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. 

You Know What? We're Pretty Awesome

So there I was, hurtling along in the sky at about 500km per hour, around five km above the ground in long rather heavy metal cylinder. The thought struck me; how is it that such an incredible feat of human engineering and genius that is powered flight does not inspire awe in all who see it let alone use it.

It seems rather incredulous, but we've become normalised to the thought of air travel. It has become common to the point of boredom as evidenced the fact that the time spent on safety instructions by the cabin crew is usually spent by the passengers sleeping or reading or listening to an ipod or some combination thereof. I have flown approximately 66,510km in my life, and I would not consider myself a prolific traveller. My elder sister puts her mileage in the 100,000km area. At least.

It's the same with other engineering marvels. We have had images from all over the world beamed into our homes for decades now. We can converse instantaneously with friends on the other side of the world. We use a series of giant explosions to land an object accurately on a planet over 50 MILLION kilometres away, AND then we able to land that object carefully enough that it's able to drive over the alien landscape AND collect samples and data AND transmit that data back to us. When you sit back and think about how a little while, the breath and depth of human advancements are simply mind boggling. We adapt to using new technology astoundingly quickly and integrate it into our lives. Can you imagine now a world without mobile phones, without the internet? We now have robotic limbs for paraplegics; the only limit on what's next is our imagination (and the laws of physics I suppose).

Despite this ability to adapt, I do worry at times how we'd cope with disaster, and I mean society ending disaster. I've just finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy which is a masterpiece showing man's struggle in a post-apocalyptic state. It also shows how woefully under prepared the world is for that sort of disaster. Think about how long you could survive on the food in your house right now. I'm guessing a week at most. Without a shop to buy your food from, what would you do? Could people adapt quickly enough to that? It's a fascinating question. All I know is having done scouts as a kid would suddenly become useful at last.

So the next time a telemarketer phones you, take some time to remember how amazing it is that they are able to harass you like that. Take the time to enlighten them to the majesty of technology. Not only would it educate them, you'd be guaranteed not to get any more calls from that company again.

A Prescription for Panic

It took 12 full years, but two months ago, the Lancet finally retracted the paper of Wakefield et al. which drew a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The damage the hysteria surrounding the paper caused can be seen in graph below that I plundered from the BBC. There was a noticeable drop in the uptake of the vaccine, which unsurprisingly lead to a spike in the cases of measles in the population.

I'm not going to go into the medical and statistical faults of the study (I'm not a medcine-type-guy and talking statistics bores normal people), but suffice to say that the link was tenuous and the science sketchy at best. The problem wasn't with the science. The Lancet always publishes controversial articles on the edges of science. In medicine in particular, it is necessary to generate debate to ensure the safety of both new and established treatments. The problem was how it was jumped upon by the press. That wasn't helped by Wakefield holding a press conference upon the paper's publication. Over 1500 articles were published on the alleged MMR-autism link over the following few years despite many large studies which proved no link.

Is it the media's fault for jumping on a story? In a word; no. Science is published in journals in a manner that is not easily accessible to the public. It takes the researchers and/or the media departments in their universities to start stirring the shit. Aside from MMR, probably the most famous example of this is Peter Duesberg. Duesberg is an expert in cancer causing genes. However, he is best known for a very public campaign decrying the link between HIV and AIDS. While some debate on the origins of AIDS was acceptable in the 80's, Duesberg still espouses his views and is considered a major influence on former South African president Thabo Mbeki. Duesberg sat on an advisory panel to Mbeki and the South African government's subsequent failure to provide antiretroviral drugs is thought to have cost thousands of lives. 

How did Duesberg get into this position? He used his right as a member of the National Academy of Sciences to publish a paper without peer review, by-passing the usual crap filter. Through this he was able to gain the credibility in the media to participate in debates on AIDS. Just as we are seeing with the global warming denialists, when there is a scientific debate of major impact going on, the media feel compelled to show all sides no matter how ridiculous they are. Then the crazy theory gets picked up by a political cause and from there it snowballs. Duesberg's theory was that AIDS was the result of environmental issues; large amounts of recreational drug use being paramount amongst them. This was desirable for those who wanted to stereotype the gay community as bringing AIDS upon themselves and also for cementing AIDS as the "gay plague". 

I for one would not expect any newspaper editor to be able to parse the science and divide the crap from the better theories. Even in the broadsheets that have specific science reporters, I wouldn't expect all of them to  be experts in immunology, general relativity, photonics, whatever the story is this week. The responsibility lies with the scientists themselves who are the best judge of the quality and validity of their own work. Unfortunately, scientific ethics is not taught to students in university. From my experience, the university is more interested in you producing something that they can release a catchy press statement about, with the university's name all over it in giant bold letters, naturally. 

Privately funded research is unsurprisingly not exempt from this either. In fact, the research that Wakefield's infamous MMR paper was based on was funded by solicitors representing parents who believed their children had been harmed by MMR. Conflict of interest much? At least he is now facing charges of professional misconduct for that (amongst other things). 

Simply, ethics needs to be highlighted much more in the training of scientists from all disciplines, not just the health sciences. Where there are the bad apples, the whole scientific community needs to come out strongly to shout them down. The Durban Declaration about AIDS in 2000 or the UN's IPCC reports on global warming are good examples of the scientific community doing what it should.