Adding it up

This year's Leaving Cert results are out and the post mortem has brought out all sorts of moaning about the state of mathematics in Ireland. The government reacted with the decisiveness that is to be expected of all politicians; launching an review conveniently handled by a subordinate so the Minister doesn't actually have to deal with the crisis du jour. While there is a high failure rate at Ordinary level, the rates of honours grades on the Honours papers is up presenting the mutually exclusive problems of a huge gulf in education standards or grade inflation.

There have been various causes and solutions proposed. The lack of qualified teachers is certainly a problem. The debate over the value of the Project Maths syllabus continues. The Minister is using the results to emphasise the importance of rolling out the new syllabus (despite results only being "marginally better"), but detractors say that reducing the course content is papering over the cracks and will make things worse in the long term.

I feel some actual analysis backed up with numbers has been missing from the discussion. First of all; let me start with there is no grade inflation. The percentage of students getting over 75 CAO points from mathematics has actually decreased over the past five years from 9% in 2006 to 7.5% this year. Overall the past ten years, the percentage of students getting over 75 points has ranged from 7.2% to 9%, so there isn't exactly a huge amount of difference there.

What is causing the appearance of grade inflation is that the numbers taking honours mathematics is falling. It dipped under 16% for the first time this year. This is down nearly 3% over the past 6 years. It will be very interesting to see how the bonus points for honours maths affect this next year and into the future. I'll go into why I don't think this is the correct solution in a later post. I don't know how it's affected applications for university courses; that data I don't have to hand. The mean amount of CAO points from mathematics is the lowest of the three compulsory subjects at 34.5, compared to 55.1 in English and 41.9 in Irish.

From the the Leaving Cert data it is clear that the rate of failure in mathematics is startling. However, any notion that this is increasing is unfounded, but that doesn't mean it's not an issue. Over the past ten years, an average of 15.88% of all students sitting leaving cert mathematics across all levels receieved a grade that netted them 0 CAO points. I count CAO points as a more meaningful metric as that's what matters for university applications and I didn't want to count pass grades in foundation. There is a weak downward trend over the last ten years, but this year's results left 15.48% without any CAO points from maths.

Interestingly enough, the failure rates, mean CAO points etc. in Irish are quite similar to mathematics. The only big difference is the much higher rate of students taking honours, but it is the statistics for Irish are bolstered by the growing number of students not taking this "compulsory" subject. 14.6% of students sitting the leaving cert didn't sit Irish, up 6% from ten years ago. From the coverage I've read the dire situation Irish finds itself in has been glossed over. In fact the press release from the Dept. of Education praises the increased proportion getting honours in Irish, ignoring the growing problem of students not taking the subject or its effects on the rate of success they're so happy to talk about.

So what does this all mean for mathematics in Ireland. This post is getting a little long, so I'll leave that for later. We need to ask ourselves some hard questions about what outcomes we want for those at the top, middle and bottom of the spectrum and does the current courses cater for all those needs. 

PREVIEW: I think major change is needed. I really mean major. So drastic that I know there is zero chance of either a risk averse government with zero cash to spend or the teaching unions would go for it. 

Patently Stupid

One of the most contentious issue in technology today surrounds patents. We've all heard plenty about how patents are causing problems in the pharmaceutical industry, but thankfully, the tech patent problem is a decidedly Western problem that shouldn't cost any lives. It's still a big problem; costing companies large and small many headaches and filling my RSS feed with new crap daily.

The problems are two-fold; patent trolls and patent wars between the major players. All of these things surround software patents. There are issues with software patents being granted for overly generic concepts in several cases where prior art exists. This has lead to a bevy of problems, with companies getting sued once they become big enough to be a target for violating a patent they didn't know existed. Essentially the root of the problem is with US law allowing such patents to be granted in the first place. That still leaves us with problems to be fixed though.

Patent wars is the easier one to talk about as it's less contentious. Essentially, the big tech companies have built up loads of patents over the years and have now decided to unleash the dogs of war i.e. the lawyers on each other. In some cases this is a defensive act, counter-suing in response to being sued. The result is chaos. Companies settle for licencing fees rather than pay for long and expensive court cases. Those that do go to court get dragged out, with appeal after appeal, and are often perused in several jurisdictions simultaneously (e.g. Apple's actions against Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 in most of the EU and Australia). You end up in a world where Microsoft make more money of a free, open source mobile OS (Android) than they do off their own, proprietary, licensed OS (Windows Phone 7). This is through suing HTC and extracting a licence fee from them for every Android phone shipped. Now they're going after Samsung too.

This is for patents referring to smartphones ONLY. It was produced in December 2010 so is a little out of date.

Is this a problem? Like, big companies fight all the time; in marketing, in product development, in hiring etc. Does this limit the innovation within these big companies? Probably not. What it does do is create a culture of fear; encouraging companies to build up large patent libraries as a defence. This translates into the company patenting any idea that gets thrown out there, just in case, thus inhibiting other companies who may be seriously developing something in that line. It also means obscenely highly priced auctions, and some rather convenient alliances forming (see the Nortel patent licence auction and the anti-Google alliance). These sort of manoeuvres may not be anti-innovation, but they almost certainly are anti-competitive.

How to solve it? The short answer is you can't. These companies would fight each other if all they had at their disposal were plastic spoons and half-rotten cabbages. We should tighten up patent issuing though, which will hopefully result in these companies only being issued with relevant patents and leave room for competitors to create something similar but different.

The other issue is much more serious. Patent trolls just sit on patents, do nothing with them and then sue the pants of anyone who encroaches on them. This has also led to the Eastern District of Texas becoming the Cayman Islands of patent litigation with several of these companies sharing their registered address in tiny offices here so that they can file in what is seen as a court favourable to patent holders.

They target anyone big enough to pay. App developers have been sued. Spotify got sued a mere week after launching in the US. They're simply parasites, sucking the lifeblood out of companies while claiming to protect innovation. This is what really annoys me. I've learned over the past year that having a good idea or having a good product is by no means a guarantee on success. It all comes down to work, marketing and more work. Without that, your product is going nowhere. Innovation without production is not worthy of protection. The only reason we issue patents in the first place is to protect companies, particularly small companies, from having their ideas copied by larger rivals. Patent trolls don't add anything of value to society. They don't ever do the work getting to the innovation in the first place either. Patents are usually purchased rather than investing in original research.

This has an easy solution though. Make patents dependant on commercial use. A straight forward "use it or lose it" rule. Give the licensee two years, and after that if they haven't done anything with it, void the patent. There's no commercial interest to protect, so all that patent is doing is stifling other innovation. I think it would work. I'm not a law-talking-guy though so I may be wrong.

Note: This post was prompted by an excellent post from Michael Mace on his blog Mobile Opportunity. Read it.

Note 2: As if to underscore my point, Google just spent $12.5bn buying Motorola Mobillity, mainly for their patent portfolio.

A new look

I've moved into a new place, and so it seemed like an opportune time to change things up a bit; give the ol' blog a bit of a refresh and start out again ahead of the new NFL and Premiership seasons and of course the Rugby World Cup. I will admit that the riots over here in London recently have kicked my from my laziness a bit as well, and so I want to start writing again. I don't think I'll be changing society, but I like having my soapbox.