I think there is some merit in the Professor's claims, but there has to be caution. Students need to be able to estimate measures, use measuring instruments, read clocks and handle money, all before age 10. These aspects of maths are suited to activity based learning, and can easily be embedded in other subjects.

But what of the kids who have the right brains to cope with more formal material earlier? What of the kids who cannot understand concepts such as zero or fractions without a more formal approach? What about how the retention of number facts is higher if we can get kids to engage with drill and memorisation of tables at early stages rather than later? How do we prevent the kids developing their own unusual understandings of fundamental concepts, because they have found a need in real life, and then we have to unwind their thinking later, because their constructed strategies only work in special cases?

I appreciate a lot of the results in maths education research. But there has to be great caution before we reject those practices that have worked for between 100 and 2000 years in favour of ideas that one or two research projects support. Is everything we do in classes effective? Certainly not. But until we can get class sizes down, better resourcing, attract more mathematicians to the teaching profession and get more individualised strategies working in the classroom we better be careful not to break what we know does work to some extent for the majority of students, even if it's not working optimally.

Note that this quote suggests that Viacom thinks SCO is right...

According to slide on page 22 (sigh), You Tube is a "video Grokster". So You Tube promotes discussion of abuses of the law by greedy litigious bastards whose business model hasn't changed with the times.

The problem with your argument is that in other countries it hasn't happened like your doomsayers predict. Here, as long as you can survive that long, after 12 months a medical insurer cannot knock you back for treatment for a pre-existing condition. If they do, the fines are horrendous, and a large part of that fine goes to you (or your estate if you die of your condition). This has been the case for at least 20 years that I know of, and the health insurers are still making profits, people are still buying their shares, people are still buying insurance, and people are still getting their conditions treated.

As an outsider, the spin that is surrounding this debate is like some kind of sick black comedy. The funniest thing is that so many Americans are buying into the weird agendas that predict the end of civilisation and the resurgence of Stalinism. Look around the rest of the world - these systems can work, which in turn results in a more productive and humane nation.

It's the approach that you can just pump the numbers into SPSS or Statistica, and then call on a battery of tests until you get a "significant" result that results in the kind of errors the article (and a disturbing number of /. readers) fall into.

Unless you're dealing with large samples, all z and t tests assume normality in the population, with insignificant skew or kurtosis. Yet by definition, if we have enough data to be sure we have a normal population, we have enough data that the central limit theorem makes the differences moot. Even more extreme, if we have a complete description of the population (a census) we have no need to use any inferential statistics.

Meanwhile students are told to test the data for normality, homoscedacticity and linearity, to the point where the repeated tests on a single data set make the chance of a Type II error better than even. But by saying "SPSS said so" and burying assumptions beneath a mountain of waffle and misunderstood jargon we can still get these "results" published.

No-one who can't perform a balanced block design ANOVA by hand, or explain what transforming data does to residuals under assumptions of a linear additive model, should be allowed near statistical software in my opinion. And the so-called statistics packages in popular spreadsheets should be banned, and any student relying on them should be failed.

About 10 years ago a colleague of mine found a reproducible way to run commands as administrator on any windows machine that enabled shares or IIS. He provided Microsoft with full details on how to do it. Then he was raided by the Feds 2 days later, as he was apparently a "dangerous hacker". He didn't even let us know how he did it though - just Microsoft. Fortunately his Dad was a senior policeman, and knew the right people (lawyers) to get some sense in the situation. Microsoft is not to be trusted in it's dealings with the law.

Austudy and Abstudy are different because the situations are radically different. Many Aboriginal people expect to be worked as slaves, beaten and raped in schools. They don't trust us white teachers with their children - after all, that is what happened to them when they went to school. The Austudy paperwork is not suited to people with extended relationship groups, with communal property concepts and relatively fluid addresses.

The so called "extra benefits" for the Indigenes are about equity - providing the opportunity for equality, not equality in itself. Comparing it to the "affirmative action" of the US is misinformed, as there has never been an indigenous African American culture, although there is an interesting hybrid culture in Florida.

I was one of those students who used pen and paper in lectures, and I have to agree that it's a more effective way of learning. I did take the time to add additional notes later to "decode" what wasn't legible.

My approach was to get down everything on the board and as much as possible that was said - including student questions and interjections.

This certainly worked for me - I had a GPA of 7, won scholarships, University Medals and Distinguished Scholar awards.

My son (who is in a special school for gifted students) uses a TabletPC. Except for the slippery feel, it seems to be the best of both worlds. Once the handwriting recognition is trained, you have the kinaesthetic sensory input of handwriting, the ability to make diagrams and formulae, and the clarity of formatted text. It will be interesting once the technology matures.

Can someone mod up this AC's posts? I assume that he's AC for professional reasons. It's good to have clear, correct interpretation of the law here in Oz for those who don't live in God's own country.

The catch in Queensland is that unless you are using the MOI (mandated operating interface) you are screwed. Using Firefox? Sorry, can't help you. OO.org? Same thing. Not Outlook? Then it's your fault you have an email issue. Does AVG show a virus? Not a mandated scanner, so you are NOT infected. Try using squeak in the classroom, and you get slapped. Don't use linux, or cygwin etc. In fact any non-approved software can (and often will) be deleted if your laptop is dropped into Information Services, as your problem is put down to "non-mandated software" as the 1st option.

This clearly makes support simpler, but can make teaching more challenging, especially if you want the kids to use computers as tools for thinking, and not just document management systems.

Being disabled, I find the caps-lock key very handy. My right hand does not work properly, and typing things like "B.M. Forester" is much easier than holding down the shift key. I have never used AOL.