A team of education, economics and public policy scholars has built a new tool that can quickly assess how a particular school finance reform proposal might impact individual California school districts.
The tool can be used to assess any formula that consolidates so-called “categorical” or restricted, special-purpose state and federal funds. It will be discussed at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Diego on Tuesday, April 14.
“California currently allocates more than $40 billion of tax revenue — more than $1,000 per resident — through a school finance system that is not rational or transparent,” said Heather Rose, assistant professor of education at UC Davis. “Reform is vital, and we hope this model will be a useful tool for legislators and others who are serious about achieving it.”
The model appears as an Excel appendix to a 2008 PPIC-sponsored report, “Funding Formulas for California Schools II: An Analysis of a Proposal by the Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence.” It can be seen at http://www.ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=830.
AT LAST! Now, how to propogate …
[The] process begins by taking the derivatives of every variable observed with respect to every other – a mathematical way of measuring how one quantity changes as another changes. Then the computer creates equations at random using various constants and variables from the data. It tests these against the known derivatives, keeps the equations that come closest to predicting correctly, modifies them at random and tests again, repeating until it literally evolves a set of equations that accurately describe the behavior of the real system.
Technically, the computer does not output equations, but finds “invariants” – mathematical expressions that remain true all the time.
This is one of the interactive graphics Eigenfactor.org has published as part of their effort to draw more meaningful conclusions from the citation network of published research. Their analysis, described here and in this PDF, uses an eigenvector centrality measure similar to PageRank to evaluate the relationships between articles.
Incidentally, Jack July recently posted a similarly intended graphic from Nature (full text available free here). Its authors use clickstream logs to create a map of greater resolution and timeliness than is possible with citation data.
A team of researchers from Perimeter Institute, Cambridge University, and Texas A&M has for the first time estimated, from mathematical symmetry arguments, the size of a fundamental imbalance pervading the subatomic world. This imbalance, called the CP violation, distinguishes matter from antimatter and is essential to understanding why matter predominates over antimatter in the natural world.
Applying a new statistical approach, researchers showed how random matrices can be used to estimate the size of the CP violation to be expected in nature. To their surprise, their results tallied well with experimentally observed data about quarks.
The team also showed how this approach could be applied to judge whether or not there are likely to be more than three subatomic particle families in nature, and to anticipate the properties of exotic particles called neutrinos. The work also provides clues about the physical mechanism which caused the imbalance between matter and antimatter in the Universe.
Jer Thorp, using a NYT API and Processing, created this graphic tracking the number of occurrences of ‘organic’ since 1981. The names of the organizations associated with the articles were used to create roots. This is just one of the several visualizations in this set, including one comparing frequencies of ‘communism’ and ‘terrorism’ and another with ‘acid rain’, ‘global warming’, and ‘climate change’. A few of these are even available as prints in his Etsy store.
O Hive Mind, o Lazy Web, Urania’s child, I invoke thee! Is there a name for the function
i.e., forwhen X is binomially distributed?
Posted by crshalizi at March 22, 2009 21:52 | see also Enigmas of Chance
=) =) =)
♥ ♥ ♥
lol!
A paper published in the March 2009 issue of Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics Review, presents an overview of the theoretical developments in cloaking from a mathematical perspective. One method involves light waves bending around a region or object and emerging on the other side as if the waves had passed through empty space, creating an “invisible” region which is cloaked. For this to happen, however, the object or region has to be concealed using a cloaking device, which must be undetectable to electromagnetic waves. Manmade devices called metamaterials use structures having cellular architectures designed to create combinations of material parameters not available in nature.
![A Beautiful Math
It’s hard enough to make modern mathematics comprehensible in print, so I’m especially impressed to see anyone try to do it on television. Tonight, at 8 p.m. on PBS, Nova is presenting “Hunting the Hidden Dimension,” an hour-long documentary on what it calls a “compelling mathematical detective story,” the discovery of fractal geometry and its resulting applications. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that there are lots of beautiful examples of fractals the natural world — and the unnatural worlds of “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.”
[UPDATE, Wednesday, Oct. 29] If you missed the show last night, you can watch it by clicking here. You’ll see a beautiful explanation of how patterns of static in phone lines led to the Mandelbrot set pictured above — and much more. I agree with Xanthippe’s critical verdict on the show: “Brilliant.”](http://9.media.tumblr.com/5bkSAFYVqfwdfep0ZAiWX0kro1_400.jpg)
It’s hard enough to make modern mathematics comprehensible in print, so I’m especially impressed to see anyone try to do it on television. Tonight, at 8 p.m. on PBS, Nova is presenting “Hunting the Hidden Dimension,” an hour-long documentary on what it calls a “compelling mathematical detective story,” the discovery of fractal geometry and its resulting applications. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that there are lots of beautiful examples of fractals the natural world — and the unnatural worlds of “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.”
[UPDATE, Wednesday, Oct. 29] If you missed the show last night, you can watch it by clicking here. You’ll see a beautiful explanation of how patterns of static in phone lines led to the Mandelbrot set pictured above — and much more. I agree with Xanthippe’s critical verdict on the show: “Brilliant.”
Math research team maps E8 - MIT News Office
old news but something i’ve been thinking about recently.
Seed: Paola Antonelli + Benoit Mandelbrot
The curator and the mathematician discuss fractals, architecture, and the death of Euclid.
Very Special Relativity: An Illustrated Guide: Sander Bais
This is an amazing book~
![\[ f_n(\theta) = \sum_{k=0}^{n}{{n \choose k} \theta^k {(1-\theta)}^{n-k} \log{k!}} \]](http://cscs.umich.edu/%7Ecrshalizi/sloth/604_1.gif)
