Word: maths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...constantly changing in response to hormones, encouragement, practice, diet and drugs. Brain patterns fluctuate within the same person, in fact, depending on age and time of day. So while Summers was also right that more men than women make up the extreme high--and low--scorers in science and math tests, it's absurd to conclude that the difference is primarily because of biology--or environment. The two interact from the time of conception, which only makes life more interesting...
...more parts of their brain to accomplish certain tasks. That might explain why they often recover better from a stroke, since the healthy parts of their mind compensate for the injured regions. Men do their thinking in more focused regions of the brain, whether they are solving a math problem, reading a book or feeling a wave of anger or sadness...
Today, in Iceland and Sweden, girls consistently outperform boys in math and physics (see box). In Sweden the gap is widest in the remote regions in the north. That may be because women want to move to the big cities farther south, where they would need to compete in high-tech economies, while men are focused on local hunting, fishing and forestry opportunities, says Niels Egelund, a professor of educational psychology at the Danish University of Education. The phenomenon even has a name, the Jokkmokk effect, a reference to an isolated town in Swedish Lapland...
...spent last Thursday evening solving a crime. Although their three-hour foray into forensics was a bit sugar-coated--the girls, ages 9 to 15, were given cocoa powder to dust for fingerprints and chocolate bars to study teeth imprints--there was also a heavy dose of science and math. The troops measured the "culprit's" footprints to extrapolate how tall he or she might be and used deductive reasoning to eliminate suspects from further investigation. The workshop, organized by IBM for the fifth annual Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, emphasized another skill crucial to the girls' future success...
...have to catch them young if you want to increase the number of women in the upper ranks of science and math. Otherwise, says Anneila Sargent, an astronomy professor and radio-observatory director at the California Institute of Technology, if you wait until graduate school, "the pot of candidates just isn't that big." Nor is there much turnover on the tenure track. Even after a high-profile push at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, women accounted for just 34 of the school's 262 science professors in 2003--or 13% of the total, up from 8% in 1993. Says...