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The numbers do add up for Sunak – politicalbetting.com
The numbers do add up for Sunak – politicalbetting.com
Nearly half of Britons (48%) support Rishi Sunak's intention to ensure all children will have to study some form of maths until they are 18 All Britons: 48% support / 37% oppose18 to 24 year-olds: 34% / 50%65+ year-olds: 61% / 28% https://t.co/i16lGZm46T pic.twitter.com/UiNSPAAdt8
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I was hoping to start a discussion.
It has no meaning whatsoever.
1. Where will the teachers come from?
2. If kids have not engaged with maths by 16, another two years will make no difference.
The really key years are primary school and 7-9 in secondary school. Those should be the focus.
As currently stated, it's little more than fantasy.
If he's not going to have an election for a couple of years, it's not going to look very good as a mere manifesto commitment.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/why-isnt-1-a-prime-number/
“More people than ever before were shot dead in Sweden in 2022, and the new year has begun with a new spiral of violence in Stockholm.”
https://twitter.com/thelocalsweden/status/1612029227871907841?s=46&t=VorTiAXGq8Up1yDU4iDl_Q
The holdout Brexiteers are beginning to remind me of 1980s communists - "it just hasn't been properly delivered yet".
Funnily enough one was studying maths to 18 and afterwards and one wasn't.
My middle child is nearer the target. She says that she doesn't "do" maths but she can, she just doesn't like it very much. Would she be a better trainee court lawyer if she had done more maths? Not sure, but probably not.
With greater distance from the effects of the policy linked to greater support.
But most OECD countries do mandate maths until 18 years old as well, so I do think that needs to be part of it.
- mandatory education
- mandatory education to 14
- mandatory education to 16
Etc etc
I suspect that, a few years down road, it will be regarded in the same way.
Those that got their qualifications then sought their first live flying job - my first instructor found a job as a reserve pilot flying out of Malta, there to cover unexpected absences amongst the regular pilots. After six months of hardly flying, he chucked that and returned to instructing. My second instructor, who took me through solo to my licence, later found a job doing the nightly mail flights from Stansted to Edinburgh and back. He was pleased to get that first step on the ladder, but as someone who worked on the edges of employment law myself, I could see that his pay and conditions were pretty appalling.
Pilots aspire to a seat in the cockpit of a passenger airline, but even there the conditions aren’t great. RyanAir adopts the same approach to its staff as it does to its passengers, making them pay for everything including their training, parking at work - they even need to provide their own pens. A newly recruited RyanAir Co-pilot is almost on starvation rations.
Becoming a BA pilot used to be seen as the gold standard, treated decently with reasonable pay and conditions. But under Walsh - who if you dig into his management style is really quite some scumbag - the airline spent a lot of time trying to reduce the cost of its pilots by eroding their terms and conditions.
Being an airline pilot is a role where supply considerably exceeds demand, and the people I met aspiring to the role mostly has some sort of money behind them whilst they were young - rich families, or loans - the rest lived a student-bedsit existence through their 20s and often had jobs on the side. It was tough for them, particularly as they were dreaming of an established pilot role at a major airline whilst seeing the value of the prize they were aiming for being progressively denuded by those same airlines.
I will never forgive what happened to my parents after my Mother´s fall last week. The attempt by ministers to pin the blame on the nurses and the NHS staff for the decisions they themselves have made over several years was even more contemptible than politics as usual. Thousands, if not millions, of people have endured this, as they endure public services cut to the bone, infrastructure on the brink of collapse, and PR bullshit in place of actual decisions, so that virtually anything under government control is broken. The Passport Office, Companies House, the courts system, Local government bankruptcies, the roads, insane prices of infrastructure builds, education, social welfare all join the NHS in the emergency room. One crisis may be a misfortune, a dozen simultaneous crisis is more than mere carelessness. And in the middle of this disaster all we see is assholes like Mogg and Johnson plotting to obtain Imperial purple for themselves.
I sense a gathering rage, and it may even be that the Tories are not merely defeated, but actually obliterated.
If Sunak is so keen on maths, perhaps he might be able to work out the costs of his failed policies and dishonest manifesto. Then he can work out how many seats his party gets under FPTP on less than a 20% national vote. After that he can calculate how long the Tories will stay out of power after the most crushing defeat they have ever had.
Stats are shamefully ignored in the current curriculum.
Folk need arithmetic and stats (particularly probability) for daily life.
Algebra, calculus, trigonometry and geometry once you've mastered those, for those who have ability, interest or specialisms requiring them.
But given that those who want to do A Level maths can and that those without a good GCSE grade have to retake, it's an odd policy when we don't really have enough maths teachers as it is.
There is definitely a move away from just three simple A-levels going on.
One benefit of private education is, possibly, showing that things are possible and might even produce good results.
One correction to my post, as I recall to be instructors they already needed CPL, and it was the training and hours toward their APTL that they were using their time as instructors to achieve.
Simply adding compulsory maths onto someone who could barely do it before 16, or simply wasn't enthused, risks turning folk off education altogether as it stands.
Incidentally. My Canadian High School didn't offer "Maths" at all past Year 10.
There were separate subjects for calculus, algebra, and geometry ISTR.
You didn't get into Year 11 without having the basics.
He told me that when he looks at other pilots now, it often scares him how burnt out and generally fried they look to him.
Would be better to distinguish more between credible and normal real-life applications of maths than more complex theory required for subsequent specialism.
Couple of surprising things about Sweden.
1. The bombings. Five in a week in Stockholm. That’s like Belfast in the 70s
“During one week in Stockholm two (2) people have died and several injured in four (4) shootings and five (5) bombings.”
https://twitter.com/tomas68355920/status/1610618077091094529?s=46&t=VorTiAXGq8Up1yDU4iDl_Q
2. The Sweden Democrats. The hard right party in the ascendant. A lot of their new support is coming from the young. Even amongst 18-21 year olds, 20% support them, up from 10% a few years ago
When your young people shift to the hard right, that’s a bad sign
Using the back of a beer mat, I pointed out that buying a mobile via contract was an extremely expensive way to buy a phone on credit. To looks of horror - the less maths interested hadn’t thought about it that way. At least one chap would have been better off buying his phone on a credit card and paying it off slowly.
I'm 50 years out of date so the following might be rubbish, but I did no logic until my second year of a maths degree and that was by choice that I did it, so I could have gone through without any. I think basic logic should be taught at GCSE. I also did not get any of what was termed at the time 'modern maths' so my first few weeks of Uni came as a bit of a shock. I also did not get any stats (although I did get probability) prior to Uni and as that was a choice subject also I never did any at all in my formal education. In some professional exams I was excused Stats because of my Maths degree but chose to take it anyway for obvious reasons.
It’s a funny job because it’s very rules-bound and the autopilot does almost all of the flying, while the pilots do the paperwork, so a fair few pilots have private licenses on the side to maintain their connection with the image of freedom above the clouds that was their first inspiration.
A mixture of health and finances mean that I no longer fly, but I’m grateful for the experiences I had flying across Northern Europe and in California. And for those summer evenings when I’d drive up to Stapleford and take one of their planes out on a solo bimble above East Anglia, just for the fun of it. That moment when you taxi onto the end of the runway and briefly hold the brakes while moving the engine up to full thrust, knowing that you’re about to be be up in the air, is the one that I always savoured and dream about still.
At the start of the pandemic he seemed genuinely shocked to find out the more the government tested the more Covid positive results there were.
Sadly he didn’t not improve during the pandemic.
I was agreeing with you.
Unfortunately, simply teaching the same Maths curriculum for longer won't solve this.
I didn't do any stats for O Level.
I took it as an elective in my first year at Uni and discovered that my knowledge of betting made it pretty straightforward. Got my best Uni grade in it, despite having to do virtually no work.
Or his struggles with the concept of perspective….
I don't know about 16-18 year olds being required to take more maths classes, but mainstream journalists definitely do.
I had some pigs in blankets left over from Christmas, in the freezer.
I used them to make toad in the hole - I think the result was excellent.
But have I committed a heresy?
Civil servants
Talking heads in social media
The list of those who needed a touch of stats grows, doesn’t it?
For all the excitement the likes of Leon has had about ChatGPT writing stories etc, actually those in the know have said where it appears to be most useful is providing bullet points and it churning out a letter / email / report, same with translation of code to documentation, or converting data to more usable forms....i.e. what lots of white collar jobs currently do manually.
If you "specialise" the training of such models to your corporate business, and the format / tone used, it is going to be extremely good at firing out email, reports, etc in a standardised format.
With the added feature of an even bigger debt.
Come to think of it, Rogozin’ing the sausages would work as well.
1. Most people don’t have the brains for serious maths. 80% of people have an IQ under 115. 50% have an IQ under 100
They can barely scrape a GCSE in maths. They literally cannot benefit from any more teaching. It’s a waste of time and money
2. The AI will do everything anyway. For the dumb it will do dumb easy maths. For the smart it will do the smart hard maths. It will do it quicker, cheaper and easier for everyone
The only advantage in having advanced maths and computer skills (for the top 10% that can master them) is that you’ll be able to sit back and think “ah, I sort of understand why ChatGPT35 is giving that answer”
You’re like someone in 1890 saying “we all need to learn advanced mechanics because the car is coming, and we need to improve our sprinting so we can keep up with the vehicles”
What humourless ninny marked this as “off topic”?!
BTW, the likes of ChatGPT is really really bad at maths, it doesn't understand it at all. The current SOTA approaches to LLM don't have any ability to understand these concepts. There has been some progress on other approaches, but this is doing straight pure maths questions, which is rarely the task in question for real world applications.
What you need is the replicate the human ability to take language, understand its meaning, devise the mathematical approximation to it, solve while also understanding the limitations built in. There isn't an AI that can do this, or close to it. That is why data science is value career option even with the rise of these LLMs.
Toad in the hole as illustrated would have added to the festivities. Which were colourful and exuberant.
Some of that was due to the Gove reforms (ditching modules, adding more content to each A Level subject) and some was down to funding- schools and colleges can't really afford the necessary teaching hours.
https://twitter.com/maartengm/status/1611298962262183936
Maths / Physics texts are perhaps an exception to this rule, especially at higher, very specialist levels.
impressive.
As usual with the Tories since 2010, it is an idea that falls apart after 5 minutes.
“For all the excitement the likes of Leon has had about ChatGPT writing stories etc, actually those in the know have said where it appears to be most useful is providing bullet points and it churning out a letter / email / report, same with translation of code to documentation, or converting data to more usable forms....i.e. what lots of white collar jobs currently do manually.”
ChatGPT is an enormous evolution. No one is quite sure what it can do or what it means - and what jobs it will take. It’s a lot more than “good at bullet points”. And better AI is coming this year
eg Meet “Claude” and be very scared
I just took a random hard maths question from the internet and fed it to ChatGPT. The question is too hard for me to understand so I don’t know if the answer is right. Is it?! Genuine question. ChatGPT bullshits
As for fundamental understanding of mathematical concepts, no its doesn't. We have done this a million times, all these LLM are variants on Transformer based architecture, they are tokenising language and learning the next words based on learned probability distributions. That is great for some tasks, such as the ones given above, not at fundamental understanding of abstract concepts. Many people have clearly demonstrated that ChatGPT doesn't understand very simple mathematical concepts such as Prime numbers.
As for Anthropic model, I am well aware of it. My understanding it has many more guard rails than ChatGPT. Like text-to-image we will see lots of variants, but while they are Transformer based architecture they do not understand abstract concepts of maths, nor are they trying to do so.
Text-to-Image will revolutionise things like graphic design packages from Adobe, LLM will revolutionise the workflow currently undertaken by Microsoft Office and GMail.
BTW does anyone know anyone who would actually buy it?!? Who are these bookworms?
Head::desk
They don’t have to understand, whatever that actually is, they just have to “do”
We won’t even know if they understand. We can’t open up an electric skull and see the neurones popping. All we will know is that they 100% appear to understand - a lot better than us