Mathematical Parrot Reveals His Genius With Posthumous Paper

ananyo writes "Even in death, the world's most accomplished parrot continues to amaze. The final experiments involving Alex – a grey parrot trained to count objects – have just been published (abstract). They show that Alex could accurately add together Arabic numerals to a sum of eight, and correctly add three small sets of objects, putting his mathematical abilities on par with (and maybe beyond) those of chimpanzees and other non-human primates."

From the title I thought Alex WROTE the paper!

[wisebabo]

That would've been even more impressive than his math abilities.

implication for dinosaurs

[WindBourne]

With time, the dinosaurs might have evolved to create civilization.

Re:Mathematical Parrot Reveals His Genius With Pos

[jellomizer]

I did a calculation a while back that compared a middle grade teachers salary with an engineers. I took into account the normal days off from holidays+summer vacation that teachers normally get, compared them to the Holidays and standard vacation time an engineer gets. With a standard 8 hour day from an engineer and a 10 hour day from a teacher. It worked out that the engineer was only getting paid a small amount more. I think 1 dollar an hour difference.

Now that 10 hour day is an average that teachers bitch and moan about to me, however from friends who are teachers I usually see them working up to 12 hours some day and 6 - 8 hours the other... So 10 hours seemed fare. Most engineers I know work more then 8 hours a day to but they don't complain about it as much.

Teacher have a powerful union behind them (My personal feeling is Unions are holding good teachers back from getting what they deserve but that is too much digressing) that makes sure that they are treated fairly most engineers do not have such protection.

But this anti-Math and Science from teachers starts well before they are teaching. Normally for anyone graduating from High School who is choosing a major a Teaching degree is one of those that you can get that has an obvious career path that doesn't require heavy Math and Science, so they go that route. I went to college I know education majors, I saw the classes they took, I saw their masters classes too... They are joke classes to give them a degree.

The Poor teacher excuse is getting really lame today. For they are a few groups without strong math or science skills who can get a decent middle class job, they are not going to be rich but they will be able to pay their bills and feed a family.