs cooking debate as if there are two sides and you have to choose one. Recently I was cooking an elaborate dinner, starting early in the afternoon, and I found myself wishing my Soylent
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by jrells 12y ago
I think I understand where you're coming from, economics is a form of culture, but I was trying to distinguish the cold economic price of low-skilled labor from the non-economic value we place on it (sorry I don't know a better wa
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by jrells 12y ago
You're right that teachers are a bad example. Their pay is heavily affected by our culture through politics (although our political system responds to many other incentives too). Private tutors make great money.
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by jrells 12y ago
How is this a cultural problem? It seems strictly like an economic problem. Teachers are highly valued in our culture (or at least, valued much more than they are in our economy). We DO value work, and that's precisely why people are c
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by jrells 12y ago
As much as I would love for educational institutions (and government in general) to fund open source projects to solve their needs, that doesn't seem very realistic right now. Maybe when startup culture becomes the norm. The people who
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by jrells 12y ago
My University uses Moodle, which is also TERRIBLE. I do all my grades and such in Google Docs, since Moodle is a UX nightmare. Something as simple as entering grades in Moodle requires a lot of clicking around for each grade. We have multi-

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