terrordrive:

I love Geometry… its my favorite

proofmathisbeautiful:

intothecontinuum:

matthen:

Pick a whole number, if it is even divide it by 2, if it is odd then multiply it by 3 and add 1. Repeat. For example, 12 is even, so goes to 6, then 3 which is odd, so goes to 10, then 5, then 16, then 8, 4, 2, 1.  Your number will have also gone down to 1 (I imagine).  Will the numbers always go down to 1? This seemingly simple question hasn’t been answered yet, and is called the Collatz conjecture.  The image shows my visualisation of how the first few hundred numbers whittle down to 1.  It is such an easy question to ask, but we can’t prove it yet; a good example to show there is still plenty of work to be done in maths! [more]

I made a post about this a while back, and also posted a song that supposedly represents the “oneness of the first 300 integers”. However, I have not been able to figure out the mapping which takes the integers to the sequence of notes in the song.
I was thinking the oneness of some integer (mod 8), would get assigned to some pitch in some scale (perhaps A minor).
Can anyone make sense of this?
Here is the sheet music created from a midi of the song.

This is definitely amazing!!

infoneer-pulse:

More than two-thirds of a large group of college students say that tablet computers will change the way students learn, according to survey results released today. The Pearson Foundation sponsored the survey of 1,214 college students, as well as 200 high-school seniors who are heading to college, and found overwhelming interest in the devices.

Most of the students were not speaking from experience: Only 7 percent of the college students and 4 percent of the high school seniors owned one.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

infoneer-pulse:

The winners were announced today for a new fellowship that has sparked heated debate in academic circles for questioning the value of higher education and suggesting that some entrepreneurial students may be better off leaving college.

Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, will pay each of the 24 winners of his Thiel Fellowship $100,000 not to attend college for two years and to develop business ideas instead.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

infoneer-pulse:

“The Modern Educator Is Not a Teacher”: Updating Learning for the 21st Century

Why do classrooms and schools operate almost the same way they did 100 years ago? A group of middle schoolers from the Dallas-Fort Worth area began asking themselves this question during a class discussion of Orson Scott Card’s science fiction novel Ender’s Game. More importantly, they began to wonder, “Could children, using the internet, have a dramatic impact on the world around them? Could they influence public opinion, and make a mark on their world?” Thus began “Education Evolution,” a class video project that brings a student perspective to what’s going wrong in the modern classroom, and offers up ideas of how it can be fixed.

» via Good

abcworldnews:

Behold the majestic tree octopus. Okay, it’s not actually real, but that didn’t stop students from believing it was.

A researcher from the University of Connecticut fabricated the existence of the tree octopus and directed students to do a report on it, to prove that they don’t critically evaluate information found on the internet.

According to this education blog, the students fell for it — heading straight to a Web site that had been set up to feed them information.

infoneer-pulse:

In the Internet age, walls are everywhere falling in academe. Online education, all but cleansed of its original stigma, has become commonplace. This is especially true among big public universities, which have clamored to capitalize on new markets by enrolling far-flung students. The University of Massachusetts and Penn State University rake in tens of millions of dollars each year from their online programs. The University of California is considering using online education to help recoup the revenue lost to massive cuts in state funding.

But at elite private universities, the online revolution has unfolded differently. At first, several top institutions tried selling their course materials online through websites such as Fathom and AllLearn, but stopped upon discovering that not many people were willing to pay for online courses that did not lead to a diploma. Faced with the choice of either offering degrees online at a price or giving away courses for free, the elites took the road less traveled: they would publish the raw materials — and in some cases videotaped lectures — for certain courses on the Web, but would not offer online pathways for their coveted degrees.

» via Inside Higher Ed

infoneer-pulse:

‘Facebook of Science’ Seeks to Reshape Peer Review

Vitek Tracz is a risk-taker. He put his money into open-access publishing when free Internet journals seemed like a long shot.

“Everybody promised me that open access would not succeed,” recalls the scientific publisher. “They said I would go bankrupt. I thought there was a very high chance of that, myself. But it now turns out to be significantly profitable.” Two years ago he sold his BioMed Central publications—there are now about 200 of them—to Berlin-based Springer for an undisclosed sum, thought to be in the region of $50-million.

Now, the man described by his colleagues as one of the most innovative and mercurial forces in publishing wants to reinvent the basics of scholarly communication. Mr. Tracz plans to turn his latest Internet experiment, a large network of leading scientists called the Faculty of 1000, into what some call “the Facebook of science” and a force that will change the nature of peer review. His vision is to transform papers from one-shot events owned by publishers into evolving discussions among those researchers, authors, and readers.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

infoneer-pulse:

Is President Obama’s laser-like focus on students going to and graduating from college all wrong? According to a team researchers out of Harvard, yes. The just-released “Pathways to Prosperity” report claims that instead of making college the ultimate goal, students actually need vocational education for so-called blue collar professions. Why? That’s where the jobs of the future are.

Forty-seven million new jobs will be created by 2018, and although almost two-thirds will require some education beyond high school, they won’t all require a college degree. Some of the fastest growing jobs—like construction worker, electrician, dental hygienist, police officer, or home health care aide—only require vocational certificates or specialized training. And, even though some of those positions don’t carry much social prestige, 27 percent of current blue collar work actually pays more than many jobs that require bachelor’s degree.

» via GOOD