Archive for March 2011

Of course, the previous post does not count, so I have to start with something. Here is a list of interesting talks/articles that I’ve seen lately.

Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover

Points out some problems in math education, where doing math becomes just pattern matching. Search for the variables you need and replace them in the formula. The proposal is to make them realize the information needed to solve a problem, as in real life, where it’s rare to get exactly the pieces of information you need.

Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers

The main critique to the math education system is that it focuses in calculation (computation) instead of real math. The proposal is to use computers to do the calculation and allow children to get intuition on it by playing with them, seeing for what the things they learn are useful. An interesting detail I found in this talks is that the presenter’s proposal for teaching the basics of calculation, like multiplicating big numbers, can be accomplished teaching the kids how to program that method instead of making the repeat it $10^6$ times.

Arthur Benjamin’s formula for changing math education

A 3min short opinion-video. The main idea is to include statistics as the main subject. The main argument for this is that most people only need that in their day to day life (plus the basics, I guess).

Those videos are awesome, they really catch you attention and it’s hard to close the video before it finishes.

10 easy ways to fail a Ph.D.

The title explains exactly what the article is about. And in it you can find a link to another article I found really interesting: Productivity tips, tricks and hacks for academics.

## New Web/Blog, Why?

I updated my Web and my blog (it used to be @wordpress). The main reason to do so was to get everything in one place and to move from http://www.recoded.cl to http://fclaude.recoded.cl. The main domain redirects to this page and will continue to do so for a while, since I don’t have time right now to setup another site.

Some of the projects I’m hosting at this domain are starting to attract people to collaborate in them, and since those projects are hosted as subdomains of recoded, I wanted to allow the option of using the root domain pointing to the projects instead of being my personal page. Besides, that makes it okay to also potentially host projects where I’m not involved.

## Coming back to my blog

I haven’t written in here for a long time. There are many reasons for that, lots of things to do,  traveling, and time. Yet, the most important one, I didn’t know what to blog about.

The main problem is not finding what to write about, but to decide what should actually go into the blog. So far I’ve mostly posted about my trips and papers, and that’s something one should do. If you don’t think people want to know about what you write, then maybe you shouldn’t have had written that paper in the first place :).

The missing part is the things I didn’t want to post. For example, talks and useful links I find. Or comments about books I read. After some thought I decided that I should also include that. So my new goal, copying from Alex Bowe, is to post once every two weeks.