A Quote by Terence Tao
The accuracy of Wikipedia can be dodgy in some places, but in maths, it's really quite good.
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I don't really agree that most academics frown when they hear Wikipedia. Most academics I find quite passionate about the concept of Wikipedia and like it quite a bit. The number of academics who really really don't like Wikipedia is really quite small and we find that they get reported on in the media far out of proportion to the amount they actually exist.
I was quite into biology and chemistry at school, and I did well in my maths GCSE – I really liked it and got an A – so I quite fancied a career in forensics or something like that. But I bet if you put a maths exam paper in front of me now I wouldn’t have a clue.
I'm not exactly a maths genius - I'm really good at maths, maths was my favorite subject in school, but I wasn't a genius.
I'm quite good at taking in information so I voraciously inhale Wikipedia - which may have some things wrong in it, but I think is generally more information than we had before. Last tour we didn't have Wikipedia. And then Discovery Channel and History Channel. I can take it in and retain what I think are the most important facts.
Now in Wikipedia it's really interesting. If you put something incorrect up on Wikipedia within minutes there are people crawling all over that sentence saying, "This is wrong" or "I want to change this" or "You've got to include an amplification," et cetera. So there's this massive checks and balances that actually makes that accuracy work. This is the kind of model that we - and I'm not sure why no one's discussing this - that we now have to begin to apply to fake news.
It's probably the wrong way round, I know, but I just love maths and doing equations. When I was a kid, I was really good at it, so when I was seven, I asked my mum what job lets you do maths and pays you for it. She said accountancy, and that was it. I was dead set.
More than other subjects, there's a myth that you have to be an absolute genius to be good at maths and to enjoy it, so I think it's less accessible for people. Even the word 'maths' makes people screw their face up. They do the maths face.
What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation, and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy!
What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy.
All my family has very good mathematical abilities - like, so dorky. I was the dork then in school - on any maths exams I'd get 100%. I just knew how to do maths and most people would hate it, but for some reason it just came.
I love the Wikipedia link chain because it has led me into some strange articles. Wikipedia is one of my favorites.
The core community is passionate about quality and getting it right. If you want to read some good criticisms of Wikipedia, probably the best place to go is to the Wikipedia article called 'criticisms of Wikipedia'... It was either the dumbest thing or the smartest thing I ever did. The dumbest thing for the obvious reasons, but the smartest thing because I don't think it could have had nearly as much impact as it has. One of the key things that inspired people to put a lot into it (was the charity aspect).
The point is with good maths skills you have just wonderful opportunities and if you don't have good maths skills, there are just so many things that you won't be able to do.
In other countries you can do high-level maths or general maths, whereas we've just got all-or-nothing. We need to give people another option from 16-18. Not everyone is going to want to become a rocket scientist but that doesn't mean that maths isn't extremely useful.
Well the way we perceive accuracy and what accuracy is statistically are really two different things.
The model is just one element of the photograph. There's also the location, the light - all that junk. It helps if the girl is really good-looking, but a girl can be not super good-looking and it'd still be a really good photograph. I ask people to send some photos of where they live if that's where I'm shooting. I go for shabby places over too-nice places, because most of these girls are going to look better if they're not made to look rich.
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