Accepted pending minor revision today! So I'll definitely post it once we sort out the minor revision.

Congratulations!

very cool to both batair and well named

Congratulations well_named. Keep us posted on the phd programme too.

fyp. Im the same old idiot ive always been. Well maybe a little dumber since im getting old.

That last one was for dereds. Congrats to both.

hey man take the credit where you can IMO

Well i did learn how to drive a zamboni recently so in the grand scheme of things that makes dereds and well named "accomplishments" look small.

Agreed. I would love to drive a zamboni.

It was fun.

hey guys random news I can't tell my family (middle of night with time change) and can't tell anyone else (not officially signed yet) but I can't ****ing sleep and am idly browsing the forums and so you get to be among the first people to know I got a new job and am moving back to my home city!

I'm Canadian but have been away from my home city for masters/phd and have been an assistant professor (teaching stream) in math in the US for a few years now. The new job is very nearly identical tenure track teaching focused faculty position at a decent university but most importantly where all my and my wife's family lives. We have a 1.5 year old now, and the pull to come home has been huge. I really love my current position and will sorely miss it, but just about all the things I love about it are present in the new position so it is pretty much purely additive (well except housing is expensive af in canada).

A couple on this forum may appreciate this, but a big part of my "story" these days is about embracing active learning in mathematics where we try to develop transferable reasoning skills and conceptual understanding as complimentary to procedural fluency in subjects like calculus. So at my current position I and another colleague really led a top to bottom reform of most of the gateway courses from learning objectives through to pedagogy....my sense of the new position is they mainly hired me because of this and aren't quite there yet but really want to move in this direction as well so I'm pretty pumped about that.

Ok enough of my ramblings

Congrats uke that sounds great apart from the housing costs which I feel being in Ireland

Congratulations! And keep fighting the fight to break the cycle of math-hating because of bad pedagogy!

ha indeed! I've actually being giving the ATMI survey pre and post across all calc sections in some of my sotl research and....uh....it isn't ****ing pretty. I guess I can count "I destroy students' love of mathematics a little bit less than the traditional lecturers do" a win?

Are they getting significantly worse over the semester, or are they simply not getting better?

I'm of the mindset that you cannot change 12+ years of negative perceptions and swing it positive in one semester. So I'd take any positive movement as a win.

I generally agree, and also what's possible depends on the slice of students. Engineering students (predominantly taken AP calc from HS at our institution) come in with fairly positive and fairly fixed attitudes in general. Nevertheless, the shift from AP calc to university calc can really hurt (or maybe solidify) a students attitudes towards mathematics. Also students from disciplines with lower average ACT scores tend to have larger drops in applied calculus and calculus and "no change" is a great result for these students. But it also depends on the metric being discussed. For instance, we saw active learning pedagogies can hold the line on confidence in mathematics while still having falling enjoyment of mathematics. A big question for us is what can be done in lower level courses like QR, where attitudes towards mathematics are in some sense more central to the broader course outcomes than they are for engineers.

For some discussion of what the national picture looks like, I presume you are familiar with the MAA national study, but in case not a short summary of this is here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5951...n_tab_contents

Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history. Pretty interesting data.

Congratulations to Well Named!

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...ocial-science/

Response from proponents of the Big Gods Hypothesis:

https://psyarxiv.com/jwa2n

Your closest too inquisitive neighbor was always more of a problem. That and your moralizing mate.

Well yes, that is the idea. Your neighbor and spouse can directly punish you when you act in anti-social ways, but strangers can't (as readily). It's easy to see how social cooperation exists in small groups. Belief in a moralizing god that punishes you when you act in anti-social ways towards strangers can function as a kind of deterrent as well and so makes the social cooperation necessary for large societies to exist easier to achieve.

If dealing in probabilities of any sort can this offer anything concerning the evolution of the Human Being ? Trivially, the insurance company can project the anticipated life expectancy of you and I but in no way are we going to come to the point where we will die at the age of 76 as per our life expectancy.

To the point, religion has not always existed and appears as the human soul loses his perception of the world of his origin , the world of the spirit . The word "religion" means exactly as presented to "reunite "with that to which we have lost.

I believe it was Achilles who stated 'better to be a beggar on earth than to be king of the shades" . The ancient Greco-Roman epoch ( 700 BC to 1500 CE) through Achilles (Homer), is displaying this 'loss" of perception which became marked and correspondingly the Greek and Roman gained the intellect . This was a pointer to the "darkness" within the human soul which is tellingly evident within our times, in evolution.

In esoteric apprehension there were three (3)cultural epochs prior to the Greco-Roman which were ; Egypto-Chaldean, Persian, and the Old Indian. The further back one goes to what is known as the Great Deluge or Atlantean Catastrophe the initiatory cultural , within the western exegesis , is the Old Indian.

The Ancient Indian of about 10000 years ago had a consciousness which was within the spiritual world and to these peoples it would have been ridiculous to "prove" the spirit as they were well within the same.

To these people(s) the sense bound perceptive world was "maya", or "illusion" for they were well aware that the sense bound world that we "see" was "spiritual substance" ( language has progressed to only the sensible and so words have to take on a meaning open to the good will of the reader) projected into the senses .

It should be apparent that this is before written history or better known as "prehistorical". There people (s) had little use for the sense bound world, leaving little or no trace of their living character; living more in huts bent and fashioned from nearby trees or whatever they were immersed.

The Vedas and Vedanta philosophy speaks to the supersensible perceptions of the ancient Indians but were only an echo of that to which the ancient Indian was immersed. The Vedas and Vedanta philosophy were brought forth during the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, and as noted a weak echo of those ancient times.

The following epochs known as the Persian (Zarathustra) and Egypto-Chaldean displayed a gradual loss of this supersensible consciousness . Again this Zarathustra is from a prehistorical age . The Avesta has been dated to about 1500 BCE which like the Vedas was an echo of that earlier time when Zarathustra walked the earth.

The origins of "religion" has been Man's attempt to "return" to that consciousness and the ancient mystery centers were that very attempt. Religion did not always exist as Man had no need for he was in that very world to which he has now "lost".

The ancient consciousness did not allow for "freedom" and consequential to his release into the world of the senses he (Man) developed his own personality, gradually, until he hit bottom (so to speak) at exactly the time in which the great Sun Spirit, the Christ, incarnated into the body(s) of Jesus of Nazareth at the Baptism by John. He then of course went through " human death" and now lives within the spiritual environs of earth as a guide for all men who are still in the process of the 'spiritual return' tho their home of origin.

No higher being had ever gone through death and therefore it was necessary that the Christ Being undergo death in order to lead Man onto his proper evolutionary course.

Aphoristically, the moral cannot be gained until the individual man becomes responsible for his actions, or in other words he become "free" from the primitive atavism of his forbearers. And so Man becomes 'free" and in so doing he presents "love" , that brought by the Christ Being and of course it becomes possible for Man to "fall" into the morass of decadent tendencies known by some as "evil".

In our age we seek "the moral" but let it be known that as on the earth we have the "laws of nature" and so in the higher worlds we have the "laws of morality" . The "laws of nature of the spiritual world" are the moral laws of the spirit.

The condemnation spoken to in the original study are a passage to which, for example, the ancient Hebrew received laws to his whole nation which have now morphed to the individual man, not as a condemnation as may have been noted by Michelangelo's painting of the Last judgment but that to which the individual man can come to by dint of his own effort, in freedom for we can only do the 'good" and the "true" as individual, with unbound head.

The work of the present time is to take note of the spirit and to come to the realization of the laws of reincarnation and karma for if this is not true the development of the individual man, and the earth itself, cannot be accomplished in "freedom". We have all lived in previous times and carried the powers gained into the next life, the moral human being.

The idea that large centers of population initiated religion by some intellectual fait accompli is alarmingly fatuous .

Religion is a convenient way to claim knowledge about questions we can't answer.

The problem arises on two fronts. One when religious adherents argue that said claims justify authority and one when such answers are later used to claim more solid knowledge must be wrong.

The former leads to bizarre arguments ala 1. God exists 2. ??? 3. Women should stay silent, the latter needs no introduction; a good quarter of the discussion on this board are religious adherents with a beef against contemporary knowledge they feel contradict their 1000-2000 year old holy books.

Not all religions do that, but the ones that do have this nasty tendency to crop up in debates on culture, tradition and science. And not only in regards to what the adherents should believe or do, but even in regards to what others should believe or do.

Note that religion in this sense is something very different from "spiritual belief".

Hard as it is to realize, the present age extols "external knowledge" as the sine qua non of knowledge and its accessory, truth. And so, in the scientific age, the individual human separates himself from the object of his study with a type of an "I-Thou" arrangement to which the " I" can have no say. To the modern science, all that the "I" says is "subjective" and therefore spurious.

Look around and see the scientific ethos of diminishment of the "I" in a paradoxically egoistic age. From the New York City bus driver, the Kansas City construction worker , the London taxi driver, or the etheric halls of quantum mechanical physics the thought forms demand an "external knowledge" , a knowledge of submission, a scientific dogma.

The Kantian mischief which denies knowledge and expects "duty" and in its own way created side bars such as pragmatism ( to which much of science is immersed) also enters the "social sciences" as a poison which needs healing of this ever present aberrant thought.

If I take the bark of a tree and cut it into smaller and smaller parts and pieces can this possibly tell me anything about the world in truth and substance ? If knowledge is external to Man then here is no need to think about it and just accept what our senses present to us as sensuality in motion, as does the dog of the house; the animal.

Present day religious , unfortunately, have imbued this thoughtless scientific activity and are as materialistic as the laboratory chemist. It was not always so for prior to this idea of science the religious was a "revelatory" spirituality to which "dogma" became a "condensed" materiality, due to loss of comprehension.

And so we've proceeded from a "dogma of revelation"( religion) to a "dogma of experience"( science).

The drift here is that there are many paths to which the present age manifests, in consequence, to this science that denies spirituality, advocates and enforces materiality, and in short denies thinking or "that which comes from within" .

There is so much more, to which comprehension can be gleaned but in truth the Divine, which at best is given lip service, is that very nature of man which comes from within, the human being ensconced within the world of a spiritual reality, the thinking and thoughts of the cosmic entelechy. It is not all about the crick and crack of the stumbling of a sense bound nature crippled by a lack of comprehension of the Divine spiritual world within Man.

Discussion of the methods of sociology and its effect upon our present times would be interesting and enlightening.

Can't really say I have ever seen science that ignores the "I".

Pretty much any method101 book is going to discuss the "I" fairly extensively.