Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTA recent classroom revelation caused us to reconsider the adequacy of the instructions offered in our textbooks for one of our most elementary quantitative methods. Specifically, we found that many students were mystified concerning how to pick an initial objective function value when plotting an isoprofit line in order to graphically solve a linear programming problem. We observed that this seemingly insignificant issue was causing a surprising amount of wasted time, confusion, and even anxiety. Our experience indicated that students do not necessarily possess any consistent intuition for choosing an appropriate initial value. We confirmed this perception through informal experimentation. We reviewed several textbooks and found that most simply do not bother to address this issue. Therefore, we devised a simple, comprehensible method which we have taught our students to resolve or avoid this problem. Although we quickly found the method to be helpful for many students, we conducted an experiment to formally measure its effect.

Apparently we've all got to be poorer. Well, yes, again, but this time it's because: The global extraction of raw materials is expected to increase by 60% by 2060, with calamitous consequences for the climate and the environment, according an unpublished UN analysis seen by the Guardian.Natural resource extraction has soared by almost 400% since 1970 due to industrialisation, urbanisation and population growth, according to a presentation of the five-yearly UN Global Resource Outlook made to EU ministers last week.To get a handle on the sort of size of number they're talking about: Each year, the world consumes more than 92b tonnes of materials – biomass (mostly food), metals, fossil fuels and minerals – and this figure is growing at the rate of 3.2% per year.Of course we don't, in fact, "consume", we borrow for a bit. That old phrase of dust to dust, ashes to ashes, is true at the planetary system level. Say, the use of metals - we might dig them up out of one hole, use them then stick them back in another, mine to landfill, but we've not consumed them.But OK, so 92 billion tonnes, call it 100bn. Up by 60%, let's give them an inch and call it 200 billion tonnes. Big number.Except: The lithosphere consists of sediments and crystalline rocks with a total mass of 23,000–24,000 × 10x15 metric tons.24,000,000,000 billion tonnes.200 billion is 0.0000008%In a million years we'll use under 1% of it (assuming we've got the right number of zeroes there all the way through).This is such a problem that: ""Higher figures mean higher impacts," he said. "In essence, there are no more safe spaces on Earth. We are already out of our safe operating space and if these trends continue, things will get worse. " which we think might be a bit of an exaggeration. "The report prioritises equity and human wellbeing measurements over GDP growth alone and proposes action to reduce overall demand rather than simply increasing "green" production." Ah, yes, we must be more equal and poorer as a solution. How did we guess that is what would be suggested? "Decarbonisation without decoupling economic growth and wellbeing from resource use and environmental impacts is not a convincing answer and the currently prevailing focus on cleaning the supply side needs to be complemented with demand-side measures," Potočnik said." That, again, means make everyone poorer.Yes, sure, 200 billion is a big number even when speaking about government budgets and deficits. But the size of the Earth is a really, really, big number. Against which 200 billion is a grain of a smidgeon of a smear. It's simply not an important nor relevant number nor percentage. It's a great excuse to impose perpetual poverty upon the population, of course it is. But it's not a good reason. Because a big number of a very big number is a small number.

AbstractWhen asked to explain their solutions to a problem, children often gesture and, at times, these gestures convey information that is different from the information conveyed in speech. Children who produce these gesture‐speech "mismatches" on a particular task have been found to profit from instruction on that task. We have recently found that some children produce gesture‐speech mismatches when identifying numbers at the cusp of their knowledge, for example, a child incorrectly labels a set of two objects with the word "three" and simultaneously holds up two fingers. These mismatches differ from previously studied mismatches (where the information conveyed in gesture has the potential to be integrated with the information conveyed in speech) in that the gestured response contradicts the spoken response. Here, we ask whether these contradictory number mismatches predict which learners will profit from number‐word instruction. We used the Give‐a‐Number task to measure number knowledge in 47 children (Mage = 4.1 years, SD = 0.58), and used the What's on this Card task to assess whether children produced gesture‐speech mismatches above their knower level. Children who were early in their number learning trajectories ("one‐knowers" and "two‐knowers") were then randomly assigned, within knower level, to one of two training conditions: a Counting condition in which children practiced counting objects; or an Enriched Number Talk condition containing counting, labeling set sizes, spatial alignment of neighboring sets, and comparison of these sets. Controlling for counting ability, we found that children were more likely to learn the meaning of new number words in the Enriched Number Talk condition than in the Counting condition, but only if they had produced gesture‐speech mismatches at pretest. The findings suggest that numerical gesture‐speech mismatches are a reliable signal that a child is ready to profit from rich number instruction and provide evidence, for the first time, that cardinal number gestures have a role to play in number‐learning.

STUPEFIED BY MESSAGES OF FEAR, PROPAGANDA AND OUTRIGHT FALSEHOOD, THE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES FOLLOW A LEADERSHIP UNABLE OR UNWILLING TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN TRUE STRENGTH AND RAW POWER

Much recent anthropology reflects on how scales are contested and contingent products of heterogeneous social interactions, not the 'ontological givens' (sensu Carr and Lempert) described in earlier scholarship. This article examines the importance of number in the formation of scales of measurement. It does so regarding a pastoral Mongolian scale of livestock-counting based on the number ten thousand, or tüm[en]: a qualitative-cum-quantitative term suggesting plenty and abundance. Drawing on literature on the anthropology of number, and bringing it into dialogue with studies of scale and ideology, this article argues that number is not just a means for calibrating pre-existing scales. Instead, as something endowed with particular qualities and conceptual stability, number can be mobilized to produce ideologically charged scales of measurement.

University catalog published as an issue of the Norwich University Record.