I find the tone of this discussion quite interesting. The general theme seems to be that the price in Australia is higher than The One True And Just Price, and how dare these evil companies take advantage of the Australians. However, I'd wager there is not this level of disgust when a company sells something to some people for a price less than The One True And Just Price (e.g. books in India, coupons at the grocery store, etc.). It seems like people's perception plays the largest role in whether they find price stratification objectionable--if a company "starts" from a price, and offers lower prices to some people, then it's okay, but if they "start" from a given price and insist on higher prices from certain people, then this is outrageous, despite being the same behavior.

Stephenson has another book, Anathem, that is quite good.

The quotes in the headline should be around 'Journal' rather than open access. The point is not that they claim to be open access but are not; they claim to be a peer reviewed journal and are not (while it may have been reviewed, any reviewer who did not see through the nonsense could not credibly be called a 'peer' of a working mathematician).

Actually, St. Louis is home to a budding craft beer scene with over 20 breweries in the area.

Stouts and porters are ales.

With my students, the answer is face to face. With colleagues/collaborators, it is definitely email.

My wife, who has chronic bronchitis stemming from when she had pertussis in college, would disagree with you.

Lots of bad advice in this thread. As a fellow mathematician who has taught intro stats before, and am currently teaching it (at a large research university) again this summer, here is my take: 1) Be prepared for the fact that many will not have taken a math class in many years, some 5 or more. They will recall little from their previous math classes other than intuition. Their arithmetic skills are poor. Be sure you are evaluating them on their understanding of the stats material, and be forgiving of arithmetic errors 2) They will be heterogeneous. Some will prefer abstract formulae, others will want to see things in words. Give both. Some will like to read the book, others will like lectures. I am linking to relevant Khan Academy videos on my website along with the date of the lecture they go along with. Anything you can do to come at things from various angles will increase the proportion of the class that understands it. 3) Try and explain the big picture. I am often motivating things with social science "experiments", or medical experiments. Find out what kinds of examples click with your students, and use those. While their arithmetic skills are often abysmal, they generally grasp quite readily the major ideas, how one should apply them, and when. They just get lost a bit in details. 4) Don't get bogged down teaching too much probability. It's an easy trap to fall in to. 5) Have fun. I've found teaching this course to be more work, but rewarding. A lot of these students have a near phobia of anything math, it's nice to see things clicking for them and them grasping the big ideas, if not the specific computations. Okay, back to writing tomorrow's lecture... P.S. Neither math nor statistics are "natural science", much less any kind of science.

Article is short on details, but at least they include a link to the paper on the arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0403069

"Icons drive the Linux OS"? Really? I don't have any icons on my desktop (Fluxbox), and one can run Linux just fine without any sort of GUI.

I clicked through the first couple links and didn't see a picture of the hardware. I assumed that Arduino meant small.

Actually though, it doesn't seem to be too much of a stretch to use an Android phone as your internet-facing computer. Probably mostly an academic (hah!) concern though, as you point out.

It's bad enough that my students want to use the calculator on their phones during an exam. Now they can network their calculators?

As faculty, if including more than one student in an email, we are required to input students' email addresses in the BCC line to protect their privacy. We get a nice reminder whenever we write an email from the online course content system:

There are plenty of meaningful things to do here on Earth.

That's not right. When anyone writes sqrt, they mean he principal root, a 1-1 function. So sqrt(1) really is 1. The problem is that the principal root, sqrt(x^2) is abs(x). So sqrt(i^4)=abs(i^2)=abs(-1)=1.