This report Frinom the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, citing an article in the June 1 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says that differences between boys’ and girls’ performance on standardized mathematics tests correlates with the level of gender equity and other socio-cultural factors in the country in which the test was taken.
The study’s co-author says:

“There are countries where the gender disparity in math performance doesn’t exist at either the average or gifted level. These tend to be the same countries that have the greatest gender equality,” article co-author Janet Mertz, an oncology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a university news release.[...]

“If you provide females with more educational opportunities and more job opportunities in fields that require advanced knowledge of math, you’re going to find more women learning and performing very well in mathematics,” Mertz said.

The study goes on to cite the US as a country where there is a relatively high degree of gender equity and hence a relatively equal performance on standardized tests between boys and girls, with more and more girls taking advanced courses in science and math. But, importantly, the study also warns that

“U.S. culture instills in students the belief that math talent is innate; if one is not naturally good at math, there is little one can do to become good at it,” Mertz said. “In some other countries, people more highly value mathematics and view math performance as being largely related to effort.”

This is a point well worth noting. What will it take for the culture in the US to get away from the idea that you’re either born with mathematical ability or born without it — in other words, mathematical predestination?

On Twitter right now I am soliciting thoughts about calculus courses, the topics we cover in them, and the ways in which we cover them. It’s turning out that 140 characters isn’t enough space to frame my question properly, so I’m making this short post to do just that. Here it is:

Suppose that you teach a calculus course that is designed for a general audience (i.e. not just engineers, not just non-engineers, etc.). Normally the course would be structured as a 4-credit hour course, meaning four 50-minute class meetings per week for 14 weeks. Now, suppose that the decision has been made to cut this to TWO credit hours, or 100 minutes of contact time per week for 14 weeks.

Questions: What topics do you remove from the course? What topics do you keep in the course at all costs? And of those topics you keep, do you teach them the same way or differently? If differently, then how would you do it? Finally, would there be anything NEW you’d introduce in the course that would be pertinent for a 2-hour course that wouldn’t show up in a 4-hour version of that course?

Keep Twittering your comments to me at @RobertTalbert, or comment below. I’ll sum them up later.

UPDATE: I also meant to say, feel free to play with the assumptions I am making here. For example, if it’s impossible to think of a 2-hour calculus course, change that to a 3-credit course and see if you can come up with anything.

…if you’re not following my family blog, The Talbert Five. Just click it.

My latest post at the Young Mathematicians Network blog is on how to get from graduate school to your first academic job without hopelessly screwing yourself over financially speaking, like I did. It takes some time for the post to appear on the YMN web site, so I will include it below the fold for CO9s readers (I should call this “premium content”!).

Right now, if you are on the job market, you are thinking of two, maybe three things. The top attention-getter, if you’re in graduate school, is getting your thesis done. Next down the list, you’re probably wondering what all those search committees are thinking, particularly what they are thinking of you and where they put you in the pack of applicants for their positions. And third, you might be thinking about the Joint Meetings next month, where you’ll likely get your first dose of interviewing.

But what many job applicants, particularly those still in graduate school, don’t think about at this time of year is how things are going to unfold after the interviews have been done and the job offers extended and accepted. Very soon, you’ll be done with your thesis and signed on to start a new position in the fall. And the gap between finishing school and starting a new academic job has to be paid for.

A failure to plan for this gap can create a huge financial mess, as you can tell if you look at my story. I accepted a job in April 1997 and defended my dissertation in May of that year, but not once did I plan for the interim period between finishing school and starting my job. When the summer following my defense came, I had virtually no income and absolutely no savings. So when I made my move from Tennessee to Indiana, I had to put everything — groceries, apartment deposits, and so on — on credit cards at 15% to 18% interest. My indebtedness went even deeper when I discovered the simple fact that my first paycheck wasn’t due to arrive until the middle of September. So I had to live for two months on my own with no money, living like a graduate student, racking up high-interest debt, after telling myself I’d finally be able to afford nicer things once I had a job. I absolutely failed to enjoy the new, comparatively luxurious income that I had earned by getting my job, because I had to spend the plurality of it paying off the debt I incurred while moving to that very same job!

We mathematicians are so good at quantitative ideas and yet many of us miss the boat when it comes to real-life personal finance. Here are ten pieces of advice about money and finances that I wish I had gotten prior to my last year in graduate school.

Things to do BEFORE interviews

1. Use a good online salary/cost of living calculator to get an estimate of monthly living expenses in all the areas you might live. You can Google and find a whole lot of these. Find out what the average starting salary is for the position to which you applied, and start plugging and chugging to find out what that compares to in different places.

2. Starting NOW: Save up for two months of living expenses based on the average monthly cost of living in your potential new locations. Those two months are August and September. This is very tough, because moving to a new location involves lots of one-time startup expenses that can mount up very quickly: deposits for a new apartment, fees to turn on utilities, tags for your car, and so on. Add to that the fact that many employers issue paychecks only once a month in the middle or sometimes (like my current college) at the end of the month. That means that the big, fat paycheck you’re looking forward to is not going to come your way until potentially 6-8 weeks after you actually begin working, and you will have a lot of expenses in the meanwhile to deal with. You have to have a cash reserve that is sufficient to handle these expenses and get you through to your first paycheck.

3. Starting NOW: Procure summer employment and benefits. In light of #2, it’s especially important to try and get some income sources for the time following your completion of school and (hopefully) your thesis defense and prior to your move. Fortunately, summer employment is usually easy to find if you are willing to get outside your comfort zone. There’s a good chance that your current university can hire you on as an adjunct to teach a four- or eight-week summer course. Adjuncting is a gig that usually pays fairly well, doesn’t involve as much grading during the summer as a regular-term course, and keeps your classroom skills fresh. Community colleges are also a good source of these kinds of jobs. If you don’t want to teach, there are always seasonal jobs in retail; or you could tutor; or you could babysit; or whatever. The point is that most graduate school assistantships run out at the end of the academic year, and you will need an income stream once this happens in order to save up for living expenses in August and September. The time to get busy finding such a stream is now, particularly for teaching jobs, as most colleges plan their teaching schedules out 4-6 months in advance. And don’t forget benefits, either, like health insurance; if you carried health insurance as a part of your graduate student assistantship, and you’re no longer a graduate student, then you should look into getting a COBRA or finding a summer position that has health insurance as a benefit.

4. Starting NOW: Pay down or pay off credit card debts and make a pact with yourself to use credit cards only if you know you won’t carry a balance. If you can pay off your credit card and personal loan debts now, then you can use the money you are pumping out to the credit card companies and salt it away instead for your living expenses later in the year. And since the use of credit cards and personal loans is easy to justify when you have to scrape income together to get by, you have to be serious with yourself about using them sparingly, if at all — or else you’ll end up with debt that takes years to pay off, like I did.

Things to do DURING and AFTER interviews

Once you start having phone interviews and/or Joint Meetings interviews, and then go on to on-campus interviews and eventually job offers, it’s time to be more precise:

5. When you are able to make a short list of schools under consideration, do detailed research on the cost of living in each area and revise your calculation from #1. You’ll have between two and ten schools that are holding your interest and which are reciprocating that interest by now. Look at each school in turn and find out: average monthly rent on apartments, average cost per square foot for houses, property tax rates, car and health insurance rates, and so on. You now have to consider the prospect of actually living in one of these places. And the cost of doing so is at least as important of a factor in considering job offers as anything else. If a school in central Indiana (one of the most affordable places to live in the USA) offers you a salary of $50K per year, that’s much different than getting an offer from a school in San Francisco or New York City of the same amount or even $20-30K per year more than that. You can find out information on most of these things online at your salary/COL calculator, local real estate web sites (which let you search for apartments and homes in the area), and Chamber of Commerce sites.

6. When doing on-campus interviews, take time to explore the area to check out housing prices and neighborhoods, rent for apartments near campus, going to grocery stores, etc. While you can do much of your cost-of-living research online, there’s no substitute for pounding the pavement and putting yourself in the actual location in which you might be living. That college’s web site might make it look like an idyllic, forested setting, but maybe that’s just good photography — and the reality is that the college’s town is run-down and crime-ridden. On my first job interview, the college actually loaned me a college vehicle and paid for the gas so I could spend an afternoon on my own driving around to see the place, and that was a major factor in my taking that position.

7. When an offer comes, negotiate for relocation expenses. The cost of actually moving your stuff from your current location to the new location is a significant expense that can be a huge one, if you have more to move than just yourself and a small amount of stuff. Many colleges automatically give some sort of relocation allowance and are happy to do so, but you want to do the research beforehand to estimate just how much it’s going to cost you to actually move (How big of a truck will you need? How much mileage and gas? Will it take one day or multiple days? Do you need movers to handle your stuff?) and then make this a point of negotiation during the offer. If you are attractive enough of a candidate to get an offer at all, most colleges would have no problem spending a little more on a one-time basis to help you move there. (And if they are not willing to help you on that, turn the offer down — who wants to work at a stingy college?) This is a summer expense that you can totally avoid if you have hard data to support your estimate and halfway-decent negotiating skills.

8. Consider living in an inexpensive apartment or rental house for one year after moving, rather than buying a house. There are a lot of reasons in general to prefer owning a home over renting. But when you are moving to a new location, renting for a year will free up income (since rent is typically less than a mortgage payment) and will allow you to do four important things:
(a) Research the housing market in your area, figure out where the good and bad neighborhoods are, and figure out just how much you can really afford per month on a mortgage payment.
(b) Set aside money towards a down payment on the house that you really want (if you really want one). The magic number is often 20% of the house’s value, which will allow you to avoid mortgage insurance costs later.
(c) Build up an emergency fund of at least $1000 that will give you a cushion if something unexpected comes along.
(d) Continue to pay off debts.
Also, since it might be expensive just to travel to a place to look for housing, getting an apartment first doesn’t involve so much guesswork (apartments are pretty uniform in quality whereas houses can look great online but turn out to be terrible in person), and setting up your apartment can be done online or over the phone without having to travel.

9. Make a pact with yourself that you will not splurge on nice stuff until you actually have an income from your new job. This is very tough, because you’ve been living for 4+ years on a pauper’s income and eating Ramen noodles for two meals a day, so you really, REALLY want to go out and buy an iPhone or a new car. But you have to tell yourself that just having a job doesn’t mean you have money — not yet. I think a good waiting period on new stuff would be one semester after you start. By then, you’ll have an idea of just how far that paycheck will stretch each month and you can avoid getting in over your head. Some items, I agree, you have to buy right away — like furniture for your apartment. But you can often get multiple-years same-as-cash deals on things like this and defer payments until after the first semester is over.

10. Continue to educate yourself on personal finance matters. I highly recommend, and have largely stolen from in this article, the work of Dave Ramsey as a good source of learning about financing. He will challenge you to change the way you think about consumerism and debt, and if you listen, you will get on a sound financial footing for the rest of your life. His best book is Total Money Makeover, and his Financial Peace University classes are offered all the time in churches and community centers, usually for free or a small fee. He also has a radio show, web site, and podcast on money matters.

The point here is that you not only want to get a job you love, you also want to give yourself the ability to enjoy it to the fullest by not having to worry about money or how to pay off all the debt you gathered while finishing up.

Do you have other ideas or advice for getting financially ready to transition from grad school to the working world? Leave a comment!

You have to love this:

more graph humor and song chart memes

I’m not sure how I made it this far without GraphJam. Briliant stuff.

Jackie asked a series of good questions about the textbook-free modern algebra course and some of the student outcomes I was seeing in it. I tried to respond to those in the comments, but things started to get lengthy, so instead I will get to them here.

Do you think the results are only a result of a textbook free course?

To repeat what I said in the comments: I think the positives in the course come not so much from the fact that we didn’t have a textbook, but more from the fact that the course was oriented toward solving problems rather than covering material. There was a small core of material that we had to cover, since the seniors were getting tested on it, but mostly we spent our time in class presenting, dissecting, and discussing problems. We didn’t cover as much as I would have liked, but this is a price I decided to pay at the outset.

Most traditional textbooks don’t lend themselves well to this kind of class design. The ratio of text to problems in a typical textbook is probably something like 5:1 — a lot higher than that in some books. When you have a book in the course, it almost forces itself into the center of the class universe and everything tends to revolve around it, and take on its flavor. When the book spends most, almost all, of its pages on stuff for students to read rather than on problems for students to solve, then I guess it’s possible to have a problem-solving oriented class, but you’re going to be swimming upstream the whole way.

It works better, I think, to have no central book — and instead, provide problems via the course notes with just enough information to solve the problems. And if the students need more information, make it an assignment for library research or web queries.

Were there any negative outcomes? Anything you didn’t like as a result of choosing to structure the course in this manner?

There are some important algebra topics, in rings and particularly in fields, that are not going to get the time they really deserve. And I had to cut short or cut out some topics in group theory that are normally standard fare. At least, I see this as a negative; whether it really makes a difference in the long run is yet to be determined.

The way I select students to do course tasks in class basically involves randomly ordering the students and having them attempt the problems one after the other. It seemed like several times, students who had not presented much ended up first on the list on the days they didn’t have something and last on the list on the days they did. Call it bad luck or Murphy’s Law or what-have-you; but I didn’t like how there was no mechanism for making sure the lower-scoring students got more chances to work.

Some students in the class still struggle with basic problem-solving skills and writing proofs. I think they have enough education to carry out successful problem-solving on proofs most of the time. But not having me lecture has meant that they don’t get to see professionally put-together proofs very often unless they go do some reading.

And I think that this course structure caused stress and even ill will among the students who were not used to having so much personal responsibility in their college work. I think that’s an unintended consequence of implementing a course design that is basically sound; I regret that it happened, and I’d like students to have a more uniformly positive experience in the class, but I’m not going to change the basic course design.

Would you do this again?

You bet, although I believe this way of running the class works in some situations and wouldn’t work in others. I thought about running my differential equations class next semester like this, but that course is so focused on methods that a blind application of this course structure onto that course doesn’t seem appropriate. Maybe I’ll come up with some variant that works.

What would you keep the same? What would you change?

I would definitely keep my method for assigning problems to students, my rubric for grading course tasks, and just the overall procedure for running the class sessions that I used. And I’d keep the feature where students get to choose the weights on the various assessments.

I’d do a little more with the course wiki. Right now students are expected to write up their solutions to course note tasks on the wiki, but there is no point value in doing so nor a penalty for not doing so. The exams are open-wiki, though, so there is some incentive for writing results up well. But I think I would make the posting of solutions mandatory and enforce the rule.

I’d also try to have a complete set of notes before the course began. I have been writing things as I go, and it’s led to some snafus I could have avoided.

I might try writing the course notes so that rings and fields come first.

I’d seriously consider having proof techniques be offered as the subject of weekly help sessions or additional course work. Some students are still struggling with basic problem-solving techniques, and they really need more help than what they are asking for.

That’s that for the questions. Any more?

Apple just made major updates to the software I probably use the most, namely iWork and particularly Keynote. I downloaded the 30-day trial (which makes me wonder why we can’t just download software from Apple) and have given Pages and Keynote a very (VERY) brief once-over. I hope to have more later. But for now, here are some first impressions.

They are really pushing Pages now as a word processor. Before, it was a little hard to know exactly what it was. Is it a word processor? Is it desktop publishing? Is it something in between? We didn’t really know, and I hardly ever used it unless I had a document to print that had a lot of graphics in it. But now, check out the updated toolbar:

Mercifully, you can now adjust stuff like font size, typeface, aligment, etc. from the toolbar — no more click, click, click to navigate through those damnable Inspectors to do such simple stuff. Just like… a word processor. And just so you don’t forget, it tags the name of the document with (Word Processing) at the top. Actually this appears to be because you can switch between “word processing” mode and some other kind of mode (“page layout”?). I didn’t play with it long enough to find out the difference.

I made out a document in Pages ‘08 just to see what it was like, and the experience was pretty much the same as with Pages ‘06. One thing I was thankful for was this commonly-used Inspector item for laying out objects within a document:

In ‘06, the choices here were “moves with text” or “fixed on page”. The latter option confusingly meant that the object being selected could be moved around and the text would wrap with it, which to me is the opposite of something being fixed on a page. “Floating” is a much better term for this.

Keynote ‘08 has some nice new themes to it and has the feature I have been secretly wishing for ever since I started using Keynote: The ability to animate an object along a user-defined path. There is also a new option that lets you export a presentation directly to YouTube — which is nice, but won’t the screen resolution be terrible?

There are more features to boot, and I hope to delve deeply into them later.

Finally, there is a new spreadsheet package with iWork called Numbers. From the Apple tutorials, it sounds… rudimentary. There are all sorts of media-rich enhancements, like the ability to edit images right in the spreadsheet, but honestly, I use a spreadsheet for number-crunching and data analysis. All I can say is, if it doesn’t do multiple forms of regression, it ain’t a spreadsheet, and I don’t care how media-rich it is. We’ll see how it stacks up to Excel pretty soon.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iWork, Numbers, Pages, Keynote

This post on the TV show Jericho has produced 13 comments, making it one of the top 5 most-commented-on articles I’ve posted here at CO9s. Almost all these comments are from new commenters. So welcome to all of you folks. I guess we’re witnessing the power of a Technorati keyword search at work.

Technorati Tags: Jericho, Technorati

I made it back from Reconnect 2007 safe and sound around 11:30 last night, and without a single flight delay! I didn’t have wifi at any point on the way back — see mini-rant below — so I kept a text file with some running commentary while I was waiting for my flights yesterday. Here you go:

- Both the Raleigh-Durham airport and the Newark Liberty Airport have wifi… for $7.95 per 24-hour period. That’s lame. Wifi in an airport should be free. Especially in Newark, which has one of the highest rates of traffic in the world — and one of the most boring gate areas. I’m writing this blog post offline at my gate in Newark, because of the non-free wifi, in case you were wondering.

- I’m hoping that Washington-Dulles has free wifi, because I was counting on snagging a Jericho episode from iTunes for the 90-minute flight back to Indy (in the dark).

Update: Dulles has three different wifi networks — each with its own set of rate plans. Nothing free. Lame, lame, lame. Guess I’ll have to find my in-flight entertainment elsewhere.

- Getting *in* to Newark is evidently a highly uncertain affair (see my reports from the inbound trip). But once you’re here, getting *out* seems to be no problem. Nothing is being delayed, lines are short, and people are moving on and off planes easily. What does this say about Newark?

- You cannot buy anything in the Newark airport with “New Jersey” or “Newark” on it. Millions of NYC items to buy, though. Again, what does this say about Newark?

- I had to take a hotel shuttle from Rutgers to the hotel, so I could catch my airport shuttle from the hotel to the airport. The hotel shuttle was supposed to pick me up at 12:30 and the airport shuttle was to pick me up at 1:50. The hotel shuttle was an hour late, almost causing me to miss my ride to the airport. How hard is it to drive a bus 10 miles?

- Upon checking in at the US Air counter, I entered my information only to get a message that my reservation couldn’t be found. When I checked with an agent, I was told that I was actually on a United flight. I guess I should just regard the fact that “USAIR” was printed on the ticket as just a decoy to test my critical thinking skills.

- State Shuttle, the airport shuttle service I used, has been the only transportation-related service I’ve used on this trip that has demonstrated anything approaching competence. And the drivers I had were very friendly and fun to talk to. If you are flying into New York or Newark and need ground transportation, I highly recommend them.

- One good thing about Newark: Electrical outlets in plentiful supply. Charlotte’s airport had great, free wifi but nowhere to plug your computer in except really inconvenient places (e.g. in front of entries to bathrooms).

Technorati Tags: Jericho, Airports, Wifi

I found out during one of my interminable waits in the Charlotte airport that CBS has this site called Innertube, where you can view entire episodes of some of its shows for free. Included in that list of shows is the entire first series of Jericho, a drama that has become a cult favorite even though it was cancelled after its first series. I watched the first episode in the airport, and I was hooked.

It’s about life in a small town after a devastating terrorist nuclear attack on the United States. I have always been a sucker for post-nuclear holocaust fiction — call it a morbid holdover fascination from having grown up in the 80’s. Jericho is small-town slice-of-life drama, meets post-holocaust, meets government conspiracies — all in a neat, weekly serial package. This is one of the few TV shows I’ve made an effort to watch lately, and I’m not the only fan. There’s the Emmy-nominated web site and even a Jericho wiki where the real paranoids theorize about who attacked us, what’s in Hawkins’ basement, and more.

I’ve watched three more of the episodes on line during my free time here in Jersey and I am thoroughly indoctrinated into the cult. You can buy the whole first season on iTunes for $30 and I am seriously considering it, for the flight back to Indy.

Technorati Tags: Jericho