This is a forum dedicated to a 13 year old Star Wars game.
Everyone who isn't a hypergeek, or has a life, has already left.

I like this. Fact today, False tomorrow. People question 'professionals' because they are only taught so much. I'll agree the probably 90% of people who don't listen to experts are wrong, but sometimes the right to question authority is what creates cause for further experimentation. We all know (or should know) that we do not understand everything to a perfection. We're an always learning, ever changing society.

It stopped being about JK like 5 years ago, it's just a social forum basically

Isaac Asimov deals with this in his essay The Relativity of Wrong.


Science is both progressive and cumulative, and builds upon the mistakes of the past. Even though scientific theories are later proven wrong, the degree of their wrongness attenuates with time.

Is wronger even a word?

It's perfectly cromulent.

Martyn is a professional.

DON'T TRUST HIM!

Could somebody these days please tell me what a 'nerd' is these days? It used to be something who had big glasses, looked unsanitary and was behind a computer all day. And right now it is?
I'm behind a computer most of the time, I don't have big glasses, I actually have a social life and I like programming. Am I a nerd? Oh, and I tend to wash myself once a day

'Professionals' usually means 'professors.' If you get your PhD in Human Ecology and you write your thesis about banana bread, nobody else on the planet knows as much about banana bread as you do. That's what 'PhD' means.

Knowing that, it's really, really hard to believe in someone when they think they know more than the person who literally wrote the book on the subject.

Someone who is subjectively better at something and is resented for it. The popular definition has been watered down somewhat.

In my locale, "professional" usually just means "I do this for a living" and does not necessarily denote any formal education.

For example:
"Do you know someone who can help me get rid of the bugs in my house?"
"Yeah, I'll ask my dad to come help."
"Does he know what he's doing?"
"Yes, he's a professional."
"Oh, OK, thanks."

Well, yes, but the people who do knowledge for a living are typically academics.

Professional has two meanings here:

I am a professional, I cannot join a union, instead I can only join a professional body. In my case that's the Institution of Structural Engineers. Only people with certain jobs (usually requiring university education) can call themselves "Professionals" in this sense.

My dad, despite being a professional electrician (as in the meaning "makes his living from being an electrician) is a tradesman. He can join a trade union such as Unite.

The only funny one in this is teachers. Teachers consider themselves Professionals in the way that I am one, BUT they are allowed a union (with all the lobbying/strike power that comes with it). In fact the teaching Unions are, in my opinion, walking a very fine line at the moment. They are often in the news for striking, and are quite militant as far as other unions go. If we elect a Tory government (and we probably will) I expect NASUWT and the NUT are in for a rough ride.

Sorry for the late reply. My schooling was a little unusual as I went to a super-selective state grammar school. It took the top percentage of nerd kids and tended to teach beyond the syllabus so it kept us engaged. So perhaps it attracted eccentric teachers with PhDs who enjoyed teaching kids who picked things up quickly. I remember going to lectures at the Royal Institution and being surprised to find one of my school teachers giving one of them.

I don't think a PhD is such a big a deal. It's part of a path into academia and it's good for R&D in industry but if you did something with little practical application and didn't find a place in academia then secondary level teaching is probably the next best alternative, you'll probably be able to ensure you teach in a nice school with easy students.

How far do you go in mathematics in high school in the US/Canada? We covered Euler's identity as we went over de Moivre's theorem in high school, we also did matrices, butt-loads of ODEs and a bit of group theory as well as stats, mechanics and algorithms. Is it all pre-calc until university across the atlantic? Do you do a lot of statistics?

A good percentage of my school teachers had phds too.

My Bio-10 teacher had a PhD in biochem, he used to work pharma until he got fed up with ****ty corporations.
So now he gets paid a pittance to teach high schoolers.

Not here, not unless you went back and got an education degree. You need a B. Ed. and certification.

I can't speak for the rest of the US/Canada. The last time I checked, though, Alberta's math curriculum was ranked third internationally, behind Japan and Quebec.

It's a bit of a mess, actually.

The Pure Math curriculum is pre-calc, plus units on logic, combinatorics, statistics, probability, trigonometry and geometry.

There are introductory units dealing with finance and linear algebra, but the subjects are not discussed in depth.
AP/IB classes introduce matrices.
Finance is discussed more thoroughly in the Applied Math track.

The main course dealing with linear algebra is actually Physics, which introduces the concepts of vectors, vector spaces and linear transformations.

At the highest level is Math 31, which covers the same amount of material - in one high school semester - as an entire year of first year undergraduate calculus. It's a purely optional class that substitutes for another senior year science.

Yes, actually, quite a lot. Do I remember any of it? No.

In my senior year of high school I spent a semester on multivariate calc and a semester on ODE's (with like 2 weeks at the end for glancing at PDE's). But I wasn't typical of my school; many people don't even reach intro calc until sophomore year of college (if they ever get that far).

I managed to avoid statistics completely throughout high school. (Which was probably good news, because even at college most stats classes were abysmal.)

I did exactly the same thing (multivariate in my sr yr of high school and absolutely no statistics). Not that it did me any good because I never had to use it again so I can't remember anything and then I took stat in college and had a miserable experience.

Depends heavily on the quality of the school. My very very crappy public school covered AP Calc AB, but only 9 of the 330ish seniors that year took it. The average student didn't even really get past basic trig.

I kinda wish I hadn't wimped out and gone with Computer Science. I was really good at maths and physics at school and now I feel like I know nothing. Computer Science was quite frankly a piece of piss.

Could've done both! I know my CS math requirements put me only 3 courses away from a math major, so I went with that too.

OTOH you would have still been employable even if you never went to grad school. Usually if someone with a math bsc gets a job it's... doing computer programming.

That depends almost entirely on the student. Around here, the 'average' student gets through trig and geometry. But there are AP classes available through college level calculus and statistics. The physics course I took was also math heavy, but it didn't do anything fancier than vectors.

Matrices are Algebra II, or Linear Algebra. Average students see them their sophomore year.

Do you cover any set theory?

That's an incredibly simple area of mathematics that has profound (and unsolved) problems. It's something that could be taught in primary school, but is never even mentioned until an undergrad mathematics course. It was never even mentioned in my theoretical physics course, even though we used group theory (a special case of set theory) extensively.

Yes, a lot. I think the only major operation I didn't learn in high school was the power set.

Group/ring/field theory was never explored, but the idea of (for example) the complex numbers being a set, domain and range as sets, the graph of a function being a subset of the Cartesian product - was firmly established.

Neither set theory nor group theory were ever covered formally at my high school.

Here's another data point -- a "trusted" medical journal published a "peer reviewed" medical study linking autism to certain vaccines. World gets in an uproar. 10 years later the study is "retracted" due to it being total bull****. No wonder we don't trust the "scientists" bwa bwa bwa

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/02/02/lancet.retraction.autism/index.html?hpt=T2

What's way more interesting is that article linked to another CNN article, http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/03/31/irpt.autism/index.html

"Julian slams himself against the ground or wall while he screams [...] Marcus, 3, [...] screams with such ferocity that his face turns purple and mucus bubbles from his nostrils. Their youngest brother, Aric, also has autism and just turned 1 year old."

Wow, Aric ALSO has autism and just turned one! Now he's just like his 3 and 4 year old bigger brothers! It's a Christmas miracle! Sibling studies show that, if you have an autistic kid, the probability of having two more is less than 0.08%. But hey, if this family wants to be under the bell curve, why stop them?

I used to babysit an autistic kid. I don't believe for one second that garbage about how you can't tell the difference between an autistic kid and a misbehaving kid... you so totally can. I think the recent outbreak of autism isn't caused by vaccines. I think it's caused by the same doctors who think they can cure stupidity with Ritalin. Maybe I'm just ignorant.

It also occurs to me that most of the people who think vaccines gave their child autism noticed the results pretty fast. Almost... almost like taking them to the doctor and getting a shot... changing their routine... provoked an outburst of some sort....???

Actually, the paper by Wakefield established that the connection between autism and the gastrointestinal pathologies was real, but said it did not prove an association between the MMR vaccine and autism - only suggested that it may be an environmental trigger, and called for further investigation into the connection.

This report was a 'case series report', essentially detailing the clinical report of 12 individuals over a period of time. Such reports are usually not very interesting, they're only interesting if they come back with something unusual. For something as common as the MMR vaccine and autism, finding 12 people with both is not very unusual.

However, it was the media reports that spun this non-event into a hysteria. Emotive anecdotes from distressed parents were pitted against old men in corduroy with no media training. Newspapers and celebrities began to use the vaccine as an opportunity to attack the government and the health service, using Wakefield as some charismatic maverick figurehead.

The biggest player in this entire health scare was actually little baby Leo Blair. In December 2001 the Blairs were asked if their infant son had been given the MMR vaccine, and refused to answer, on the grounds that this would invade their child’s right to privacy. This stance was not entirely unreasonable, but its validity was somewhat undermined by Cherie Blair when she chose to reveal Leo’s vaccination history, in the process of promoting her autobiography (and also described the specific act of sexual intercourse which conceived him).

While that alone may not be unusual, you can see why the Blairs were the sort of family to not have their children vaccinated. They surrounded themselves by cranks and quacks. There was Cherie Blair’s closest friend and aide, Carole Caplin, a new age guru and “life coach”. Cherie was reported to visit Carole’s mum, Sylvia Caplin, a spiritual guru who was viciously anti-MMR

They were also prominently associated with a new age healer called Jack Temple, who offered crystal dowsing, homeopathy, neolithic-circle healing in his suburban back garden, and some special breastfeeding technique which he reckoned made vaccines unnecessary.

You may not think that the views of a Prime Minister or his wife directly influence your own, but it gives valuable talking points for the media which in turn serve to legitimise pseudoscience as an 'alternative' to science, with commentary from token celebrities. We were getting comments and advice on complex matters of immunology and epidemiology from Nigella Lawson, Libby Purves, Suzanne Moore and Carol Vorderman.

The actual scientific content of the media reports was very poor because the anti-MMR lobby fed stories to generalist journalists rather than the science journalists, who were much more likely to write an uninformed piece with statements from 'both sides' of the debate - rather than an accurate analysis of what was actually going on.

There were various reports that carefully reproduced the conditions and found no evidence of any link between the MMR vaccine and autism. It was entirely ignored in the media.

People make decisions about health based on what they read in the media, and MMR uptake has dropped from 92% to 73% (in some places in London, even lower). After this, incidents of mumps and measles increased rapidly. In 1998 there were 56 confirmed cases of measles in the UK; in 2006 there were 449 in the first five months of the year, with the first death since 1992; cases occurred in inadequately vaccinated children. Mumps cases began rising in 1999 after years of very few cases, and by 2005 the United Kingdom was in a mumps epidemic with almost 5000 notifications in the first month of 2005 alone.

And of course the media now look for someone to blame for their own crime, and Wakefield is their scapegoat. It is madness to imagine that one single man can create a 10-year scare story. It is also dangerous to imply that academics should be policed not to speak their minds, no matter how poorly evidenced their claims. Individuals like Wakefield must be free to have bad ideas.
The media created the MMR hoax, and they maintained it diligently for 10 years. Their failure to recognise that fact demonstrates that they have learned nothing, and until they do, journalists and editors will continue to perpetrate the very same crimes, repeatedly, with increasingly grave consequences.

God, yes, they do it ALL THE TIME. The global warming data "scam" is a good example. It's completely non-issue and the media spun it because: 1. they are greedy sons of *****es, 2. they had no idea what it really meant, 3. all of the above.