Links for 2012-03-05

The Skills for Life survey (2011) measured the numeracy levels of 16 to 65 year-olds in England, finding that: 22% of the population (7.5 million adults) are working at Level 2 or above - roughly equivalent to A*-C at GCSE - compared with 26% (8.1million adults) in 2003. The comparable figures for literacy are 57% of the population (19.3 million adults) in 2011 and 44% (14 million adults) in 2003.

Both the right and left suddenly have a lot of complaints about white people, particularly the so-called white working class. In "Suicide of a Superpower," Pat Buchanan describes white Americans contemptuously at times, as an endangered species obliviously collaborating in its own demise by tolerating liberal multiculturalism. Charles Murray, the man who in the 1980s blamed government for encouraging sloth and single-parenthood in the black community, is now saying the same thing about the white lower class: they're suffering from declining wages and higher unemployment not because of a changed economy, but because they've come to prefer slacking and shacking up to hard work and marriage. But white rich people are a problem, too: Murray's book "Coming Apart: The State of White American 1960-2010â³ indicts the white uber-class for refusing to impose their own traditional values, which he believes are the foundation of their economic success, on their lazy, out-of-control lessers.

I frequently see a problem when people (especially techies) try to teach programming to someone (especially non-techies). Many programming tutorials begin with basic programming principles: variables, loops, data types. This is both an obvious way to teach programming and almost certainly a wrong way to teach programming. It's wrong because nobody wants to learn how to program. [...] [F]or the casually interested or schoolchildren with several activities competing for their attention, programming concepts like variables and loops and data types aren't interesting in themselves. They don't want to learn how to program just for the sake of programming. They don't want to learn about algorithm complexity or implicit casting. They want to make Super Mario or Twitter or Angry Birds.

With somewhat of a delay, here is my annual summary of the Edge annual question. In 2012 the smart people were asked What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? As every year half of the respondents used the opportunity to promote their own research. This year they may be forgiven, for they were likely drawn to their research because they found it elegant or beautiful. A notable exception is experimental psychologist Bruce Hood who nominated Fourier's theorem because "psychology ... is rarely elegant."

To make these jokes timely and accurate, while sprinkling the sets with authentic scientific plots and posters, the show's writers depend on one physicist, David Saltzberg. Since the first episode, Saltzberg's dose of realism has made science chic again, and has even been credited with increasing admissions to physics programs. Symmetry writer Brad Hooker asked the LHC physicist, former Tevatron researcher and University of California, Los Angeles professor to explain how he walks the tightrope between science and sitcom.