Hello World...

Well, I suppose I should have posted something by now. I'd like to say I've been earnestly studying for approaching finals, but that's only part of the truth, I've also been putting a lot more time into my daily newspaper reading.

What caught my eye today was the letters written in response to a Sunday piece in the Week in Review entitled "The Last Time You Used Algebra Was..." So, before reading these letters, I popped back and read the article. It was... well, it could have sparked disbelief and outrage were the chain of causation not severed by a more egregious act. In short, it's an article that ends with weak support for teaching algebra, but if you didn't get that far, you left thinking math was worthless.

Here is a link to the letters in response. Note the third one, written by this New York Law School professor (not NYU). He has a valid point: we really all do need more exposure to statistics when making decisions. Since Torts is looming, I think back to Stubbs, the Rochester disease case. It's founded on some inherently shaky statistics and it would be useful to have gone through that in class (whether it would have succeeded or not is another story and another rant for another time).

Anyway, back to the letter. Dear Professor, you cannot do statistics without algebra. It is fundamental and engrained. For example, for your consideration: z* = (obs-mean)/sigma. Hate to break it to you, but manipulating that is going to need algebra. So will doing simple things like figuring out how many people you need to interview to get your margin of error low enough to have a good poll.

It's a shame I'm too mellow to stay mad long.

So, it was nice chatting with all of you and anonymously capping on some distant prof who doesn't know me and did nothing to me - it really is what blogging is all about.

Back to working through criminal law in my head, and then dreading the Torts exam on the horizon...