Scientific American - Math

Attention Shoppers: You Underestimated Your Bill

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:27:08 EST

So, they’re scanning your items at the grocery store, and when the last tomato gets bagged you’re stunned at the cost. How did you spend so much? Maybe those cherries were 12 bucks a pound. Or maybe you should have paid more attention to what you put in the wagon. Then again, maybe not. Because a new study in the Journal of Marketing [see http://tinyurl.com/yl5dbxg ] shows that the harder shoppers try to keep track of what they’re spending, the worse they actually do. [More]

Keeping math whizzes off the street--Off Wall Street, that is

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Launching a successful start-up these days takes more than a good idea--in the digital age a revolutionary quantitative approach can be just as effective as a solid business plan, if not more so. Take Google --it was hardly the first search engine to come along (remember Lycos ? AltaVista ?). But the company's PageRank algorithm vaulted it over superficially similar competitors in just a few short years. [More]

Impact Factor: Can a Scientific Retraction Change Public Opinion?

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:45:00 EST

When science revises its stance, the field itself follows established protocol to adapt, but public opinion can be slow to catch up. Rather than wiping the slate clean, last month's retraction of a key paper proposing a link between childhood vaccines and autism seem only to have widened the societal divide on the issue. And the rising rate of retractions--roughly ninefold between 1990 and 2008--suggest that there could be more cases in which public opinion carries on long after science has reversed course. [More]

Numbers Wars: School Battles Heat Up Again in the Traditional versus Reform-Math Debate

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST

Over the past 20 years educators have fought over the best way to teach numbers to kids. Advocates of traditional math tout the practice of algorithms and teacher-centered learning, whereas reform-math proponents focus on underlying concepts and student inquiry. In the face of continued declining scores in the U.S., these so-called math wars have heated up recently with the circulation of petitions, the release of contested curriculum guidelines and, in one case, the filing of a lawsuit. At stake is the ability of American high school graduates to perform everyday math tasks and compete in a global economy.

The war began in 1989, when the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) released a set of standards that reshaped a generation of instruction. Instead of having students memorize formulas and compute problems such as adding fractions, advocates of reform math encouraged students to develop their own visual representations of math concepts and use calculators to solve numerical tasks.

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Science, Stimulated: 7 Stimulus-Funded Research Projects [Slide Show]

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:30:00 EST

Can you put a price on science? The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), signed into law on February 17, 2009--a year ago today--sent some $31 billion to scientific pursuits. [More]

Is the Recovery Act Stimulating Science and the Economy?

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:00:00 EST

So far, $9.3 million for researchers building robotic bees, $1.3 million to hunt for viruses that infect single-celled organisms, and $845,000 to study past climate change in Russia has been doled out. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been able to fund thousands of new research projects with money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), aka the economic stimulus package , which was passed a year ago today. [More]

CERN Gears Up Its Computers for More Atom Smashing

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST

A deluge of high-energy physics data is headed toward servers in Geneva, Switzerland, later this month. That's because the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) now says it plans to restart its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) soon for a run that could last as long as two years at a collision energy of seven TeV (tera–electron volts, 3.5 TeV per beam). As CERN ramps up the world's most powerful particle accelerator to operate well beyond its previous best performance , the lab's computer systems must likewise be tuned so they can properly capture and analyze all of this new output. [More]

Street Smarts: The BioBus Brings a Rolling Science Lab to Resource-Strapped Schools

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST

It's halfway through first period, and 10th-grade students at Frances Perkins Academy in Brooklyn are in science class--not in school, but on a specially outfitted bus parked outside. [More]

Thinking Outside the Boxes: Robotic Pallet-Stacking Challenge Aims to Create an Automation Benchmark for Industry

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:55:00 EST

Anyone who has ever loaded a moving van knows how difficult it is to safely stack boxes of different sizes, weights and levels of fragility, all while minimizing the amount of space those cartons take up. Imagine an endless stream of such boxes and a business that lives and dies by the efficiency of their stacking, and you have an idea of the challenge facing warehouses that process large volumes of cargo onto pallets for shipping. [More]

Green for Green: U.S. Stimulus Package Offers Businesses $7 Billion in Environmental Incentives

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:00:00 EST

Dear EarthTalk: I've been following reports about President Obama's stimulus package and what it may mean for creating green jobs. Beyond that, are there programs in place to help businesses switch to greener raw materials and/or to green up operations overall? --Diane, via e-mail

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Monkey see, monkey calculate: How are primates' brains wired for math?

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:01:00 EST

Like a lot of humans, monkeys might not be able to do calculus. But a new study shows that they can learn and rapidly apply abstract mathematical principles. [More]

Record 232-digit number from cryptography challenge factored

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 07:00:00 EST

A team of researchers has successfully factored a 232-digit number into its two composite prime-number factors, but too late to claim a $50,000 prize once attached to the achievement. The number, RSA-768, was part of a cryptography challenge that technically ended in 2007 that had been sponsored by RSA Laboratories, a prominent computer-security firm. RSA-768, so named because its binary representation is 768 bits long, is the largest number from the now-defunct challenge to be cracked. [More]

Warp-Speed Algebra: New Algorithm Does Algebra in a Snap

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:00:00 EST

Quantum computers can do wondrous things: too bad they do not exist yet. That has not stopped physicists from devising new algorithms for the devices, which can calculate a lot faster than ordinary computers--in fact, exponentially faster, in quite a literal sense. Once quantum computers do become available, the algorithms could become a key part of applications that require number crunching, from engineering to video games.

The latest quantum algorithm is generating excitement among physicists. It tackles linear equations: expressions such as 3x + 2y = 7 and typically written with unknowns on one side and constants on the other. Many high schoolers learn the trite mechanics of solving systems of such equations by eliminating one unknown at a time. Speed becomes crucial when systems contain billions of variables and billions of equations, which are not unusual in modern applications such as simulations of weather and other physical phenomena. Efficient algorithms can solve large, “N by N” systems (systems having N linear equations and N unknowns) by computer. Still, calculation time grows at least as fast as N does: if N gets 1,000 times larger, the problem will take at least 1,000 times longer to solve, often more.

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No Gender Gap in Math

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:00:08 EST

Stereotypes are usually the last thing to change in the face of contradictory evidence. A case in point is the long held belief that boys are better at mathematics than girls. [More]

The Next 20 Years of Microchips: Pushing Performance Boundaries (preview)

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 EST

In 1975 electronics pioneer Gordon Moore famously predicted that the complexity of integrated-circuit chips would double every two years. Manufacturing advances would allow the chip’s transistors to shrink and shrink, so electrical signals would have to travel less distance to process information. To the electronics industry and to consumers, Moore’s Law, as it became known, meant computerized devices would relentlessly become smaller, faster and cheaper. Thanks to ceaseless innovation in semiconductor design and fabrication, chips have followed remarkably close to that trajectory for 35 years.

Engineers knew, however, they would hit a wall at some point. Transistors would become only tens of atoms thick. At that scale, basic laws of physics would impose limits. Even before the wall was hit, two practical problems were likely to arise. Placing transistors so small and close together while still getting a high yield--usable chips versus defective ones--could become overly expensive. And the heat generated by the thicket of transistors switching on and off could climb enough to start cooking the elements themselves.

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Find X and Say Your Work

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 10:32:08 EST

Did you ever sit down to take a test and discover that the person next to you mumbles his way through the whole thing. You probably thought, “What kind of doofus can’t add a few numbers without moving his mouth?” Turns out the answer may be: a very clever doofus. Because a study published in the Electronic Journal of Research In Educational Psychology suggests that students who think out loud while taking a math test are more likely to get the right answer. [More]

Polynomial Plot: Simple Math Expressions Yield Intricate Visual Patterns [Slide Show]

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 10:00:00 EST

Polynomials, the meat and potatoes of high-school algebra, are foundational to many aspects of quantitative science. But it would take a particularly enthusiastic math teacher to think of these trusty workhorses as beautiful. [More]

Call Me Melville, Based on New Word Use

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:05:08 EST

Thieves may leave fingerprints at the scene of a crime. But does an author leave a metaphorical fingerprint on the book? The answer may be yes, according to a study published in the New Journal of Physics .

Swedish physicists investigated how frequently authors use new words in their writing. This, they say, offers clearly identifiable patterns. The research goes against a belief held for more than 75 years that there’s a sort of universality to how frequently authors use new words.

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Ask the Brains: Are our Brains Constantly Making Subconscious Calculations?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

Is it true that when we drive, walk or reach for something our brain performs calculations? Is this ability learned or innate? --Helena Larks, San Francisco [More]

How Hard Has the Recession Hit Environmental Activist Groups?

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that environmental non-profits have been hit hard by the economic downturn, and has this had an impact on their effectiveness? -- Bridget W., Bainbridge Island, WA

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