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jrtomhttp://verizonmath.com/transcript.htm
Just _reading_ through this transcript gave me flashbacks to incredibly painful conversations I've had with some of my math (and CS) students.
And this isn't calculus...it's not discrete mathematics...it sure as hell isn't amortized complexity analysis, which admittedly can be a bit of a pain...it's not even algebra. It's ARITHMETIC. On MONEY. (Plus about the simplest case of unit analysis that one could ask for.) Units of currency, anecdotally at least, are the units that you do math problems in if you want people to have the best chance of getting the answer right, because almost everyone deals with money enough that they feel comfortable with it (sometimes more comfortable than if no units are used).
(For the record, I got to this through another article(http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/11/16/damning-video-verizo.html) which provides evidence that almost no one at Verizon gets this right.)
GAAAAH.
I have never been so happy that I am no longer a Verizon customer. Having read this, I'm not sure that I could resist the impulse to ask them about their data rate costs the next time I had to call their customer service line.
Just _reading_ through this transcript gave me flashbacks to incredibly painful conversations I've had with some of my math (and CS) students.
And this isn't calculus...it's not discrete mathematics...it sure as hell isn't amortized complexity analysis, which admittedly can be a bit of a pain...it's not even algebra. It's ARITHMETIC. On MONEY. (Plus about the simplest case of unit analysis that one could ask for.) Units of currency, anecdotally at least, are the units that you do math problems in if you want people to have the best chance of getting the answer right, because almost everyone deals with money enough that they feel comfortable with it (sometimes more comfortable than if no units are used).
(For the record, I got to this through another article(http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/11/16/damning-video-verizo.html) which provides evidence that almost no one at Verizon gets this right.)
GAAAAH.
I have never been so happy that I am no longer a Verizon customer. Having read this, I'm not sure that I could resist the impulse to ask them about their data rate costs the next time I had to call their customer service line.