Exhibit Number 1.

See if you can pick out all the dodgy uses of stats, and all the outright mathematical inaccuracies.

(That said, all the "Belichick is a genius" and "Belichick is a moron" pieces seem silly to me -- I don't think either possible call clearly dominated the other. It did at least overshadow del Rio's call, which was just as interesting...)

MellowMelon has reminded me about writing and article on how to ask questions. I'm going to ask again for suggestions. What I'm looking for here isn't strategies for getting people to ask questions -- I'm looking for strategies for asking good questions. Things like:

-> Put yourself in the other person's shoes; what information do you think you'd need to answer the question?

-> If you're writing the question on a forum or in an email, reread the question when finished writing to make sure it makes sense, and has the necessary information.

-> If you want a specific answer, ask a specific question.

-> Highly specific questions are more likely to get answers than broad, non-specific questions.

What others should be on this list? (One way to think of these is to think about times you've been annoyed by poorly-framed questions. I get 5-10 such questions a week. I'm going to take notes on these over the next couple months and see what I find...)

Twitter: AoPS is on Twitter for 5 days, has 13-14 followers.

Facebook: AoPS is on FB for 20 hours, has 148 fans.

I think we have a clear winner.

The recent brouhaha about a government study showing that women should get fewer tests for breast and cervical cancer is a great example of how tough it is to cut government spending. The government is now almost entirely Democratic, and all we hear from the other side is that this is a horrible example of how the Democrats will ration medical care under federalized medicine. I don't think it's a stretch to say that if this had occurred in 2004, it would have been loudly decried as an example of the heartless Republicans trying to cut government services by removing some Medicaid services for poor women. In either case, government doing less is used a political cudgel against those doing the cutting, even if the cutting makes sense. (I don't know the details of the study in this case, but my point is that the details don't really matter in the political debate.)

This is why any increase that is funded by "cuts to be named later" should be evaluated as if those cuts will never occur, because, as we see over and over, those "cuts to be named later" almost never happen. What I'd give for a government that does the cuts first. Particularly out here in California.

Here's one reason why.

AoPS now has an official Facebook page. As with the Twitter feed, I'll be using that to broadcast news about AoPS, as well as about any other events or scholarships that may be of interest to AoPS students.

I had a chance to visit with the people at Science House while I was in NYC for the Math Prize for Girls. We spent a considerable amount of time discussing one of their new projects, which is developing an online tool for collaboration that is specifically designed for mathematicians. They also have in mind the possibility of offering bounties to solve problems, much like Erdos used to do. I'm particularly interested in this project for a couple reasons. First of all, good collaboration software might be particularly useful for the AoPS community. Second, a good set of problems with bounties might be excellent learning tools for AoPS members of all ages.

So, here's a question for those of you who like to imagine new online applications: how would you design a good online collaboration tool for mathematics?

UCLA is offering a new full scholarship specifically targeting top USAMO scorers or IMO medalists. This may be particularly interesting to international students, since the scholarship is open to them, as well.