C&B Notes

Like many of you, we have kids at home participating in e-learning.  While COVID-19 is unlikely to fundamentally transform primary and secondary education, at least in the short-term, it could shake the foundations of higher education.  Colleges will face immediate…

Student’s t-distribution is symmetrical and bell-shaped like a normal distribution but with heavier tails.  It is used when the mean or standard deviation of a sample is unknown and is robust against departures from normality.  We believe the assumption of…

We stumbled across this math textbook, Calculus Made Easy published in 1910.  As he wrote in the funny and true prologue, Silvanus Thompson attempted to make the seemingly inaccessible accessible.  As George Bernard Shaw wrote, “All professions are conspiracies against…

This method for multiplication is a neat visual method to solve problems.

The endowment for Quinnipiac University (yes, the one that does polling) has achieved top tier results without following the endowment model. The school’s leadership has invested primarily in public equities and has been committed to this strategy over the long…

In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell shared a set of six rules for writing: (i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii) Never use a long…

The more information a school can gather about applicants, the better the admissions department can assess fit for a particular program.  It also removes the necessity to rely on shortcuts — GRE scores, schools attended, etc. — that may or…

Luis Fernando Magana, a physicist originally from Mexico’s Yucatan, reintroduced a form of math practiced by the ancient Mayans on the peninsula.  Present-day schools are now using the concepts to try to improve Mexico’s poor competency in math.  Despite being…

Settled history is not always settled accurately. A 3,700-year-old clay tablet has proven that the Babylonians developed trigonometry 1,500 years before the Greeks and were using a sophisticated method of mathematics which could change how we calculate today.  The tablet,…

  Good and effective governance is not primarily a result of an exhaustive set of rules and regulations, but rather a product of a strong and clear culture of accountability and of doing the right thing on behalf of all…

We are fans of the Oxford comma.  Clarity can save money and heartache. A class-action lawsuit about overtime pay for truck drivers hinged entirely on a debate that has bitterly divided friends, families and foes: The dreaded — or totally…

Driven by lax (or no) underwriting standards and weaker-than-promised/hoped student outcomes, the fundamentals on the federal government’s student loan portfolio are worsening.  Late last year, the GAO reported the government is on track to “forgive” at least $108 billion in…