By Steve Huff 7/27/12 11:56am

New School Learning

Absolutely related. (Image: Memory-Alpha.org)

Wrathful Khan: Khan Academy’s Sal Khan Responds to Critical Post Editorial [Video]

The pissing match between Mathalicious founder Karim Kai Ani and Khan Academy founder Salman “Sal” Khan is heating up! Today Mr. Khan responded to Mr. Ani’s recent Washington Post editorial which questioned the hype surrounding Khan Academy’s mission to tutor math students with free online videos and also criticized Mr. Khan’s teaching ability. Mr. Khan offered a new correction to Mr. Ani’s correction of the definition of slope (so meta!) and may have outed his critic as low-down dirty profiteer in his email response to Valerie Strauss, the anchor for the Post‘s Answer Sheet education blog: Read More

By Steve Huff 7/23/12 6:02pm

New School Learning

Don't get struck by lightning when hanging with Bill Gates. (Photo: jurvetson)

Wrath About the Math of Khan: Puncturing Khan Academy’s Hype Balloon

We’re calling it: This Mystery Science Theater 3000 trolling  of Sal Khan’s Khan Academy videos, posted in June, was the beginning of an inevitable backlash against the breathless hype about Khan’s abilities as an instructor.

Today, in  ”Khan Academy: The hype and the reality” in the Washington Post, math coach and Mathalicious founder Karim Kai Ani put some sting in the criticism with a much more direct, serious approach to criticizing the Bill Gates-backed “Messiah of Math”: Read More

By Ben Popper 11/23/11 5:28pm

Data Dating

They can teach you how to get a date

OkCupid Is Easy to Cheat On, Mathematically Speaking

OkCupid has earned a reputation for its fun and insightful use of data, playing with the mountains of statistics it has on the science of love. But today it met its match in the mathematics blog Isomorphismes.

The main thrust of the argument here is that the mandatory questions users need to answer when creating a profile and finding a match really skew the system. They are often rather sensitive questions, for example Isomorphismes’ mandatories include: Do you think homosexuality is a sin, would you try to control your mate with suicide, would the world be a better place if people with low IQs were not allowed to reproduce (yikes!). Read More

By Foster Kamer 10/20/11 7:34am

IP Uh Oh

groupon valuation chart

A Brief History of Groupon Valuations, Told (Mostly) Through TechCrunch Headlines

What happens when you combine tech investment fervor, hype-as-absurdist-performance-art and the kind of advanced mathematics required by birthday party magicians to “pick a number, any number at all”? You get a brief history of Groupon’s valuations in the press. This is what a coupon company whose value increases by a factor of 48 in less than two years looks like in TechCrunch headlines (with exceptions for context). Read More