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Traditionally, mathematics research projects are conducted by a small number (typically one to five) of expert mathematicians, each of which are familiar enough with all aspects of the project that they can verify each other’s contributions. It has been challenging to organize mathematical projects at larger scales, and particularly those that involve contributions from the general public, due to the need to verify all of the contributions; a single error …

A difficult part of technology instruction is not that things are unknowable, but that no one is ever starting at the beginning, not in 2024. How I work – image from State Library of New South Wales I was reading this post by my colleague Alex talking about digital decluttering. Like Alex, I can get stuck into a hyperfocus jag where I am doing nothing but cleaning up data and …

New article from Special Needs Jungle: The government’s ‘national conversation’ on the future of education has launched. Its lead, Professor Becky Francis, has issued a call for evidence, seeking views on the current curriculum and assessment … The post “The curriculum belongs to the nation” Let them know that includes children with special educational needs appeared first on Special Needs Jungle. Tania Tirraoro ⓒ Special Needs Jungle 2008-2023 All Rights …

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been posting on social media about some of the books in my surprisingly extensive J-Lit library, and each time I’ve done so, it’s led either to new purchases (with a number of Shūsaku Endo books having just arrived) or an enjoyable reread (of Yasunari Kawabata’s Dandelions and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters). However, in the case of Kenzaburō Ōe, lining my books up …

From BBC News, a few days ago: A businesswoman who was arrested after sharing a fake name for the Southport attacker online will face no further action. Bernadette Spofforth, from Chester, was arrested on 8 August after reposting the fake name, commenting that if it were true there would be “hell to pay”. The 55-year-old, who has more than 50,000 followers, later deleted the post and apologised after realising the …

Found photo Do you remember curlers? I do—a kind of torture device from my youth that I used to tame my curly hair. The sort I used had brushes inside with plastic sticks to keep them on overnight. Perhaps they were the source of my teenage insomnia. Why anyone would want to have a picture of their hair in curlers? Was this perhaps taken to document an impromptu visit? Neither …

The Psychotronix Film Festival has been producing movie events in various venues since 1992 - and shall return to the Orinda Theatre at 2 Orinda Theatre Square (Moraga Way and Brookwood Road) with an improvised, sometimes ragtag, all over the map but highly entertaining lineup of films this Saturday night.These films include 1950's commercials and "educational" films, the most bizarre obscure classic cartoons, trailers from the worst movies, the campiest …

There are those who define as AGI (or ASI) as technology that will "outperform humans at most economically valuable work". Ok, but then this work will simply cease to be so economically valuable, and humans will mostly stop doing it. Humans will instead find new economically valuable work to do.This has happened repeatedly in the history of humanity. Imagine telling someone 1000 years ago that in the future, very few …

Gerald Lynch and the iMore Staff: Dig out your old iPod and fire up your ‘Songs to cry to’ playlist, I come bearing sad news. After more than 15 years covering everything Apple, it’s with a heavy heart I announce that we will no longer be publishing new content on iMore. Thats disappointing news, but not surprising as iMore will join AnandTech in the Future PLC graveyard. For me, iMore …

Henry Ford? G. K. Chesterton? Robert R. Updegraff? Charles Zueblin? Anonymous? One illuminated lightbulb in a group of lightbulbs from Pixabay Question for Quote Investigator: Thinking carefully and rigorously about an issue requires major effort. That helps to explain why shallow, lazy, and self-justifying thought is so common. Here is a pertinent quotation: Thinking is the hardest work many people ever have to do, and they don’t like to do …

If I could only popularize one idea about technical strategy, it would be that prematurely applying pressure to a strategy’s rollout prevents evaluating whether the strategy is effective. Pressure changes behavior in profound ways, and many of those changes are intended to make you believe your strategy is working while minimizing change to the status quo (if you’re an executive) or get your strategy repealed (if you’re not an executive). …

A polygonalization of a set of points in the plane is a non-self-crossing polygon using all the points as vertices. One way to prove that it always exists is to observe that the traveling salesperson tour is always a polygonalization, because any two crossed edges can be uncrossed in two different ways, one of which preserves the connectivity of the tour, and this cannot increase the tour length. So if …

Sophie Howe speaking at the high-level roundtable. Hours after UN Member States adopted the Pact for the Future and the Declaration on Future Generations on 22 September, SOIF convened global leaders, policymakers, UN representatives and civil society actors at a high-level roundtable. The event aimed to deliver key insights for the effective implementation of the Declaration contained in its flagship handbook, which focuses on action at the national, multilateral and …