Is there still a gender gap in math?  There is if you are selling cultural drama but in actuality, not so much.  Complaints aside, the No Child Left Behind program accomplished its mission; by focusing on the same sort of educational system other countries use that allowed them to beat American kids in standardized tests - namely, teaching to the test - American children performed better in each international test and for the first time in history boys and girls achieved math parity.  That's a win.

But perceptions die hard - some people still insist Republicans are more anti-science than Democrats, for example, and some (not surprisingly the same people) use words like 'dismal' and 'failure' about American girls and math.  

  After recent claims by Henry Stapp, I'd like to write about his violations of the Born Rule. For those who don't know quantum mechanics the laws come in two parts. First Unitary Evoluation. We start a set of amplitudes for a how likely each of a set possible occurances are, and write it as a column vector, describe a physical processes as unitary matrix that multiplies this vector, resulting in a output vector again describing how likely each set of outcome.

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The Born rule is that the probability of observing a particular outcome  happening is

Xmas time is here again. Unlike many people I have no particular aversion to the holiday season. I don’t have too many emotional scars from Christmases past. Getting presents was always fun, I liked the lights on our tree, even stringing popcorn, and these days I try to keep awkward gatherings to a minimum. For me it breaks up the endless round of quotidian drudgery in a relatively pleasant way. But this year I can’t help viewing the whole spectacle through the eyes of human evolution and psychology. No matter how you might feel about the holiday season personally, it’s interesting to think about what may be behind all the crazy traditions: a little bit of the science behind the season. 

BMC Neurology has published the results of the HYPNOS I clinical trial demonstrating the sedative action of the Cefaly medical device (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22035386).

The results show, in a statistically highly significant manner using four clinical measurement methods, a pronounced reduction in vigilance induced by the action of the Cefaly(R) Hypnos medical device, by comparison to a placebo.

This sedative action on the central nervous system is observed after application for 12 minutes in 83% of individuals whose mean increase in tiredness was of 73%.

I received the text  below from Jim Markovitch, and decided it was fun enough to make a guest post entry with it. Markovitch worked for the world's largest supplier of corporate credit information, where he designed and implemented algorithms to estimate the probability of the equivalence, for credit purposes, of two name/address records. More recently he has adapted these algorithms to help identify unusually efficient approximations of fundamental constants. Let us see what this is about - TD

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Well over a year ago, someone asked for a response to the following quote from Ayn Rand.  I suspect this was largely due to the idea that such a view of individualism would be difficult to refute and consequently establish its legitimacy.  So, here's the quote:

The most abundant and important molecules in all living organisms are proteins; after all they manage to participate in every single one of life’s essential reactions. So it is easy to see why scientists have been making such a fuss trying to learn how to synthesise them in laboratory as this would provide them with a tool of extraordinary potential. Unfortunately, this has not proved easy.

An organizer of the 18th Americas Conference on Information Systems (http://amcis2012.aisnet.org/) sent a CFP for a minitrack on Trust in Information Systems:

A user’s trust and distrust in information systems [IS] are important components in the interactive relationship between users and their systems. A user has to trust a technology before the technology is adopted and fully used. While there is a rich literature on interpersonal trust, trust in information systems has been under-researched...

Those who somewhat grasp Einstein’s general theory of relativity are proud to be elevated over the folk-philosophical level. They understand that the Big Bang did not explode to expand space outwards into some “meta-space” that contains space. There is space, but not necessarily an outside, a space of space. The latter would start a so called regress without definite termination (similar to the Regress argument), namely the questioning of where that space of space in turn is located and what its physics would be. Such leads to the next level of the space outside of the space that contains space and so on.

36% of post-menopausal women who are treated for estrogen-sensitive breast cancer quit using drugs that help prevent the disease from recurring after four years.

Why? The first study to actually ask the women themselves reports those women quit early because of the medications' side effects, which are more severe and widespread than previously known. A new Northwestern Medicine survey reveals a big gap between what women tell their doctors about side effects and what they actually experience.