Jelani Nelson
@minilek
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Professor @Berkeley_EECS . Research Scientist (part-time) @GoogleAI . Founder @addiscoder . 🇻🇮🇺🇸🇪🇹
Berkeley, CA
Joined February 2009
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@elonmusk
and
@sama
may not agree on much of late, but do agree AI is built on strong math foundations, including algebra and calculus, applauding
@UofCalifornia
for recent clarifications on math requirements for admission.
Many industry leaders signed:
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A
@Stanford
professor just threatened me with police. After BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, Golfcart Gail, and all the memes, we now have Retweet Rachel. Public advisory: don't call the cops on black people for no reason. Black people disagreeing with you on Twitter is not a crime.
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It is horrifying that the CMF claiming to uplift black children was co-authored by a person who finds police intimidation against blacks acceptable. I encourage concerned alumni and members of the
@Stanford
community to express your concern to the university administration.
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To be clear, what I *re*tweeted is not misinformation, not private, and not harassment. It's a screenshot from the public record. See for yourself: page 376 of
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My 5-year old says she wants to be a professor, so I took her to my office for a preliminary interview. I think she’s ready, what do you think?
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2+ yrs ago I co-authored a letter warning not offering Algebra I in public middle schools was anti-equity, as the wealthy could go private.
Yesterday I discovered a great example: the main CA Math Framework author put her kids in a private school teaching Algebra I in 8th grade.
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Students making me blush w/ course evals
"This man is insane on the blackboard – it's like he's pouring out knowledge."
"Berkeley has a lot of great professors, but something is really special with this one! The clarity of the lectures and his technical depth is just wild."
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In the midst of this “reckless disregard for accuracy” thing, I’d like to point out that despite what her Instagram page might suggest, she actually has no affiliation with the Stanford mathematics department.
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I've spent 1000+ hours setting up/contributing to educational programs for the benefit of black kids for free (, , DHBSRI). Total I've made: $0 (actually negative, since I sometimes spent my own money). Representation matters.
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Me paying for items at a Berkeley Walgreens this morning while watching a shoplifter walk right out the front door with stolen goods…
Cashier yells: “you know I’m going to have to report you”
*shoplifter ignores and keeps walking*
Me to cashier: “I’m curious, what are you
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"Maximum Flow and Minimum-Cost Flow in Almost-Linear Time"
A very big congratulations to the authors!
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The proposed CA Math Framework states improving math learning for black students as central motivation and has 0 black authors. Instead, one author has alarmingly lucrative consulting deals with school districts with large minority populations, charging $5,000/hr.
@ed_edwardson
@OxnardTweeter
CORRECTION: At the 08/04/21 meeting, the Oxnard School District board was forced to approve an addendum to
@joboaler
's contract.
She went back & required that they correct the error in the original contract -- she collected $40,000 ($5,000/hour) -- not $20,000 ($2,500/hour).
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Six years of marriage and three kids later (one in the belly!). Life couldn’t be better. ❤️ Happy Sunday all!
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Why has the desire to make math more accessible, for many folks, translated into wanting to get rid of calculus? Pedagogical debates should not create confusion on what content is important. We should 1) identify knowledge is important, then 2) find the best way to teach it. 1/
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I've been a theorist working on algorithms in the academic ivory tower for 17 years. Last summer I started part-time in industry 1 day per week (
@Google
); this is fairly common amongst my more applied colleagues in ML/systems, but less so for theorists. I highly recommend it. 🧵
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Not hard to imagine how this happens. After buying our house, we wanted a custom bookshelf. 1st quote: $9000+installation+tax. Final contract: $1743 total (diff. vendor). >80% cheaper. Now imagine a bureaucrat who doesn’t negotiate/shop around hard because it’s not their money.
Idea: LLMs for detecting when bureaucrats loot the treasury of the people they are sworn to serve
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Rest in peace to my grandfather, who lived a long and honorable life. Passed in his sleep at the age of 100. Someone needs to make a movie about his life, because he had so many unbelievable stories. Just one story: 1/
(P.S. correction to below: he was a navy doctor, not army)
Happy 100th birthday to my grandpa, who has been my model for perseverance and grit, from training to be an army doctor for WW2 (
@HowardU
‘47), to running a successful hog farm in Alabama as a side hussle, then serving the Philly community for >50 years in psychiatry, … 1/
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This saga has now entered the realm of the absurd.
‘Beckles frequently collaborates with fellow Brit Jo Boaler, the Stanford mathematics education professor who played a key role in shaping the CMF and who has recently come under intense scrutiny for allegedly engaging in
"A disgraced education 'guru' and reality TV star, who vanished from Britain after becoming embroiled in a string of financial scandals."
That's how The Independent described California “math equity” policy consultant Yolande Beckles — a woman who left her native U.K. with 19
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The Harvard admissions website no longer mentions data science (source: , compared with just 2 months ago). Universities are more deeply looking into these courses and realizing they're not appropriate math replacements. 1/3
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Team Andalus, Adama Science and Technology University 🇪🇹. First Ethiopian team to participate in the ICPC World Finals. 🇧🇩
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Happy Adwa Victory Day.
An African victory heard around the world.
The Atlanta Constitution, March 4 1896: "This is the second crushing defeat that the Abyssinians have inflicted upon the Italians since the latter attempted to extend their power in the domain of King Menelik."
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@amaldorai
“threatened to call” is future tense
Her words were “…is now being taken up by police…”, which suggested the call had already been made.
She later backtracked and claimed the whole thing was a big misunderstanding and that she neither had called nor planned to call the cops
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Don't track everyone downward and claim a false equity victory. The rich can maneuver around attempts at tracking everyone downward, as they did in San Francisco by paying for extracurricular courses and tutoring. Rather, do the hard work to lift everyone up.
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This arrived today in the mail on my birthday. Fantastic birthday present!
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እንኳን ለአዲሱ ዓመት በሰላም አደረሳችሁ
Dinner on Ethiopian New Year with two new professors about to start at MIT, Prof. Iwnetim Abate (Materials Science & Eng.) and Prof. Loza Tadesse (Mechanical Eng.). I’m proud to see my friends doing big things.
Welcome to 2015.
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Well, in CA 58% of Asian kids take Calculus in high school vs 6% of black kids. Is math not nutrition for the brain? It is misguided to respond to these numbers by suggesting removing advanced math. Rather, government should do whatever it takes to ensure every kid is “well fed”.
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I grew up on Code Jam. RIP.
20 years, more than a million participants and billions of lines of code later, our coding competitions are coming to a close. It's been an honor to learn and enjoy coding with you. Thank you.
Join us 4/15 at 2 p.m. UTC for farewell rounds of competition:
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It's clear these (non-?)answers were written by lawyers, which is a failure mode I've seen often: leaders forgetting that *they* lead, and that general counsel's job is only to...counsel. Don't let counsel steer the ship.
"Does calling for genocide of X violate your university's
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I'm not the first to say this, but I'll repeat: an interesting thing about differential privacy is it needs theorems even in practice. You can implement heuristic algs that are fast on your data, but 'heuristic privacy' doesn't exist. A mechanism isn't private without a theorem.
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Ackman says he’s going to review all MIT faculty’s work for *plagiarism*. What I find silly about this is …in many fields (my own?), my hunch is plagiarism isn’t really a popular form of malfeasance, I imagine especially in STEM fields (which MIT is dominated by). In my field,
My wife,
@NeriOxman
, was just contacted by Business Insider claiming that they have identified other plagiarism in her work including 15 examples in her dissertation where she did not cite Wikipedia as a source.
Business Insider told us that they are publishing their story
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It blows my mind that as SFUSD Superintendent Richard Carranza got rid of 8th grade Alg 1 for all students in SFUSD in the name of equity, then in his subsequent job as NYC Dept of Ed Chancellor declared a policy of 8th grade Alg 1 for all in the name of equity. Complete
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It's about the crime frequency. I lived 16 yrs in Greater Boston and can't remember anyone I personally knew who was the victim of *any* crime. Then since moving to the Bay <4 yrs ago, my wife's co-worker was carjacked at gunpoint, my student's car was smashed 12 days ago ...
Name a big city in the US where you can just leave 10k worth of stuff in your car? It's not San Francisco these people hate, it's cities.
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The California State system is, I believe, the largest university system in the USA (by enrollment). Its systemwide academic senate has published a formal resolution stating the UC is approving courses as math that don't meet state standards. Specifically, data science courses 1/
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Happy 100th birthday to my grandpa, who has been my model for perseverance and grit, from training to be an army doctor for WW2 (
@HowardU
‘47), to running a successful hog farm in Alabama as a side hussle, then serving the Philly community for >50 years in psychiatry, … 1/
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Honored to be given the chance to serve my state by providing testimony to the California State Senate Committee on Education in support of SB 1411, sponsored by
@SenOchoaBogh
, which would strengthen communication between K-12 and higher ed in the development of future curricular
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If 'projective geometry' is in your talk title, you should have a little fun with the slides ...
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Berkeley CS theory group now offering shuttle service between Simons and Soda Hall…?
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Thought of the day: some kids were showing up to school hungry and underperforming, whereas others were well fed, so the USDA launched the School Breakfast Program to equalize the playing field. Schools didn’t say “this is unfair, so no kid is allowed to eat breakfast!”.
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This is opinion article in the
@latimes
by the editorial board is quite poor quality, for multiple reasons:
1) It cites a letter to the Regents by the Cal Black Engineering and Science Alumni Club making it seem like the letter supports data science over Alg 2 for equity, but
Editorial: Not every student needs algebra 2. UC should be flexible on math requirement (via
@latimesopinion
)
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I had seen this, but didn’t realize the author is black.
tl;dr Rex pays $ for workarounds for his granddaughter to be able to take advanced math in SF, i.e. black families finding loopholes to get around a policy to help black families.🤦🏽♂️ End the circus.
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Someone said something today that really resonated with me: "global warming cannot be solved by eliminating thermometers".
Indeed, and achievement gaps in education cannot be overcome by moving the goalposts.
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I recently accepted an invitation to give a lecture at
@SpelmanCollege
. I had heard that my great grandmother Elizabeth C. Towns taught there but didn't know the details, so I contacted the Spelman College Archives and was greeted with a "welcome ... back" to Spelman 😊, and a
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As I look into kindergartens for my daughter next year, I've noticed every school's website emphasizes its commitment to diversity. Yet at least one such Oakland private school is ~1% black, in a city that's the birthpace of the BPP and almost a quarter black. Make it make sense.
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It dawned on me,
@Stanford
really needs to outsource the Boaler investigation to a neutral third party, and they need to make it clear that they are doing so. Why?
1. If the research discussed in the filed complaint can be linked as the basis of any professional development
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A new open letter authored by some colleagues stresses the importance of broad math education for data science, open to be signed by academic staff at California colleges/universities.
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Ya the congressional hearing performance was poor, but Bill Ackman is now getting carried away. Master of stoking hysteria — same guy who got everyone panicked on CNBC in March 2020 then profited off his shorts five days later, then added to his Hilton position despite
I asked a senior member of the
@Harvard
faculty to examine the below allegations of plagiarism against President Gay.
The faculty member found them to be credible.
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WHOA. Friday, the UC submitted public comment to the State Board of Ed saying changes were coming to admissions reqs. They've now come: "BOARS, which consists of representatives from each UC campus, voted unanimously to drop data science from its math admissions standards" 1/
SCOOP: The University of California is reversing course on "data science."
A panel has voted to undo an admissions standard that faculty fear isn't preparing students for college-level math—just as it's on the cusp of being written into statewide policy.
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@RogerFrigola
@Stanford
Invoking police to intimidate blacks for activity that is very obviously non-criminal is, unfortunately, a thing. So much so that at least one law has been proposed to stop it:
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"One of the things I’m always curious about is when people say data science, what is a data science course? ...
It’s almost as if we say that we want to have more physicians, and we’re going to teach a premed course in high school. That sounds really exciting. Wow, kids in high
.
@adrian_mims
, the founder of the Calculus Project, speaks about how high school math pathways shape students’ postsecondary options.
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Today witnessed a historic moment: the unveiling of a new bronze sculpture on campus, of Prof. Joseph T. Gier, the first black tenured professor in the entire
@UofCalifornia
system (and he was in
@Berkeley_EECS
!). Managed to grab a photo with the sculptor Dana King
@danaking60
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Very worthwhile read. Perhaps the most shocking part to me was reading that someone working at
@MIT
’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and BELONGING, would think it’s OK to publicly support the idea that Israel doesn’t have the right to exist, and also tweet “f*** your entire
“MIT’s mission is to train the next generation of leaders. But right now, I’m terrified of the thought that today’s students could lead anything in the future.”
Mauricio Karchmer shares “Why I Quit My Dream Job at MIT.”
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“.. criticism of the [California Math Framework] came .. from people who have done a lot of work promoting diversity and equity in math and other stem fields. “Everything I’ve read about this proposal is going to make matters worse,” Adrian Mims said ..
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"The rise of data science has led to claims that a second course in high school algebra is obsolete for many students. A loose collection of topics preliminary to data science is being promoted as an alternative. This wouldn't prepare students for 4-year data science degrees,1/
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Drill for skill? Drill to fulfill? Drill for thrills? Drill to instill?
(my five year old this morning getting her hair braided in the living room while practicing 2-digit addition)
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They put the teacher who criticized the allegedly ineffective 'Woke Kindergarten' contract () on administrative leave, just for speaking up. A public school district should not be punishing a teacher for such an exercise of free speech
@ACLU_NorCal
The East Bay teacher said district officials summoned him to a video conference Thursday afternoon, where they instructed him to turn in his keys and laptop and not return to his classroom at Glassbrook Elementary until further notice.
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California Math Framework v1: "we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents"
17-year old Daniel Larsen: hold my apple cider
At 17 years old, Daniel Larsen built upon the work of leading number theorists to prove a statement about where phony primes appear on the number line.
@jordanacep
reports:
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Forecast: this will be a political disaster at a future election. Good luck explaining to parents that it’s a good thing that advanced opportunities in public education were sacked under your watch.
CA school districts like Culver City are getting rid of public school honors classes, which will only increase the achievement gap and make the best education more inaccessible for those who can’t afford private school
It’s an absurd “feels good” virtue
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A few hours, I tweeted
@nytopinion
that I'd be happy to write a counter-essay to one published today on K-12 math ed.
The good news: a freelancer for the NYT just emailed me to schedule an interview.
The bad news: they just want to ask me about competitive speed typing.
🤣
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A first-hand account of the massacre in Axum by one of our former AddisCoder teaching assistants, who went there to teach kids coding (
@TigraiCodes
), and who had lost his brother earlier in November in Humera due to the war:
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San Francisco: “our approach to math has not led to improved outcomes in middle school and at all levels”. They’re now changing course
Yet the approach was based on the work of someone who went on to co-author K-12 math guidelines for the entire state of California 🤦🏽♂️
#failingup
2/3 If you saw any discussion of math in California or the California math framework over the last few years, page 7 of the presentation is an absolutely amazing slide.
Here is the San Francisco district's own assessment of the changes they made:
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Very honored to receive this award, but even more honored that I've had the privilege to work with so many great students over the years. Also, true story: the other winner, Darko Marinov, was my first ever research mentor when I was an undergrad and he was a PhD student.
Darko Marinov and Jelani Nelson Receive the 2022 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award
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My mom likes to say Boston raised me. So I guess I’m back home!
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"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" --definitive source unknown
I see it too often: folks letting obvious nonsense slide because they don't want to speak up and offend anyone. Good for
@garrytan
for not being
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Brian Conrad, Stanford Mathematics Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies, on the spread of California's high school math woes to the rest of the nation.
"Data literacy would be a better name for the most widely taught high-school data-science
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Just walked past the school where I spent grades 1-12. Pic from 2001 (w/ green tie) vs now. Thanks for molding me into who I am today. 🙏🏽
@AllSaintsVI
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A fun calculus post for today ..
My HS calc teacher was a very interesting person! Career highlights: Miss Teen USA competitor (won state) -> Miss USA competitor (won state) -> calc teacher -> actress -> math PhD -> university lecturer -> pole dancer
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Many know of Brian Conrad's claims of 'citation misrepresentation' in the CA Math Framework (CMF) but don't know details. In this thread I'll describe just 1 example amongst his 31 pgs of comment (, and some of ). It's egregious. 🧵
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Do J. Cole and I look similar? 🤔
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General strat:
Step 1. Do what you want.
Step 2. Say you’re doing what you’re doing for the sake of black/brown kids (doesn’t matter if true). If anyone objects, brand them a racist; don’t engage deeply.
I’m unconvinced blocking advanced math was ever really about helping us.
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My middle and high school PE teacher stopped by to drop off his daughter at UC Berkeley, to start her freshman year! (also, older photo of him with some of my classmates almost 25 yrs ago, back when we were in 11th grade)
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A thought I've had over the last many months which I never articulated, but I think is worth writing down...
The cop-calling fiasco with the CMF ~1.5 yrs ago I think has had a negative impact on the Math Ed research community (which I'm not a part of) in a couple ways which I'm
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1) A workgroup of UC-wide experts writes a report on the inadequacy of certain high school data science curricula as satisfying UC admissions requirements for mathematics. It was chaired by the “Director of Pedagogy” for a data science major who also co-created the most popular
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Congrats to
@CalFootball
for putting Stanford in its place for the second year in a row. Best trash talk I heard during the game: “they charge $50k tuition and can’t even buy their band real uniforms?” 💀
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One aspect of being an advisor I enjoy is getting to put a spotlight on my advisees when they do big things. Congrats to my PhD student Fred Zhang for winning the Best Student Paper award at SODA'23 (joint work with Binghui Peng)! 1/
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In an email thread now with the full
@latimes
editorial board and LA Times head of legal.
* The Cal Black Engineering and Science Alumni Club president confirms LA Times Editorial board misrepresented his organization's letter to the UC Board of Regents, and rather it says the
This is opinion article in the
@latimes
by the editorial board is quite poor quality, for multiple reasons:
1) It cites a letter to the Regents by the Cal Black Engineering and Science Alumni Club making it seem like the letter supports data science over Alg 2 for equity, but
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Make that two students. ;)
Regular admissions notifications haven’t even begun yet. It’s looking like this may be a good year!
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Left: a picture I saw today in the National Museum of Singapore, of a kid sitting in a box in the 1940s during Japanese occupation. Right: my daughter 2 yrs ago. American/Singaporean, black/asian, now/80 yrs ago —
kids have been the same all over the world, for ages and ages. :)
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“Equity” in quotes is right — the policy is actually anti-equity. This article explains from firsthand experience how anti-acceleration policies in public education can be evaded by spending thousands of dollars, leaving those without the financial means behind.
In 2014, SFUSD denied access to algebra for all 8th graders, regardless of their preparation/motivation, claiming “equity.”
Obtaining data through public records requests, the district’s claims of success were exposed as grossly misrepresented.
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Live from አብርሆት መጽሐፍት
@A2_SV
A2SV Generative AI for Africa Hackathon's Grand Finale Event!
Experience Innovation at A2SV's Grand Finale, 2023.
Join the digital revolution as we transform Africa's future through technology and Generative AI
Watch live -
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Also, donors: donate to state schools. Eg Berkeley graduates more undergrads per year than the total 4-year undergrad population of Stanford, and with a much smaller endowment/budget. Higher % Pell grant recipients (almost double), higher % first-gen (50% higher). 1/
GO TO A STATE SCHOOL!
No longer just a trollish tweet, now in longform at the newsletter:
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Those who will be hurt are the under-resourced, who depend fully on public education. Version 1 of the CMF (I'm still going through v2) presents an inferior 'MIC pathway', not tied to any standards, that essentially is an off-ramp for students away from STEM majors.
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Major surprise by 3
@Berkeley_EECS
grad students: Meghal Gupta,
@HongxunWu
, Mihir Singhal. *Deterministic* eps-approximate quantiles in O(1/eps) mem. The previous best was the KLL sketch, which was randomized and used O(lglg(1/p)/eps) mem, p = fail prob
1/
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"I remain flabbergasted that nobody has been held accountable for the vast citation misrepresentation that was going on in the [California Math Framework]. Somebody should be held accountable for that." -- Brian Conrad
Ep 15 features Brian Conrad, math prof and director of undergrad studies at Stanford! We discuss: citation misrepresentation in the CMF, what high school math prepares students for STEM degrees, and more!
@SBECalifornia
@minilek
@stephaniemlee
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During my nightly arXiv cs.DS check tonight, I noticed this interesting paper on resizable arrays: , which cites an '06 paper that I then read and is pretty cool: . Resizable arrays are everywhere (C++ vector, Python list, etc). 🧵 1/
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