Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (17755)	4/26/2007 10:42:41 AM
From: energyplay	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218740

You may be worrying too much. There was a study a number of years ago that found that the biggest factor in women's achievements in science was Daddy's interest in their daughters achivements and interests. By the way, today is take your kids to work day , originally take your daughters to work day, here in the PC USA. So take her out to exchange paper money for gold, and then read the story of the three bears and the sub prime lender. ;-) That's the story where the bears eat the sub prime lender. Better yet, take her by the building near the gold exchange.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (17755)	4/26/2007 12:23:04 PM
From: benwood	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218740

That math "comparison" is obviously slanted. That is a challenging puzzle on the Chinese test, but that article is comparing what's perhaps the simplest question on the Brit test with what could be the most complex question on the Chinese test. Silly journalists, again... A more apt comparison would be to get scores from Chinese students taking the UK SAT and see how they stack up, or vice versa.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (17755)	4/26/2007 1:59:07 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 218740

TJ, maths is a funny thing. I use it sort of these days only in a very approximate way, along the lines of, "Hmmmm, the discounted cash flow of CDMA royalties should end up at about, oh, I guess there. So QCOM's share price, given the normal distribution curve of future possibilities, reduced to total guesswork, should end up about umm, there. Since it is ... Yahoo! says there. That looks okay. It is decades since Fourier transforms in anger and third order partial differential equations in earnest darkened my door. I haven't had to use them to whack something into submission for a very long time. Though, ironically, they supply me my goods and services and Chinese are buying them from me by the dozen and Chinese are studying their esoteric ways then lining up to join the CDMA throng, phragmenting photons and pixelating protons. It is good that people in Hong Kong are keen to do maths. But a bit of Euclidean geometry isn't enough. They need to do the calculations with a space-time variation across that prism with a financial black hole at the centre and the event horizon growing. How fast does BD have to grow for point X to remain outside the event horizon? Maths is about making the future predictable. Ironically, the more people have done maths, the less predictable life has become. Once upon a time, when people had 10 fingers and similar numbers of toes, depending on accidents and so on, and they were used for biosphere activities rather than counting, life was more predictable. Born, eat, root, die. Now it's all over the map and nobody has any idea what's going on, so they are reduced to clutching little gold totems and chanting weird stochastic incantations to the g-ds of financial relativity theory. Oh, sure, there are PhD mathematicians doing Black Scholes financial calculations and statistical shenanigans using megaflops of processing power, but financial relativity theory black holes lie in wait for their Black Scholes and sure enough, beyond the event horizon and down the gurgler went Long Term Capital Management. The financial gravity of umpty trillion $yenyuanpoundmarkkiwi is enormous, with debt stacked on leverage, counterpartied with puts and scaled up with calls, in and out of the money in a web of self-balancing borrow and hope. I hope some Hong Kong people have done some arithmetic and have ensured that it's all nicely balanced. In 1987 we visited: en.wikipedia.org Where we found: grunch.net farm1.static.flickr.com There was recently a severe storm, but fortunately, the structural integrity was okay: kmm.nl I wonder what would happen if the wire at the bottom had a weak counter party where the puts connect to the calls in the midst of the Black Scholes stochastics and a breeze came up at the top. Tension seems to be what keeps that Needle Tower up, with no visible means of support. It's quite a sight when approaching it. Meanwhile, QCOM results out yesterday and as usual, up, up and up some more. People in Hong Kong will find CDMA much more useful than Euclidean geometry. It's obvious that when China's soldiers entered Aladdin's Cave in Hong Kong, they figured that it would be better for China to copy Hong Kong, than the reverse - at least as far as cash flow goes. It's not surprising that you show little gratitude for the wondrous British having got Hong Kong on the right track for a century. People are like that. Mqurice

To: TobagoJack who wrote (17755)	4/26/2007 2:42:10 PM
From: Canuck Dave	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 218740

Kee-rist, what a difference in those two questions! There was an article in the NY Times magazine a couple of weeks ago that Chinese educators are worried they're producing a bunch of stressed out, test-acing automatons who won't have the skills necessary to compete in the global work place. That prism problem sure fits the model. A pre-kindergarten test? Now, that's putting the "Garden" in kindergarten. Think about it, Jay. You really want your daughter to grow up with those kinds of expectations? Starting before age three? I tell everybody I got where I am because I'm lazy; always looking for the easy way out... and finding it. Certainly, the I Ching told me how to trade the markets. "To understand the world, one must stand outside it.", to which I replied "No problem, dude!". That prism problem is doable, but you need to think about it for a few minutes and let it roll over you. It's a stinker. And what if there was time pressure to get onto the NEXT problem. No time to ponder the prism, as it were. God, I sympathise. I love having the time to consider the most picky of things (like Least Action principles, LOL). Time isn't money, it's choice. Give the kids real choices. Let them decide the paths they want to go down. Not worry about the next hurdle to pass over. CD

To: TobagoJack who wrote (17755)	4/26/2007 6:03:55 PM
From: KyrosL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218740

Some of the most backward countries with abysmal economies have some of the most difficult university entry exams, because the exams are designed to reject the overwhelming number of applicants. When I first came to America after high school, I was astounded at the extremely poor level of basic math education of entering US engineering students. But they caught on quickly. In a year or two they were doing very well in the math needed for science and engineering. My intricate knowledge of Euclidean geometry and trigonometry were not much help when it came to designing circuits and writing computer programs. You might consider having Coconut attend a US university. US university education will probably still be the best in the world for the next decade or two.