Tag: Math

NCSU wins a huge analytics grant

On Friday, August 16, 2013

Day 724 of 1000

This morning when I read the news on Free Republic, I ran into this article on a new program at NCSU. That pointed to this article in the News and Observer that describes the new “Big Data” joint venture between NCSU and the NSA. It starts out like this:

As the field of “big data” continues to grow in importance, N.C. State University has landed a big coup – a major lab for the study of data analysis, funded by the National Security Agency.

A $60.75 million grant from the NSA is the largest research grant in NCSU’s history – three times bigger than any previous award.

The Laboratory for Analytic Sciences will be launched in a Centennial Campus building that will be renovated with money from the federal agency, but details about the facility are top secret. Those who work in the lab will be required to have security clearance from the U.S. government.

NCSU officials say the endeavor is expected to bring 100 new jobs to the Triangle during the next several years. The university, already a leader in data science, won the NSA contract through a competitive process.

NCSU university already has strengths in computer science, applied mathematics and statistics and a collaborative project with the NSA on cybersecurity. The university also is in the process of hiring four faculty members for its new data-driven science cluster, adding to its expertise.

This fits very nicely with Kelly’s analytics internship at the JHU-APL. The other thing I thought was fun and interesting is the connection was not just to the Statistics department, but to the Applied Mathematics department, too. Christian is an Applied Math major. The article also talks about the Professional Masters Degree in Analytics our friend Andrew earned last year.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/08/15/3109412/nc-state-teams-up-with-nsa-on.html#storylink=cpy

Kelly ups her game and joins Christian for a graduate class

By Dad

On Thursday, August 15, 2013

In Education

Kelly’s internship was quite an amazing and fruitful experience for her. I described that a little bit here and a few other places. She loved the day to day statistics work given to her. Her boss was a good mentor and even a better teacher. He recommended a couple of classes for her to take that were not on her plan. Today, she decided to drop her Economics minor so she could take the classes he recommended. This semester’s class is a graduate class in Linear Algebra. There is only one session being taught and Christian is in it. That is great. Kelly and Christian have not had a class together since their last semester of community college when they took undergraduate Linear Algebra. Then, next semester, she plans to take Real Analysis, a very ugly but very necessary mathematical proofs class.

I asked her, “Do you think you can handle it?”

She said, “Sure. I have a completely different perspective now that I have seen what kind of work I will do after I get my degree. It will be hard, but I can do it. I am taking it because I know I will need it.”

There is nothing like a little bit of real-world experience doing something you love to provide some motivation to do something that is worthwhile, but hard.

Humanities and Social Science degrees should require more math

By Dad

On Sunday, April 28, 2013

In Education

Day 615 of 1000

Kelly’s enthusiasm for all things statistical and a discussion with her yesterday inspired me to look back through a few articles from The Numbers Guy at the Wall Street Journal. I found a great article that describes why I think the higher education system in America generally fails many Humanities and Social Science students. Most of them do not have the skills to properly evaluate many conclusions based on statistics and mathematics. Of course, there are significant exceptions. Rodney Stark, about whom I have written in the past, is also a numbers guy¹. Stark’s research and conclusions are driven by numbers. His research does not lead to a priori conclusions based on the current Zeitgiest. Rather, he lets number tell their own story, records the results, and makes conclusions based on those results. It does not hurt that he writes about really interesting stuff and has an accessible and engaging writing style.

I recommend you read the whole article, but here is a quote that describes the problem:

In the latest study, Kimmo Eriksson, a mathematician and researcher of social psychology at Sweden’s Mälardalen University, chose two abstracts from papers published in research journals, one in evolutionary anthropology and one in sociology. He gave them to 200 people to rate for quality—with one twist. At random, one of the two abstracts received an additional sentence, the one above with the math equation, which he pulled from an unrelated paper in psychology. The study’s 200 participants all had master’s or doctoral degrees. Those with degrees in math, science or technology rated the abstract with the tacked-on sentence as slightly lower-quality than the other. But participants with degrees in humanities, social science or other fields preferred the one with the bogus math, with some rating it much more highly on a scale of 0 to 100.

One of the features of a “Liberal education” classically defined is that it values a wide breadth of knowledge. Early on, that meant that mathematicians and physicists were required to have as deep a knowledge of literature and history as possible while historians and literature students were required to have as deep a knowledge of mathematics and physics as possible. It seems like this is not valued as much as it was in the pass both the hard and soft sciences have suffered for it. If a Humanities graduate or Social Scientist believes a paper is better solely because it has a cryptic looking equation in it, even if the equation is bogus, that idea certainly seems to be vindicated.

1. Full disclosure: I read every Rodney Stark book I can get my hands on and am pretty much a Rodney Stark fanboy.

Up late preparing for Real Analysis and an EE Circuits class

By Dad

On Friday, April 19, 2013

In Education

Christian went to bed about two this morning after preparing for two very difficult, critically important mid-terms. When Lorena got up this morning, she took the picture below of how he left his books when he finished studying.

Test prep for Real Analysis and EE Circuits mid-terms

Why not skip high school? (Part 8) Kelly takes a mathematical proofs class at Big State U.

By Dad

On Wednesday, April 3, 2013

In Education, Homeschool

Day 590 of 1000

This is the eighth in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college. The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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Learning how to do mathematical proofs for the first time is not for the faint of heart. We decided it would be good to ease the kids through the transition form Community College to Big State U. (NCSU in this case) with a single class in the summer before entering full time in the fall of 2012. The class Kelly chose was one called Foundations of Advanced Math. The prerequisite for the class was Calculus II. Here is the course description from the catalog:

Introduction to mathematical proof with focus on properties of the real number system. Elementary symbolic logic, mathematical induction, algebra of sets, relations, functions, countability. Algebraic and completeness properties of the reals.

What is not mentioned in this description is that the move from applied math to proofs requires a paradigm shift. I wrote a little about this class as Kelly went through it here and here. Kelly had a tremendous professor for this class. He was a 75 year old emeritus professor who truly wanted his students to learn how to think properly about mathematics. Here is a quotation from one of the linked posts above about the admonition this professor gave to his class.

At the beginning of the class he said it was possible to pass the class just by memorizing the proofs, but if you did it that way you would lose out on two levels. First, it would be hard to get a good grade doing it that way. Second, if the student did not have a “lights going on” experience during the semester, their math world would only involve ciphering and not “real” math.

He was exactly right about this. It was doubly important for Kelly to have her “lights going on” moment because she would have two key classes called Mathematical Statistics I and II that require the ability to do and understand proofs. It was not OK to just learn the mechanics of this class. In her previous applied mathematics classes, Calculus I, II, III, and Linear Algebra, Kelly had Christian with whom she could collaborate when she did not understand. Foundations of Advanced Math was the first class like this she had to take without a safety net.

She started out slowly. She studied hard, but got herself into a little bit of a hole. She could do the material, but did not really understand it. She studied harder and harder as the semester went along, but at the mid-point of the semester, she could do the proofs, but was not really “getting” them. She studied even harder, late into the night every night and some time, about three quarters of the way through the class, the light went on. She remembers a precise point when she realized she knew how to do the proofs. It was extremely exhilarating for her. She aced the final and got an A in the class.

Earlier, we mentioned that a light load for the first semester at community college served our children well. Kelly’s single hard class during the summer semester before she started full time at Big State U. was very valuable both in terms of building confidence and giving her a sense for the difficulty of hard STEM classes.

Early math skills

By Dad

On Tuesday, March 26, 2013

In Education, Homeschool

My buddy, Jon from Chile, sent me an article from USA Today that sings from our hymnal. The title of the article is Studies: Math Skills can be predicted, improved early on. It is a great article and pretty close to precisely what we believe about teaching and learning of math, IQ, and how early kids can learn stuff. I love this quote from the article:

Factors such as IQ and attention span didn’t explain why some first-graders did better than others. Now Geary is studying if something that youngsters learn in preschool offers an advantage.

Large swaths of this blog are written about how we taught math to our kids in our homeschool. Reading, exercising of memory skills and math made up the core of our educational efforts up through the first grade. Everything became easier because of that focus. It must have worked–Kelly is now a Senior in Statistics and Christian is a Junior in Applied Mathematics at NCSU. This reminds me that I need to write an index to some of the stuff we wrote. Thanks for the pointer to this great article, Jon!

Math and Engineering degrees are great even if you want to do something else

By Dad

On Thursday, November 10, 2011

In Business, Education, Homeschool, Money

Day 80 of 1000

I found a great article in the Wall Street Journal this morning titled Generation Jobless: Students Pick Easier Majors Despite Less Pay. It had some startling statistics:

Workers who majored in psychology have median earnings that are $38,000 below those of computer engineering majors, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by Georgetown University.

Wow. The article tells a story about a student who switched from Electrical and Computer Engineering because her team stayed up past midnight in a lab to write a soda machine program. They could not get it to work, so to keep from getting a bad grade, she withdrew from the course. Then she switched from engineering to a double major in psychology and policy management. Her grades went from B’s and C’s to A’s. She said her high school did not prepare her for the rigor of an engineering degree.

So the upshot is that she is willing to work in a low-paying career for the rest of her life because she was unwilling to do what was necessary to pass a few hard classes. I have had this discussion with people before. If you cannot handle a specifc course, you can do a TON of things to make it happen. You can get a tutor. You can take the class two or even three times if needed. You can take a more remedial course, then try the tough one again. Is it worth it to go to school for a year or two more to do something you like and that pays well for the next forty or fifty year? It seems like a no brainer.

The crazy part is that even for those who want to do less technical jobs, it is best to prepare for that non-technical job with a hard degree.

Research has shown that graduating with these majors provides a good foundation not just for so-called STEM jobs, or those in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, but a whole range of industries where earnings expectations are high. Business, finance and consulting firms, as well as most health-care professions, are keen to hire those who bring quantitative skills and can help them stay competitive.

We joked about this quite a bit, but I wanted to get it into the kids head that, if they went to college (not necessarily a given–preparation for many careers–pilot, electrician, writer, and small business owner are monumentally better served through some type of preparation other than college), they could study their passion, but they needed to start with a rigorous degree. We defined rigorous as anything that involves hard math. The use of hard math and statistics is creating new breakthroughs in a lot of fields right now: medicine, agriculture, sociology, etc., etc. etc.

One of our pet peeves during our homeschool years was a couple of homeschool guys from Oregon who wrote a book titled Do Hard Things when they were in high school, then went off to a liberal arts college whose only majors are Government, Journalism, History, Literature, and Classical Liberal Arts. Those are fine things to study, but are very far from the type of “hard” we are talking about here. The only math I could find in their core curriculum was Euclidean Geometry. If you want to get a book on doing hard things, forego the Harris book and get this one by Katie Davis has done at Azima.

Math test preparation is hard

By Dad

On Friday, November 4, 2011

In Education

Day 74 of 1000

Kelly stayed up until about 2:00 AM Wednesday morning in preparation for a Calculus III test. Like a lot of complicated things, calculus is hard until you know how to do it and have used it for awhile. We were surprised when someone told her that it does not help to study anymore within ten hours of the test. I can think of no reason why that would be true other than to give one’s self time to get some rest. Both Kelly and Christian took the test and did great–maybe even better than expected. When we talked about it later, they both mentioned examples of things they read or learned five minutes before the test started that improved their grade. That has been my experience, too.

One of the things I have told the kids time and time again is to just keep the pressure up. The classes where you get all great grades without too much effort are probably not worth taking because you do not learn much without some effort. You will get some low scores on some homework assignments and labs in those difficult classes about complex subject. You might even get a low score on a test or two. If you quit trying and tell yourself you cannot understand the material when that happens, you can fail the class. The reality is that lots and lots of people have figured out how to do Calculus, Physics, Chemistry, and Statistics. If you study, you can get it. So the key is to not get discouraged and always keep the pressure up–study, study, study.

There are six weeks left in the semester. With Thanksgiving and Finals week, it means there are really only about five weeks of actual class. There are papers to write, speeches to present, homework to submit, and quizzes and tests to take. Everything that lead up to this point was just to get the kids to the point where they have a shot at a good grade. NOW is the time when they have studied hard for three months and are tired, but need to add additional study and work pressure to finish well. If that means it is necessary to work through the weekend and stay up late one or two times per week, so be it. It is the most exciting and nerve wracking part of the semester.

Very important update: In the service of familial and marital peace and tranquility, I must also note that Lorena got an “A” on her Financial Accounting mid-term.