An infestation of termites is weakening mathematical writing. We all too often resort to wishy-washy conditionals such as ‘can be’ or ‘wish to’ hidden within the body of sentences. Just as termites weaken a building, these conditionals erode writing by turning what should be definite statements into weak conditionals. Get rid of them. If in your analysis or computational experiments you do some...

You have roughly 40 contact hours in a typical course. If all you do in them is lecture, you might as well just hand out your notes and let the students find something more productive to do with all that time. The only way a skill is developed—skiing, cooking, writing, critical thinking, or solving thermodynamics problems—is practice: trying something, seeing how well or poorly it works, reflec...

In the past decade, medical imaging has made great advances, and we can now see many parts of the human body with amazing detail. While there has been an exponential increase in medical imaging, there are few data demonstrating improvements in outcome, and imaging that requires ionizing radiation is known to be harmful. Indeed, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is so concerned abou...