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Posted by tpc at October 12th, 2008

In the midst of recession and oil prices falling from $145 to below $80, the ridiculous power company announced that electricity prices are going up by 21%, based forward oil pricing. The best thing is that our electricity are generated through natural gas, not crude oil!

Even more ridiculous is the following quote taken by the report written by one Liaw Wy-Cin.

The scope for savings is high considering that power consumption patterns show that 40 per cent of households, from one-room flats to landed properties, use more than the monthly average, said Mr Khoo (Chin Hean, EMA chief executive.) EMA is the electricity and gas industry regulator.

Well, if the report was accurate, the statement defies common sense! By the very definition of average, 50% of every household would use more! I’m guessing the 40% comes because they banded the average consumption into ranges. (I made a terrific blunder here, see the comments.)

Another report from Reuters said

People who take long spells of sick leave at least once in three years face a higher risk of early death,…

What a magnificent revelation, almost as strange as rooster crows leading to a higher chance of the sun coming out. Come on, which part of ’sick’ in sick leave do you not understand? People suffering from serious ailment take sick leave and have a high chance of premature death. Common sense tells you that. Again, either it was a worthless paper in the British Medical Journal or it’s the reporters missing the point.

Posted by tpc at April 7th, 2007

How many times have you tried to search for a particular item and find that the only thing missing is the one that you want?

Two years back, I was searching for a 1995 article in the Rocky Mountain Journal of Mathematics, Volume 25 no. 4. I couldn’t believe my bad luck when I discovered the library had every volume, every issue for the past 35 years, since volume 1 in 1971, except the very issue that I was looking for! I was so amazed that I even went to ask the librarian about it.

A similar thing happened again today. The local newspaper had a 100 word column with the headlines Untrained S’porean’s maths Ideas on print. It’s about a Mr Bertrand Wong who claims to have proven the Twin Prime conjecture. His work was published in a peer reviewed journal known as the International Mathematical Journal. Some googling revealed that this is a relatively new journal started in 2002 and since 2006 has changed its name to International Mathematical Forum. Some 2006 articles are available online.

Wong’s article appeared in vol 3 no 8 pg 873-886. It got me piqued because just last week I was looking for some material on the twin prime problem to share with some students. Unfortunately, our very well stocked library does not carry this journal, so I tried to go into Math Reviews to find out more about the article. But no matter how I search, I could not find a review. When I pulled out all the reviews for Int. Math. J vol 3 no 8, I discovered that out of 12 articles in that issue, all 11 have review entries except the very last article. Another coincidence?

On a related note, I found this page on exceptional Math Reviews.