I don't think so--it appears the problem there was that he posted the paper to a Google website, not his own or his institution's.

This is complete flame bait. Here is a link to what Elsevier allows authors to do with their articles: http://www.elsevier.com/journal-authors/author-rights-and-responsibilities#author-posting . The article asserts that posting to your own website is a violation of the agreement; note that Elsevier explicitly states that this is allowed. Posting the submitted version to preprint servers (e.g. arxiv.org) is explicitly allowed. What you can't do is post to some third party for-profit website, which is apparently how they view this academia.edu place. Given that they have an "about" page bragging about their investors, and they have a CEO, it does not seem far fetched to conclude that this academia.edu is gaining commercially from your posting the article, which is an explicit violation of the agreement with the publisher.

So to me, this is a non-story. Disclosure: I have no love for Elsevier, but I have published with them in the past and will again in the future (we junior faculty don't have the luxury of taking principled stands).

I'm not really sure this is an apt analogy. Yes, you forgo higher wages while in graduate school, but if you don't make drug lord^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a tenure track position, you can head to industry and make a good wage. I don't think street dealers have this option. Yes, most of us want to go into academia, but having a fallback option with 50-100% higher salary doesn't seem so bad (speaking as a mathematician here--maybe humanities Ph.D.'s really are like drug dealers).

Another thing they downplay in the reward side of academia is the time flexibility. There are absolutely zero vacation days, but for the most part, outside of hours physically spent in the classroom (usually less than 10 a week, less than 40 weeks a year), you get to arrange your schedule. I've known professors who worked from home in the morning and the office in the afternoon, and one who showed up at 4:00 PM and stayed until 12 or 1 (I was always amused when he joined us for a beer "after" work on occasion). To a lot of us, this is a huge perk

The thought just occurred to me, that they don't need to access your email. Suppose you send an email to 10 people, and one of those 10 people lets Linked In access their email. Now they can pair off you with each of those 10 people, and suggest that each of these 10 people should connect with you, and that you should connect with them.

Arguably the fact that it's an open question is what makes it special. But while Beal more or less came up with the question in a vacuum, it's related to other questions posed over the years. Some more details can be found here: http://www.ams.org/notices/199711/beal.pdf

He apparently does mathematics in his spare time and has spent a good amount of time working on this question (that's why it's named after him). The prize has been offered for several years actually, the news is that it has increased to $1M. The origin of the prize, along with some more details, here: http://www.ams.org/notices/199711/beal.pdf

Sounds to me like a plug for his startup: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-30/googles-eric-schmidt-invests-in-obamas-big-data-brains .

Yes. I didn't make the law, nor do I follow it in my brewing, but that's what the law says. Keep in mind it was written 400 years ago when water chemistry was not understood at all.

RO water is unsuitable for brewing as it lacks necessary ions (e.g. calcium for yeast health) and will result in an improper mash pH usually. It's not uncommon for (non-German) brewers to "build" their water by starting with RO and adding ions back. But this is not permissible under the Reinheistegbot, at best they could dilute their water with RO or DI, which dilutes any pollutants but does not remove them.

It sounds like he thinks his audience needs but does not want the training wheels (probably because they don't think they need them).

I tend to agree with you. But as a faculty member, I don't get any say in what goes on in K-12, or which students are admitted to college. All I get a say in is what to do with the students that do show up on campus. And this kind of program seems like something faculty members can do to better educate those students we do get.

I do agree, we need to bring the K-12 standards up, but that's a political game that has to be solved in a way approved by the teachers' unions and the state legislatures. At least at universities, we are more (but not completely) immune to the whims of politicians.

Teaching students how to do proofs teaches them an abstract way of thinking that is universally applicable to solving open ended problems--problems of the form "Here's point A. Point B is over there. How do we get there?". Not every engineer needs this kind of thinking, but some do, and the best will benefit from it. Some of the greatest engineering feats came from attacking these sorts of problems: "Here we are on Earth. There's the moon. Go put a man on it."

If you just want to write iPhone apps, you can probably skip the good math classes, but if you want to really learn how to think, take as much as you can. Saying an engineer won't need these kinds of thinking skills because you don't have a specific application in mind for them is the same short-sighted thinking as saying we shouldn't fund basic research if we don't have a clear application in mind before the research is done.

Nobody is arguing that we shouldn't try and prepare everyone well before they get to college, but the simple fact is that we (at the universities) get these underprepared students every year, and that is unlikely to change soon. Rather than just throw blame at others and tell them to fix it, this is a proactive approach: what can *we* (at the universities) do about this problem? We'll all be ecstatic when K-12 education improves to make this a moot point, but until then we shouldn't just ignore the problem.

Funny, my math department has to offer dumbed down (i.e. remove most proofs) courses for the engineers, e.g. Matrix Analysis instead of Linear Algebra. Our engineers don't hardly have to know what a proof is.

Sounds like a good idea to me. I work at a large flagship state school, and we see a number of underprepared students admitted. The problem is not so much that we can't teach them what they need to catch up, it's that they are given unrealistic expectations. The College of Arts and Sciences is making a big push to have everyone finish in 4 years, but this is very unrealistic for these underprepared students. A program where everyone expects them to take an extra year would reset the expectations to a realistic level and, in my opinion, probably improve performance.

By the way, "underprepared" often includes students who have, for example, passed pre-calculus, but did not learn the material and thus struggle when I see them in calculus. It's well established that the best predictor of success in calculus is algebra/pre-calculus skills, so giving them a chance to sharpen these skills with less time pressure would be beneficial to the student.