Numeracy Quotes

scientific literacy and numeracy were not very good predictors of people’s beliefs about the risks of climate change. Instead, their beliefs were well predicted by their general cultural outlooks—by their tribal memberships (see

Submitting all of one's beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

I sometimes think it would be beneficial if people thought of each other as “historical factorials.” Thus, (Myrtle!) would be understood not just as present-day Myrtle but as the product of all her past experiences.

agricultural economy based upon farming, to an industrial economy based upon factories,” Charles told me. “Factory workers must possess very specific skills. They must be educated to a basic minimum standard of literacy and numeracy, and they must be reliable, nondisruptive, and good at following instructions. Most importantly, they must do exactly what they are told, when they are told to do it. Industrialising countries lacked such workers, therefore institutions were set up to produce them. Replaceable parts for a machine.” I

Bertrand Russell famously said: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” [but] Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice. But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

Making is a form of thinking. It’s so important from an early age to encourage young people to make art and to look at art, and the fact that we would privilege numeracy and literacy over visual awareness is a sad indication of an increasingly corporate value system. We must give young, curious, inquiring minds the ability to have the confidence in their own perception. Treat your own response with more value than something you read in a book.

Liberals tended to be good at solving the problem when the ‘correct answer’ proved that gun control reduced crime. Conservatives were better when the answer proved the opposite. In short, people with high numeracy skills were unable to reason analytically when the correct answer collided with their political beliefs.

I learnt that in teaching young children the concept of number, you should start with the concrete, then move to the pictorial, before finally representing numbers in the abstract. I learnt that children should be encouraged to articulate their processes, and feed back to each other on whether they are right or wrong, and why. And I learnt that this is so children understand number concepts, not just procedures, because (though not only because) the PSLE tests understanding, not just memorisation. As I was chatting to the professor in the car as she gave me a lift to the station, she also expounded on the importance of teacher-student relationships – 'you can't touch their brain until you have touched their heart'.

What benefits did elementary school offer students, especially those of lower-class backgrounds? A human capital explanation of the advantages of education would typically focus on the technical and academic skills offered. In 1922, the school committee sent a questionnaire to employers asking what 14–16-year-old youth workers in continuation schools should be taught, inviting “any other suggestions which would enable us the better to serve the employers of Boston.” Their replies suggest that indeed, academic skills were important, but basic literacy and numeracy were prioritized over specific job-related skills.

Some of our findings were surprising in that they challenge some popularly held beliefs about what makes a teacher effective. For example, style of organization for mathematics teaching was not a predictor of how effective teachers were. Whole-class ‘question-and-answer’ teaching styles were used by both highly effective and comparatively less effective teachers. Similarly, individualized work and small-group work were used by teachers across the range of effectiveness. At the school level, setting across an age group was used in schools with both high and low proportions of highly effective teachers. The same published mathematics schemes were used by highly effective and comparatively much less effective teachers. Our findings also raised questions about the sort of mathematical knowledge teachers need in order to be effective. Despite what might be expected, being highly effective was not positively associated with higher levels of qualifications in mathematics. The amount of continuing professional development in mathematics education that teachers had undertaken was a better predictor of their effectiveness than the level to which they had formally studied mathematics.

Superforecasting does require minimum levels of intelligence, numeracy, and knowledge of the world, but anyone who reads serious books about psychological research probably has those prerequisites. So

Convert any common fraction to a decimal fraction by dividing the lower number (denominator) into the upper number (numerator). For example, ¾ = 3 + 4 = 0.75. The result is also known as a proportion. Multiply it by 100 to convert it into a percentage. Recognition

they do not ‘convert’ numbers into music, but actually feel them, in themselves, as ‘forms’, as ‘tones’, like the multitudinous forms that compose nature itself. They are not calculators, and their numeracy is ‘iconic’. They summon up, they dwell among, strange scenes of numbers; they wander freely in great landscapes of numbers; they create, dramaturgically, a whole world made of numbers. They have, I believe, a most singular imagination – and not the least of its singularities is that it can imagine only numbers. They do not seem to ‘operate’ with numbers, non-iconically, like a calculator; they ‘see’ them, directly, as a vast natural scene. And

It is now widely believed (and, I think, correctly believed) that the survival of a nation under modern competitive conditions depends on broadening the electorate’s competency in numerate matters. Numeracy

Today we aren’t quite to the place that H. G. Wells predicted years ago, but society is getting closer out of necessity. Global businesses and organizations are being forced to use statistical analysis and data mining applications in a format that combines art and science–intuition and expertise in collecting and understanding data in order to make accurate models that realistically predict the future that lead to informed strategic decisions thus allowing correct actions ensuring success, before it is too late . . . today, numeracy is as essential as literacy. As John Elder likes to say: ‘Go data mining!’ It really does save enormous time and money. For those

the left hemisphere is responsible for sequence, logic, speech, analysis and numeracy; while the right is involved with imagination, colour, rhythm, dimension and spatial awareness.

the left hemisphere is responsible for sequence, logic, speech, analysis and numeracy; while the right is involved with imagination, colour, rhythm, dimension and spatial awareness

How is it that a country that gave us Emily Pankhurst and Margaret Thatcher is currently number twenty-eight in the list of countries offering equal pay – behind Bulgaria and Burundi? For every £1 earned by a man, a woman earns 85p. We are all aware of the heart-warming story of the female Dagenham workers who fought for equal pay in the 1960s. It is still happening. Why does a man working in the warehouse at Asda today earn more than a woman at the checkout, whose skills require numeracy and customer relations? Why do women earn, on average, 21 per cent less than men at corporate, managerial level? Why are there so few women at this level? There are mandatory quotas in France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Germany. Why is the UK so far behind? Institutionalized misogyny say the Fawcett Society, the campaigning group on equal pay. But, looking back at my own career and the regrets I have about family life, I ask whether women can and should try and compete.

In 2012, psychologists Richard West, Russell Meserve, and Keith Stanovich tested the blind-spot bias—an irrationality where people are better at recognizing biased reasoning in others but are blind to bias in themselves. Overall, their work supported, across a variety of cognitive biases, that, yes, we all have a blind spot about recognizing our biases. The surprise is that blind-spot bias is greater the smarter you are. The researchers tested subjects for seven cognitive biases and found that cognitive ability did not attenuate the blind spot. “Furthermore, people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” In fact, in six of the seven biases tested, “more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” (Emphasis added.) They have since replicated this result. Dan Kahan’s work on motivated reasoning also indicates that smart people are not better equipped to combat bias—and may even be more susceptible. He and several colleagues looked at whether conclusions from objective data were driven by subjective pre-existing beliefs on a topic. When subjects were asked to analyze complex data on an experimental skin treatment (a “neutral” topic), their ability to interpret the data and reach a conclusion depended, as expected, on their numeracy (mathematical aptitude) rather than their opinions on skin cream (since they really had no opinions on the topic). More numerate subjects did a better job at figuring out whether the data showed that the skin treatment increased or decreased the incidence of rashes. (The data were made up, and for half the subjects, the results were reversed, so the correct or incorrect answer depended on using the data, not the actual effectiveness of a particular skin treatment.) When the researchers kept the data the same but substituted “concealed-weapons bans” for “skin treatment” and “crime” for “rashes,” now the subjects’ opinions on those topics drove how subjects analyzed the exact same data. Subjects who identified as “Democrat” or “liberal” interpreted the data in a way supporting their political belief (gun control reduces crime). The “Republican” or “conservative” subjects interpreted the same data to support their opposing belief (gun control increases crime). That generally fits what we understand about motivated reasoning. The surprise, though, was Kahan’s finding about subjects with differing math skills and the same political beliefs. He discovered that the more numerate people (whether pro- or anti-gun) made more mistakes interpreting the data on the emotionally charged topic than the less numerate subjects sharing those same beliefs. “This pattern of polarization . . . does not abate among high-Numeracy subjects. Indeed, it increases.” (Emphasis in original.) It turns out the better you are with numbers, the better you are at spinning those numbers to conform to and support your beliefs.

Ccru is committed to an ongoing research program into the numeracy of the ‘lost Lemurian polyculture’ apparently terminated by the KT missile of BCE 65 000 000.

I started crossing the number seven when handwriting it as people kept mistaking my sevens for ones. I thought that would clear up any confusion. That was until people started asking if my crossed sevens were now nines. So basically, I should avoid handwriting numbers if at all possible!

Parsani's manuscript evoked a feverish excitement in Hyperstition's laboratory as the discovery of these notes on the cross of Akht — an artifact whose 'decimal gates* opened onto an inorganic pestilence, recovered from a forsaken perpetuity, or the 'Ancient Without Tradition’ — coincided with one of Hyperstition's theoretico-fictional projects. This project explored nexuses between numeracy. Tellurian dynamics, warmachines and petropolitics, models for grasping war-as-a-machine and monotheistic apocalypticism, all in connection with the Middle East. The project had been temporarily halted for lack of what may be called 'technical elements for the fictional side': what was missing was some vehicle for transporting the theoretical carriers in their expedition, a narrative line with the appropriate authority to mobilize the fictional side of the project.

The ‘quantitative revolution’ in geography required the discipline to adopt an explicitly scientific approach, including numerical and statistical methods, and mathematical modelling, so ‘numeracy’ became another necessary skill. Its immediate impact was greatest on human geography as physical geographers were already using these methods. A new lexicon encompassing the language of statistics and its array of techniques entered geography as a whole. Terms such as random sampling, correlation, regression, tests of statistical significance, probability, multivariate analysis, and simulation became part both of research and undergraduate teaching. Correlation and regression are procedures to measure the strength and form, respectively, of the relationships between two or more sets of variables. Significance tests measure the confidence that can be placed in those relationships. Multivariate methods enable the analysis of many variables or factors simultaneously – an appropriate approach for many complex geographical data sets. Simulation is often linked to probability and is a set of techniques capable of extrapolating or projecting future trends.

He signed documents only with a mark, suggesting that he could not write his name. “Most plain-dealing men in early modern England used marks because the majority of the population was illiterate,” explains the historian David Cressy. “More than two-thirds of men and four-fifths of women in the seventeenth century could not write their names.” Numeracy, not literacy, was needed to conduct business in Elizabethan England, and reading and counting were taught before writing, so some could read but not write. Of the nineteen elected officials in Stratford while John Shakespeare held office, only seven could sign their names. His wife could not write her name, either.

Peter de Mendelssohn, press officer for the British Control Commission, was entrusted with verifying the credentials of German journalists and organizing a free press in the British zone (Der Spiegel and Die Welt were considered reliable by their German readership). Equally significant was the contribution made by progressive educator Robert Birley, future headmaster of Eton, who reformed and restructured the German educational system. Literacy, numeracy and the core subjects had all been fatally neglected during the Hitler years, as National Socialist indoctrination took priority over the basic curriculum, leaving a generation semi-literate and woefully ill-informed.

As Josephs and his colleagues point out, 'through its hierarchical ordering of two or more groups, a stereotype is essentially a statement about dominance or status.' When the stereotype of women's inferiority in maths is made salient, a woman doing a maths test is at risk of confirming her lower status in the hierarchy of numeracy.

Colorful posters about student safety, numeracy, and public servants such as policemen, firemen, and teachers lined the boards and walls, and she frequently referenced these posters when talking to her students.

My central thesis may be baldly and succinctly stated: the shift between two distinct information technologies—literacy and numeracy—resides at the source of how science and religion went their separate ways, producing the Great Rift between them.

Members of society who are wealthy, or whose livelihood is guaranteed by an institution, or whose religious commitments ensure that they will never have to choose between abortion (or other forms of birth control) and being saddled with the many burdens of parenthood—all these sheltered classes can easily approach all moral problems on an exclusively literate plane, with comforting words that give no hint of numerate realities, including the afflictions that time will bring. Margaret Sanger's experience as a nurse in daily contact with the wretchedly poor made her see the numerate realities that were effectively invisible to the sheltered classes — until she rubbed their noses in raw life. Opening the eyes of the socially blind required the creation of new terms: birth control in 1914 and planned parenthood in the 1930s. Literate approaches frequently deceive, but (with imagination) words can be made to serve the goals of intelligent numeracy. Compassionate souls soon see that all of society benefits when women are freed from the necessity of bearing unwanted babies. (It is remarkable how often a human ostrich who seeks to impose compulsory pregnancy and mandatory motherhood on women lightly belittles a woman's request for an abortion as being no more than a "whim.")