"CST tests.

60 multiple choice questions for each student.

4 choices for each question.

That's 2 bits per question. 15 (8 bit) bytes per student. The sum total of how we look at their success.

Those 30 bytes get turned into a score between 150 & 600. 450 points (9 bits), except it's not. Because of weighting and quantization, you only get 160ish discrete scores. That's down to under 8 bits per student. (Probably appropriate, because the questions are unique from one level to next, so information about an individual response doesn't correlate to any particular response from the next year).

If a teacher has 28 kids in 5 periods, that's 140 students. 1120 bits of data to evaluate their entire performance for a year.

NY has decided that test scores will count for 40% of a teachers evaluation, & an unsatisfactory rating on test scores prohibits anything except an unsatisfactory rating for the other 60%.

Your entire career will be based on a the equivalent of single tweet."

"The study of synesthesia has helped shift the way scientists think about the brain. In the past, they have focused on matching different areas with specific functions; now, the entire organ is viewed as a tapestry of interwoven connections.

"The whole system is a giant network," Eagleman says. "It's no longer sufficient to think about single areas in isolation."

Like synesthesia, many neurological disorders — such as schizophrenia, autism,Alzheimer's disease, depression and epilepsy — have been linked to abnormal communication between brain regions. The hope is that as neuroscientists learn about how the connections in the synesthetic brain differ from those in normal brains, they will also gain insight into how these differences develop — and how they sometimes manifest as harmful disorders."

"The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements show that simply standing together can achieve real results."

"Occupy Wall Street is unsettling and disarming to those who hold economic power precisely because it is about making our government more democratic, creating an economic system that is more fair to its citizens and more responsive to the needs of people, and not to the needs of corporations. I noted that revolutionary moments turn into revolutions only when the repressive forces maintaining the regime begin to divide. The 1 per cent can be split - and perhaps already is becoming divided. When it does, this revolutionary moment may turn revolutionary. An alternative future on a global scale is possible, and it may have never been more within reach. And even if gains are not imminent, people of every generation grasp the idea that they ought to have a direct say in the conditions that shape their lives. Indeed, they are now insisting on it. Nothing is more revolutionary."

"How Many Really? compares the number of people involved in key historical events or situations to the people you know through Facebook or Twitter. You can also add your own numbers — for example, the amount of students in your class.<br />
<br />
Choose a story to get started."

"One of the concepts was called ‘Dimensions’ – a set of tools that looked to juxtapose the size of things from history and the news with things you are familiar with – bringing them home to you.<br />
<br />
About a year ago, we launched the first public prototype from that thinking, http://howbigreally.com, which overlaid the physical dimensions of news events such as the 2010 Pakistan Floods, or historic events such as the Apollo 11 moonwalks on where you lived or somewhere you were familiar with.<br />
<br />
It was a simple idea that proved pretty effective, with over half-a-million visitors in the past year, and a place in the MoMA Talk To Me exhibition.<br />
<br />
Today, we’re launching its sibling, howmanyreally.com"

"It's estimated that 20,000 humans were sacrificed by the Aztecs every year.<br />
How does this compare to the number of people you know?"

"Culling is easy; it implies a huge amount of control & mastery. Surrender, on the other hand, is a little sad. That's the moment you realize you're separated from so much. That's your moment of understanding that you'll miss most of the music, dancing, books & films that there have ever been & ever will be, & right now, there's something being performed somewhere in the world that you're not seeing that you would love.

It's sad, but it's also ... great, really. Imagine if you'd seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings & books and movies you're "supposed to see."…That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze…can [be] gobble[d up]…in one lifetime…

If "well-read" means "not missing anything," then nobody has a chance. If "well-read" means "making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully," then yes, we can all be well-read…"

"The later Wittgenstein uses children in his philosophical arguments against the traditional views of language. Describing how they learn language is one of his philosophical methods for setting philosophers free from their views and enabling them to see the world in a different way. The purpose of this paper is to explore what features of children he takes advantage of in his arguments, and to show how we can read Wittgenstein in terms of education. … The two features show that teaching is unlike telling, an activity toward the other who does not understand our explanations. Since we might not understand learners because of otherness, the justification of teaching is a crucial problem that is not properly answered so long as otherness is unrecognized. As long as we ignore otherness, we would not be aware that we might mistreat learners."

Too much to choose, but here's one interesting bit: "Now as for the color yellow, there is a physical explanation of that. When I began to lose my sight, the last color I saw, or the last color, rather, that stood out, because of course now I know that your coat is not the same color as this table or of the woodwork behind you—the last color to stand out was yellow because it is the most vivid of colors. That's why you have the Yellow Cab Company in the United States. At first they thought of making the cars scarlet. Then somebody found out that at night or when there was a fog that yellow stood out in a more vivid way than scarlet. So you have yellow cabs because anybody can pick them out. Now when I began to lose my eyesight, when the world began to fade away from me, there was a time among my friends . . . well they made, they poked fun at me because I was always wearing yellow neckties. Then they thought I really liked yellow, although it really was too glaring."

"It’s important to note what’s wrong with bean counting. It’s not that counting is wrong. Counting is good. We desperately need to know what’s working and what isn’t.<br />
The problem with the bean counters is what’s being counted. It’s a focus on solely counting things, rather than dimensions of life related to people. It’s perfectly possible to measure dimensions like client delight and employee satisfaction, but the bean counters–and 20th Century business–focused on counting the beans.<br />
Bean counting is the consequence of a view of the world as consisting of “things” to be manipulated, rather than people to be interacted with and conversed with and responded to.<br />
The new economics counts the people dimensions as well as the beans. And guess what? Even in conventional bean-counting terms, the new economics turns out to be two- to four-times more productive than traditional management…"

"Out of every hundred people,<br />
those who always know better:fifty-two.<br />
Unsure of every step:almost all the rest.<br />
Ready to help,if it doesn’t take long:forty-nine.<br />
Always good,because they cannot be otherwise:four — well, maybe five.<br />
Able to admire without envy:eighteen…"

"Here is I. M. Chip Blue, the fifth in my series of Enigma Gadgets. Like the others, it's based on the Arudino microcontroller and uses the Quadravox QV300 speech module. The QV300 is programmed from the factory to speak 240 common technical terms including units of measure, numbers and colors. I. M. Chip Blue also contains a Memsic 2125 accelerometer. I have programmed it the device to speak nonsensical sentences based on a set of rules. The rules vary depending on the way the device is oriented."

"Moreover, the number of people involved was small: 20 with autism, 20 without. With that small a group, it’s hard to tell whether any association that shows up is meaningful. You can train a computer using photos of the family cat, and it will calculate whichever combination of size, colour, and whisker length best detects autism in its owner. There are so many potential combinations that in all likelihood one of them will appear to perform pretty well. But try it on another bunch of people, and the odds are it will fail."

"For some reason lists of features are legible to accountants & engineers who often have the keys to the car & decide what gets done."'

"Innovating, only not by stacking lists of features & parts & stuff — but at least by starting with ways of creating opportunities & experiences that lead people in new, unexpected directions. That make space for experiences that go beyond expectation. Basically creating new user experiences. I don’t think you do that just by creating new features & bolting on new technologies."

[Some quick thoughts below, but more here: http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/916738627/more-opportunities-not-more-features ]

[Love this. It speaks to what we do at schools that empower learners by creating a flexible learning environment, not adding more classes, more programs. We do "less" in terms of numbers, but more in terms of freedom & self-direction, helping them give themselves more options. One point missing: it's not only accountant & engineer decision-making people that need help seeing the benefit of fewer features, but also number-comparing users (parents in our case).]

"primes graphs digits sums of powers bases combinatorics powers/polygonal Fibonacci

"[M]uch of what we fear today is based on hype rather than reality. ... Using the most recent US data available, we hereby present a lidt of unsettling threats and their riskier counterparts."

"La palabra capicúa (en matemáticas, número palíndromo) se refiere a cualquier número que se lee igual de izquierda a derecha y de derecha a izquierda (Ejemplos: 212, 7.540.550.457). El término se origina en la expresión catalana cap i cua (cabeza y cola)."

"Does a group of indigenous South Americans hold the key to our relationship with maths? Here, an extract from an enlightening new book explains why it just might"

"A movie inspired on numbers, geometry and nature, by Cristóbal Vila. Go to www.etereaestudios.com for more info: theory behind, stills, screenshots, tutorials..."

"The Vehicle Information Number (VIN) plate on cars is a clever way to communicate everything about a car in a simple, hard-to-duplicate format. Below, we show you how to decode any vehicle's 17-digit VIN number.

"If AIG spent $160 million on bonuses ...out of $30 billion bailout it received...from American taxpayer, what proportion...did not go to bonuses?... 99.5%...AIG is as pure as Ivory soap...bonuses are smaller than small change. What is shocking about the bailouts begun by Bush & continuing under Obama is how huge they are...impossible to imagine numbers involved except when they are set against one another...country that uses mind-boggling masses of resources to produce mind-boggling masses of output...economic crisis is showing us that policy battles of most years are concerned with nickles & dimes. Earmarks worth $8 billion – pennies...cost of healthcare for children – nickels...Social Security shortfall after 2041 – dimes. The really big money in the economy is as hard to grasp as distance to nearest star. We need to think not in miles but in light years of spending...2002-06...73% of additional income went to top 1% of households...system has failed...over last several decades"

"they told Belisarius that an army of 100,000 troops was mustering against him, he calmly said: "Very few generals can manage an army of 100,000." And when they said: "It's now 150,000", he'd say: "Even fewer generals can manage an army of 150,000." Exactly...The question of size is not just about organisational efficiency. It also affects what motivates people to do what they do...I've heard it said that 11 is the maximum useful unit, for example, for those asked to do anything really dangerous and difficult. The same number for frontline soldiers and people 100 feet down a mine. A man will put himself at serious risk to save one of his mates, but not for the 29th miner down the line. ""No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back," said anthropologist Margaret Mead. Communes aren't in fashion right now, it's conglomerates and global empires. But in the end we can all relate only to a certain number of people; a unity more or less like a family."

"It appears that we, as humans, can access two different methods of numerical mapping," says Dehaene. "The logarithmic, ratio-based method is the most intuitive; we inherit it from our primate evolution and we still access it in the absence of precise mathematical tools. Through education, we also acquire a linear mapping. However, this does appear to be a cultural construct."

"Psychologists have used hypnosis to give people the ability to see numbers as colors.

"One research team has found that how readily people rally their approximate number sense is linked over time to success in even the most advanced and abstruse mathematics courses. Other scientists have shown that preschool children are remarkably good at approximating the impact of adding to or subtracting from large groups of items but are poor at translating the approximate into the specific. Taken together, the new research suggests that math teachers might do well to emphasize the power of the ballpark figure, to focus less on arithmetic precision and more on general reckoning."

"Much of geeky media is visually oriented but I can't really think of anything else that offers a multiple dimension (pictures, words, and numbers) to the experience. Being a book nut myself, I will say I feel a certain vindication when plain ol' print media wins out in this case. Any other geek entertainment with similar educational value out there?"

"The realization that l33tspeak could be applied to hex values in Photoshop led to a few minutes of frivolity. UPDATE: A few more, based on your suggestions (I can't believe I missed #C0FFEE the first time!) and some additional ones I came up with"

"Does precision or roundedness of prices bias magnitude judgments? If so, do they affect buyer behavior? In a laboratory pre-test...people incorrectly judge precise prices ($325,425) to be lower than round prices of similar magnitudes ($325,000)."

on the naming/numbering of Chile's regions

"The decimal part of a logarithm. In the logarithm 2.95424, the mantissa is 0.95424."

"Free People Search and Public Information Search Engine"

"Welcome to a fast, easy and shareable online calculator."

"Synesthesia makes sense of art and art from sense."

"Visualizing huge numbers can be very difficult. People regularly talk about millions of miles, billions of bytes, or trillions of dollars, yet it's still hard to grasp just how much a "billion" really is. The MegaPenny Project aims to help by taking one

"But there are several huge problems with using real words as product names."

"Many animals have basic numerical abilities, but some experiences can transform their minds and ultimately change how they think about numbers"