E-World
© 1992-2008 by Glenn Elert
All Rights Reserved -- Fair Use Encouraged
education | mathematics | media | nyc | science | sierra leone | skepticism
NASA Extinct and Endangered Education Programs
How many education programs can a government agency kill in one year (2006)?
When is a 65 not a 65?
Grades on the New York State Regents Physics Exam have experienced significant
declines that began when the first of the new format exams appeared in June 2002.
It is my contention that this decline is not the result of any increase in difficulty,
but instead is due primarily to a change in scoring practices that eliminated
a generous bonus and replaced it with a slight penalty. Questions have not gotten
significantly harder. Students have not gotten weaker. From June 1992
to January 2002, a student who answered 57% of the questions correctly was awarded
a passing score of 65. To receive the same score on the June 2003 exam, a student
would have to answer 67% of the questions correctly. If the new exams were graded
using the old system for converting raw points into a final mark, average scores
and passing rates would have stayed essentially constant.
School Privatization & Choice: A Sociopolitical Analysis
School privatization efforts are largely driven by greed and narrow class interests
and not by the desire to see real improvements in public education. The private
sector -- which already supplies textbooks and standardized tests -- is easily
implicated in the nation's educational deficiencies. Businesses and wealthy individuals
stand to benefit the most from large-scale privatization efforts. Taxes will
likely decrease in wealthy upper-class suburbs and opportunities will arise for
capital-rich investors to reap millions of dollars in profits from a newly created
Educational-Industrial Complex. Choices for the wealthy will multiply, while
those for the poor and middle-class will no doubt decrease along with quality.
Don't be fooled. "Choice" is code word for a system that perpetuates
positions of privilege that are inherited and not earned.
SAT: Aptitude or Demographics?
Find out how the philosophy behind the test's construction makes it
a worthless piece of garbage. College admissions officers are better of rolling
dice than using the SAT to predict student performance. Interested students can
also take heart in knowing that the SAT can be broken through study. Find out
why John Katzman, co-founder of the Princeton Review, said "The SAT is bullshit."
Teacher Certification Offices in the United States
A list I compiled around 1992. See if you can get yourself certified in all fifty states, US territories, and the District of Columbia.
Mathematics Packages: Their Role in Education
What impact will commercially produced mathematics packages have on math education
in the United States? It's just a matter of time before such materials become
ubiquitous in classrooms. Will schools teach basic algebra and other tasks when
computer programs exist to do just that? The answer lies in the procedure for
computing square roots by hand. No one teaches this algorithm now that nearly
everyone owns a calculator. I originally wrote this article while still a student
at Columbia University. For some reason I received a grade of A+. See if you can
tell me why. It's good, but certainly not the Great American Novel. The visiting
professor went back to Santiago, Chile without returning the graded copy.
Ptolemy's Table of Chords
A historical paper on the creation of a Second Century trig table, outlining
the procedure and detailing it using modern notation. It is not Lynx-friendly
and the bandwidth impaired should beware as there are many large mathematical
diagrams.
Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds by John Cage
In
honor of the late avant garde composer and philosopher of music this page "performs"
the John Cage musical composition Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds.
Turn off all screen savers and power savers. Set your computer to its maximum
volume
for truest reproduction. This is my favorite page on E-World. It even won
an award.
Rolywholyover: A Composition for Museum by John Cage
An analysis of an exhibit at the Guggenheim-SoHo based on an idea by John Cage:
the avant-garde composer and philosopher of music. It was shown briefly during
the summer of 1994. The origins of Cage's use of chance operations in music and
how he extended his musical philosophies to the museum. Being a physicist, I
read the exhibit in relativistic terms. Space & time are both dimensions.
Any work of art is a manipulation of parameters in these dimensions: the visual
arts choosing one set of parameters and the musical arts another. Some external
links are included at the end.
Television and the Presidency
Media analysis -- plain and simple. How the President of the United States appears
on television affects our perceptions. Perception is reality, form is substance,
the medium is the message, and so on.
The Before and After Movie
Two views of Manhattan taken from the same location, separated in time by
eleven months. Watch as the World Trade Center is silently erased from the
skyline.
Traffic Camera Mosaics (704x600, 1760x960)
Simultaneously displays images from all 80 currently working traffic cameras
in New York City. Comes in two varieties: a small one for typical computer
monitors and a large one for oversized monitors. Both versions refresh three
times a minute.
Einstein's Letters to Roosevelt
The letter that launched the arms race. A warning to President Roosevelt on the
possibility of constructing "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" with
hints that the German government might be doing just that. Addressed and dated
Peconic, Long Island, August 2nd 1939, it was most likely written by Leo Szilard,
the scientist who invented the chain reaction. Nevertheless, Einstein took full
responsibility for its consequences, calling it "the greatest mistake" of
his life. Also contains the partial text of three additional letters that Einstein
wrote to FDR with a small collection of external links at the end.
Van de Graaff Generators in the Classroom
Theory, safety, and operation of the 500,000 V classroom Van de Graaff generator. Written for use by teachers at Midwood High School, but the general principles and demonstrations can be adapted for use elsewhere.
The English Alphabet
This is a recitation that a primary student taught me. One student plays the part
of a learned professor who is then challenged by another student to recite a proverb
("parable" in Krio) for each letter of the alphabet. Those familiar
with public transports in West Africa will recognize many of these sayings. This
work is public domain.
Rebel Action on the Kamakwie Road
Kamakwie is a large village in north-central Sierra Leone about twenty-five miles
from the Guinean border where I lived from 1987-1990. This page is a compilation
of news reports on rebel activity along the Kamakwie-Makeni road. Articles reproduced
here are intended for educational, non-commercial use only. Copyrights are held
by the authors.
Rebel Forces Attack Magburaka
First-hand account of a February 1998 rebel attack as told by the Reverend Jim
Tulley -- a Catholic priest with the Xaverian Missionaries in Sierra Leone. Additional
stories on his evacuation to Guinea and the kidnapping of fellow missionaries
in the Northern Province. Articles reproduced here are intended for educational,
non-commercial use only. Copyrights are held by the authors.
Salone Scrapbook
Pre-war images of Sierra Leone taken between 1987 and 1990. See what the country
looked like when I lived there. Categories include snapshots, panoramas, currency,
and product labels. Images in each set are sorted and connected to each other
in file name order. Some sets also come with a JavaScript page that will load
and project the images automatically like a slide show. Be warned, however. Not
every Internet connection is fast enough to load the images in the time allotted
by the script (5 seconds).
Sounds of Salone
Traditional musical selections from the Northern Province of Sierra Leone. Gbondokali
ceremonies (Limba) and Tegbe performances (Temne). Each mp3 file is about three
minutes in length. Snippets of the Tegbe recordings were used as incidental music
in the radio programme Sierra
Leone: Celebration, War and Healing on Afropop Worldwide.
The Scriptural Basis for a Geocentric Cosmology
Those who insist that biology conform to the creation myth should also insist
that the earth sciences conform to a geocentric (or even flat-earth) model. The
Bible describes a universe that few of us would recognize today. This position
is supported with approximately 40 verses from both the Old and New Testaments.
Of course, the Bible also describes a universe that was created in six terrestrial
days. Why is the literal interpretation of the Bible applied so readily to the
latter situation and not the former? The message here is, I think, obvious. The
Bible is the literal truth only when it's convenient. In my view, this invalidates
the logical core of the anti-evolutionary
movement in its entirety.
Your Daily Horoscope: Is a Piece of Crap
The subtitle says it all. Horoscopes have no validity whatsoever. They predict
nothing. They give meaningless advice. They are based on irrational assumptions.
Most interesting of all, they disagree with one another. (Is my lucky number
713 or 761?)
Astrology
is
not
a
science. Horoscopes are not weather forecasts. Anyone who reads them seriously
is a fool.
Don't believe me? Then try it for yourself. See what the web's eminent astrologers
predicted for the earth's 500 million Aries on 11 November 1997.
| Another quality webpage by Glenn Elert |
 |
home | contact bent | chaos | eworld | facts | physics |
