Free Republic

In a meeting room at the Palazzo hotel in Las Vegas over the past week, Newt Gingrich mapped out a detailed strategy that would keep him in the presidential race all the way to the Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., in August. The crux of the former House speaker's new plan is math: a complex analysis of each state's delegates, how they're awarded and how many, reasonably, Gingrich can expect to win... The winning candidate needs 1,144 delegates to claim the nomination..... Gingrich's team has studied the convoluted rules. Using targeted phone lists and targeted mail and focusing on more...

Those who continue to believe that Romney can be stopped are focused — as is the campaign of Newt Gingrich — on the possibility of a long delegate fight. They have largely given up hope of anyone winning a knockout victory over Romney, hoping instead that some other candidate can prevent the former Massachusetts governor from wrapping the race up before the Republican National Convention, which is set for Tampa, Fla., in late August. “We have never gone through a delegate fight like this,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an influential conservative and the head of the Iowa-based Family Leader organization....

Next Week's Challenge from listener Ed Pegg Jr.: Write the digits from 1 to 9 in a line. If you put a plus sign after the 2, a times sign after the 4, and plus signs after the 6 and 8, the line shows 12 + 34 x 56 + 78 + 9, which equals 2003. That's nine years off from our current year 2012.? This example uses four arithmetic symbols. The object is to use just three of the following arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, in a line from 1 to 9 to get 2012 exactly. The...

The problem is: 3-4x = 6X+13 Can someone (please) demonstrate how to solve this? (I always was terrible at math). Thanks.

"The math is the math. You can't lower (tax) rates and raise revenues."- Barack Obama, December 11, 2011When I heard the President make the above statement to Steve Kroft during an interview on the CBS News program 60 Minutes…well, I thought of Ronald Reagan. No, not because Obama seemed Reaganesque, as he would want us to believe, but because Ronald Reagan believed just the opposite, and proved that he was right.And, I thought of Presidents Harding, Kennedy, and George W. Bush, too. All Presidents that had lowered tax rates that stimulated more economic activity – and increased the total revenue...

Texas Instruments TI-85 says: 48÷2(9+3) = 2 But Texas Instruments TI-86 says: 48÷2(9+3) = 288

I know there a a lot of FReepers smarter than I, so here goes...got this presented to me for help & I for the life of me am stumped 4 [4 - 5x] = 6x + 4 says answer is x= 10/7 can someone show how to solve? Thanks in advance....

Hearing the mainstream media breathlessly report that the unemployment rate declined to 8.5% makes it sound like all is well and the economy is mending. Unfortunately, there’s more to the story.  The official unemployment rate, called “U-3” by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), doesn’t include discouraged workers who gave up looking for work, nor does it include people working part time who want full time jobs. “U-6” is the real unemployment number, and it stands at a whopping 15.2% in Dec 2011. (See BLS Labor Underutilization for details)The Rest of the Story In the past two months, BLS reported a total...

On Tuesday, Mitt Romney beat Rick Santorum by eight votes in the Iowa caucus (maybe). Nervous Romney supporters, who had seen him down by over a hundred votes at different points in the night, were thrilled. Establishment Republicans were thrilled. And media personalities who’ve hoped Obama can get lucky enough to face Romney, instead of real conservative, were likewise thrilled. But Romney’s camp might want to take a hard and sober look at the cloud that accompanies this silver lining: namely, that Romney has been running for president for 5 years now yet 75% of Iowans still wanted no part...

You're on the trading floor, trying to price out if a 15-year bond issued by General Electric will generate the returns needed to placate your investors. Bad news, your calculator is dead and the trader from Cantor Fitzgerald is readying to signal his buy. What to do? Well, if all you need to do is double the investment in five-years, you're in luck. That's probably not the case, and GE probably isn't issuing 15-year debt. But we compiled a list of six math tricks that might just come in handy. If you have a math trick you'd like us to...

It's stuff like this that makes me love archaeology. Turns out, we can trace the concept of math homework back to at least 2300 B.C.E., in ancient Mesopotamia. In the early 20th century, German researchers found several clay tablets at the site of Šuruppak. (Today, that's basically the Iraqi city of Tell Fara.) Some of the tablets appear to be the remains of math instruction, including two different tablets that are working the same story problem. A loose translation of the problem is: A granary. Each man receives 7 sila of grain. How many men? That is, the tablets concern...

PUNTA GORDA, Fla.- The Charlotte County School District released a copy of its investigation into Charlotte High School math teacher Jeff Spires. The report details statements from students and Spires, who confess to taking part in grade-changing for money. According to the documents, an eleventh-grade student first brought forward allegations that Spires was selling grades on October 14. In the investigator's report, he says that student told the school's principal Barney Duffy he had bought several favorable grades on quizzes. The district released some of the student's exams. One one of them the student wrote "I paid coach $40.00 cash...

[SUMMARY: Public schools are bad because the Education Establishment, for 75 years, has made them that way.] Feeling brave? Got a cast-iron stomach? Not offended by decadence? Well, come with me and we’ll go for a stroll in the dangerous part of town, where society’s bad boys hang out. Yes, I’m talking about education. One metaphor works best for this whole disturbing field, and that’s CSI. Imagine a really big crime scene, chaotic and messy, filled with walking wounded, people who can’t read or count, their brains empty, their thoughts incoherent.  What happened here? We need to figure out whodunit...

Straw polls, real polls, debates, caucuses and primaries — these comprise the public side of presidential campaigns 14 months before Election Day. But behind the scenes, strategists for President Obama and his major Republican opponents are already focused like a laser on the Electoral College. The emerging general election contest gives every sign of being highly competitive, unlike 2008. Of course, at this point in 1983 and 1995, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, respectively, were in trouble; and in 1991 George H.W. Bush still looked safe. Unexpectedly strong economic growth could make Obama’s reelection path much easier than it currently...

Hussein went spewing his class warfare excrement today in Washington D.C. He is proposing $1.5 Trillion in higher taxes for a "jobs bill" that costs, he says, about $450 billion. What the f is Husseing going to do with the other $1.1 Trillion?

A study found that when it comes to career choices, men prefer things and women prefer people.If you thought it was sexist to assume that girls aren't good at science, maybe you should think again (though stereotypes are dangerous and there are certainly many, many exceptions). A recent study in the journal Hormones and Behavior found that genetics play a key role in the career choices we make. In short, men become astronauts and women prefer nursing because of our biological nature, not environmental factors. In our society, males are more likely to work in fields dealing with "things" like...

Math professors are appalled at the lack of math skills they see in some education students -- who in turn can't adequately teach math to their own students when they get in a classroom. "We've kind of been watching a train wreck," University of Winnipeg math Prof. Anna Stokke said Friday. So far, 184 people have signed a petition demanding far higher standards for admission to faculties of education, 173 of them math, science and engineering professors. They're demanding the provincial government beef up high school graduation requirements for people intending to become teachers. Some teachers didn't get adequate math...

Watch the original Miss USA evolution video here: http://youtu.be/UkBmhM0R2A0

Baltimore school officials say the district will reimburse international teachers who paid out-of-pocket fees to obtain work visas, a practice that led the U.S. Department of Labor to order Prince George's County schools to pay nearly $6 million in penalties and back wages. Tisha Edwards, chief of staff for the city school system, said the district has international teachers — the majority Filipino — who shouldered their own costs for immigration filings and fees associated with being recruited to the district. However, the district could not say how much money it might have to pay back. "If there are cases,...

...Hmmm. If it’s true, as President Obama said that the fence across our southern border is “basically complete,” let’s see what kind of math that equates to in other areas of Presidential endeavor. 670 miles of completed fence divided by an entire border of 2,000 miles. That gives us a baseline definition: “Basically complete” = 33% done.By that standard, we could say that joblessness is basically solved: 33% of the current unemployment rate of 9% gives us a basically complete unemployment rate of 3%. Wow! We haven’t seen anything close to that since 1969! We could say that our looming...

Warfare seems to obey mathematical rules. Whether soldiers can make use of that fact remains to be seen IN 1948 Lewis Fry Richardson, a British scientist, published what was probably the first rigorous analysis of the statistics of war. Richardson had spent seven years gathering data on the wars waged in the century or so prior to his study. There were almost 300 of them. The list runs from conflicts that claimed a thousand or so lives to the devastation of the two world wars. But when he plotted his results, he found that these diverse events fell into a...

Could Einstein's Theory of Relativity be a few mathematical equations away from being disproved? Jacob Barnett of Hamilton County, Ind., who is just weeks shy of his 13th birthday, thinks so. And, he's got the solutions to prove it. Barnett, who has an IQ of 170, explained his expanded theory of relativity — in a YouTube video. His mother Kristine Barnett, who admittedly flunked math, did what every other mother would do if her genius son started talking mathematical gibberish. She told him to explain the whole thing slowly while she taped her son explaining his take on the theory....

Thousands of Georgia's teens are continuing to fail final exams as they struggle with the accelerated concepts of integrated math. The latest evidence is the results to the End-of-Course Tests given in December, when 17,520 students flunked the Math I and Math II exams. The state's school districts are likely to examine those scores as they decide whether to keep teaching integrated math to their high school students or return to more traditional methods. Of the 20,679 students who took the Math I final in December, 42.6 percent failed it. That's a 19.6 percent increase from the spring, when 114,005...

Harry Reid's math problemBy DAVID NATHER | 3/4/11 7:13 AM EST Never mind the House. The real obstacle to solving the standoff over funding for the health care law may be the Senate. As the talks begin on how to fund the government for the rest of the year, there’s a very real math problem that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid faces. There won’t be 60 votes to end a filibuster on any spending agreement that includes the House language to defund the health care law, because Senate Democrats would never go for it. But if it’s all stripped out,...

Educators said only 13 percent of Albuquerque Public Schools eighth-graders passed a standard math test. According to January's district benchmark assessment test results, only 13 percent of about 4,500 APS eighth-graders are proficient in math.“If they're not proficient in math, they're not going to be successful in life,” said parent Patricia Duran.Teachers said if the eighth-graders are not proficient now, there is serious doubt they will pass an exam as a junior, which is required for them to graduate.

Shortly after the Green Bay Packers turned the nation’s attention to the Midwestern state, Wisconsin once again has garnered the nation’s attention. At stake this time is not a trophy, but a prized retirement package promised to public employees. Throngs of protesters have taken to Madison, Wisconsin to either show their support or disdain for Governor Scott Walker’s plan to require public employees to pay 5.8 percent (the national average is roughly 12 percent) of their salary as a contribution to their pension. The looming issue of funding public pensions is not unique to Wisconsin. Governor Walker’s stand, however, has...

BEN GOERTZEL: Hugo, you've recently published an article on KurzweilAI.net titled "From Cosmism to Deism”, which essentially posits a transhumanist argument that some sort of “God” exists, i.e. some sort of intelligent creator of our universe – and furthermore that this “creator” is probably some sort of mathematician. I'm curious to ask you some questions digging a little deeper into your thinking on these (fun, albeit rather far-out) issues. Could you start out by clarifying what you mean by the two terms in the title of your article, cosmism and deism? (I know what I mean by Cosmism, and I...

Finite formula found for partition numbersFor centuries, some of the greatest names in math have tried to make sense of partition numbers, the basis for adding and counting. Many mathematicians added major pieces to the puzzle, but all of them fell short of a full theory to explain partitions. Instead, their work raised more questions about this fundamental area of math. On Friday, Emory mathematician Ken Ono will unveil new theories that answer these famous old questions. Ono and his research team have discovered that partition numbers behave like fractals. They have unlocked the divisibility properties of partitions, and developed...

I need the help of some of you who are more well versed in math than I, especiaqlly percentages. John sells a car to Ted for total of $2000.00. Included in the price is a 5% sales tax. What was the original sale price of the car before the tax was added. If you could please show me the formula you used to arrive at your answer I would greatly appreciate it. thanks

“As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives..” You may know this singsong quiz, But what you might not know is this: That it began with ancient Egypt’s Early math-filled manuscripts. It’s true. That very British-sounding St. Ives conundrum (the one where the seven wives each have seven sacks containing seven cats who each have seven kits, and you have to figure out how many are going to St. Ives) has a decidedly archaic antecedent. An Egyptian document more than 3,600 years old, the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, contains a puzzle of sevens that bears...

November 19, 2010 'Reform Math' By Jason and Genevieve McNew Pay attention to what our children are being taught. Not even simple arithmetic is safe from progressive stupidity. Apples and peaches make great neighbors. Here in "upper" Adams County, Pennsylvania (also the seat of Gettysburg and the battlefields), there are twenty thousand acres of fruit trees. Many businesses are closed on Sundays, and "traffic" consists of getting stuck behind a combine or waiting for the flock of mallards that live behind the 7-11 to finish crossing Route 394. I have often compared it to Mayberry. We moved here in June...

Was wondering if there are any chemistry whizzes here who can help me with a problem in a lab I am working on? We were given a list of %T values and told to use A=2-log %T to get the absorbency (A). I'm struggling with this. Can someone take me step by step through one? Say 25%?

On Yahoo answers today, I came across a disturbing question asked by, presumably, a high school math student. Here is the question: Please, please explain these answers to me!! I am so frustrated!? No matter how hard I try, I can not understand domain and range!!! The definition in my book says domain is all the x alues and range is all the y values. That's it. Soo, how the heck do you figuire this out? 1. f(x) = x+2/x Domain: x does not equal zero Range: f(x) = any real # 2. f(x) 2/x Domain: x does not equal...

... For decades, efforts to improve math skills have driven schools to embrace one math program after another, abandoning a program when it does not work and moving on to something purportedly better. In the 1960s there was the “new math,” whose focus on abstract theories spurred a back-to-basics movement, emphasizing rote learning and drills. After that came “reform math,” whose focus on problem solving and conceptual understanding has been derided by critics as the “new new math.” Singapore math may well be a fad, too, but supporters say it seems to address one of the difficulties in teaching math:...

OK I need some math help anybody.

For a few years I thought the worst possible gimmick in education was Whole Word, basically a device to make sure kids don't learn to read. In the last few months, the clamor grew about Core Standards and National Standards, and I started to focus on arithmetic. More and more I’m struck by the parallel with Whole Word. The Education Establishment seems to specialize in coming up with techniques that are almost guaranteed not to work. I know there are cynics who will say, well, of course, everyone knows this. Even so, the thing that fascinates me is the amount...

This new report from the liberal group Families USA contains this eye-popping paragraph: Families USA commissioned The Lewin Group to use its economic models to estimate how many individuals would benefit from the new premium tax credits in 2014 and the value of the dollars going to help pay for insurance. We found that an estimated 28.6 million Americans will be eligible for the tax credits in 2014, and that the total value of the tax credits that year will be $110.1 billion. Houston, we have a problem! The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the tax credits to purchase coverage...

For the next 17 weeks, Durham's sixth-graders are playing fantasy football, the wildly popular game that has millions of participants nationwide. Most who play do so for bragging rights among their peers and the chance to win a few bucks. But these students are playing in teacher Lance Mangham's math class. It's a trend that is reaching classrooms across the country as teachers search for lessons that go beyond traditional textbooks and worksheets to tap students' interests.

Hundreds of N.J. students who can't do simple math were credited with passing calculus, according to a report on APP.com. According to a Department of Education report, "there were other students, unable ultimately to evidence even simple math skills, who were unimaginably recorded by their schools as succeeding in Algebra II or even Calculus." A report delivered at today's state Board of Education meeting will recommend four new policies to aid students who weren't proficient enough in reading, writing or math to meet state graduation standards.

Exploring the respected notion of higher “general education” in America, the American Counsel of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) set WhatWillTheyLearn.com in motion, a project aimed at evaluating major public and private colleges and universities on seven key areas of knowledge; English composition, foreign language, literature, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics, and the sciences. ACTA, an independent and non-profit organization, upholds to the standards of “academic freedom, excellence, and accountability” of America’s schools while releasing accurate rankings. Such a task is especially important during this time of rising tuition costs and economic uncertainty. This online, college ranking guide is currently...

A group of middle school students gather around a dining room table after a day of school work discussing the question, “How many integers between 500 and 1000 contain both the digits 3 and 4?” While some are busily writing out notes on scratch paper and consulting their TI-84 graphing calculators, one student picks up a marker on to a white board propped in the corner. “Here, let me show you …..,” he says. more

Parents of middle school aged children may want to be aware that the national MathCounts Foundation has changed the rules for homeschoolers this year. MathCounts provides an opportunity for 6th through 8th grade students to compete in academic problem solving and mathematical competitions which may be of particular interest to gifted middle schoolers.

Initially hailed as a solution to the biggest question in computer science, the latest attempt to prove P ≠ NP – otherwise known as the "P vs NP" problem – seems to be running into trouble. Two prominent computer scientists have pointed out potentially "fatal flaws" in the draft proof by Vinay Deolalikar of Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California. Since the 100-page proof exploded onto the internet a week ago, mathematicians and computer scientists have been racing to make sense of it. The problem concerns the speed at which a computer can accomplish a task such as factorising a...

Taken very literally, not all students are created equal -- especially in their math learning skills, say Texas A&M University researchers who have found that not fully understanding the "equal sign" in a math problem could be a key to why U.S. students underperform their peers from other countries in math. "About 70 percent of middle grades students in the United States exhibit misconceptions, but nearly none of the international students in Korea and China have a misunderstanding about the equal sign, and Turkish students exhibited far less incidence of the misconception than the U.S. students," note Robert M. Capraro...

INFURIATING Scott G. McNealy has never been easier. Just bring up math textbooks. Mr. McNealy, the fiery co-founder and former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, shuns basic math textbooks as bloated monstrosities: their price keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same. “Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,” Mr. McNealy says. Early this year, Oracle, the database software maker, acquired Sun for $7.4 billion, leaving Mr. McNealy without a job. He has since decided to aim his energy and some money at Curriki, an online hub for free textbooks and other course...

Inside the world of Grigory Perelman: the man who solved the world's toughest maths problem proves to be a puzzle himself. He has been called "the cleverest man in the world" and shook academia to its foundations when he announced he had solved a fiendish mathematical problem that had baffled the planet's best brains for a century. Yet Grigory Perelman, a 43-year-old Russian mathematician, has consciously spurned plaudits and wealth to subsist like a hermit. He lives in a 2-bedroom flat with his elderly mother in a dilapidated Soviet-era tower block in St. Petersburg, while neighbours complain that his own...

A fifth-grade Prosper math teacher whose truck was struck by lightning this weekend said he's going to turn it into a lesson plan. The shock tore up a stretch of road along the Dallas North Tollway near U.S. 380. “We’re going to do the odds on this," said Russell Babb. "I got to figure out with the kids, what the odds are of your teacher getting struck by lightning." Babb, who was driving to meet his brother for lunch, said it sounded like a bomb. Concrete flew everywhere, he said. “It chopped up the cement like a sledgehammer,” he said....

Reclusive Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, who MOSCOW (AFP) – Reclusive Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, who shot to global fame after claiming to solve the seemingly intractable Poincare conjecture, has refused another prize for the achievement. The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) said Thursday that Perelman informed the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research center that he would not accept its million-dollar prize. "I have turned down (the award)," Perelman told the Interfax news agency by telephone. "The main reason is disagreement with the organised mathematics community. I do not like their decisions, I consider them unfair." "I think that the contribution of American mathematician...

My neighbors are thinking of homeschooling, three girls, 3rd, 5th and 6th grade. They asked my advice about online curriculum and resources, especially in math and grammar. Any suggestions, links and experiences most welcome.