Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be Wall Street quant cowboys. My alma mater, northern Virginia's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology, is in the papers for offering advanced postcalculus math courses. (Yeah, yeah — tell me something I didn't know in 9th grade.) Why is this news, two decades after the school first offered such classes? Robert Sachs, a college professor who also teaches complex variables at the school, suggests that his students' math skills have potential for good or evil. Some graduates pursue careers in science or engineering, he tells the Post, while others "become the math financial people who aren't getting good press these days."

"Email becomes a dangerous distraction," headlines a guest column by an "expert in collaboration and communications" in the usually tech-savvy Sydney Morning Herald. If you check mail every five minutes, you lose eight hours a week of mental concentration, according to some glib algebra done on the results of a study. The cure for distracting email conversations? "Twitter ... instant messaging ... wikis ... blogs." You've guessed this already, but allow me to edit the author's bio for clarity: Suw Charman-Anderson is a freelance social software consultant.

NPR reports that someone edited Sarah Palin's Wikipedia page Friday just before the word got out that she was John McCain's pick for a running mate. The edits were obviously made to make Palin look good. There were about 30 of them, made by one person. I'll spell out what NPR is dying to say: That one person was Sarah Palin.Had this happened to Joe Biden's entry, it wouldn't be deemed a story for National Public Radio. Still, I like this All Things Considered writeup, because it pretty much admits in the first sentence that NPR's army of anti-GOP reporters missed the scoop that Palin was McCain's pick. None of them thought to set a watch on her Wikipedia page.

Apple's iPhone has some 2,000 apps available for download. Of those, 65 have some arguable business application, Ben Worthen notes in a Wall Street Journal blog. Only 3 out of the top 100 most downloaded applications are business-related. The most plausible interpretation of those numbers: iPhone buyers and developers are, 97 times out of 100, uninterested in apps for doing business.But because Worthen writes about "business technology," he looks at the numbers and concludes that "the growth is impressive" — because a month ago, there were zero iPhone business apps. A month ago, there were zero frivolous iPhone apps, too, and they've outgrown business apps 30 to 1. Why not just admit the obvious? People mostly buy iPhones because they're fun. And they install apps for the same reason.

"Your math is indeed bullshit," writes commenter Jeffrey McManus about yesterday's Zogby poll result that gave John McCain a 5 percent lead over Zogby's usual front-runner, Barack Obama. "The presidential election is chosen by electoral votes selected on a state-by-state basis. Any poll that tries to dumb down the situation by displaying a straight percentage of voters is bullshit." Let me shorten that: "Any poll ... is bullshit." Including the aspiring experts at the poll rollup site McManus recommends, Electoral-vote.com.They called it for Kerry in 2004, by refining a guesswork algorithm until it forecast the electoral vote count almost exactly backwards. The site's editor seems to believe that applying the right mathematical formula to inaccurate poll results will get him accurate results. That's the epitome of the old programmer's saying — Garbage in, garbage out.

In just a few short months, the value of a Twitter user has gone up over 1,200 percent, according to completely arbitrary and illogical calculations. I initially pegged it at around $1 based on the value buyers were willing to pay for Andrew Baron's Twitter account at auction. When Twitter received $15 million in funding, it worked out to around $7.50 per user. Looking at potential revenues, advertising strategist Ben Kunz pegs it at $12.26, based on 2.3 million users, industry averages for cost-per-click ad revenue, and ten ads per user per day. Of course, since Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has declared Twitter.com an ad-free zone, and many Twitter users get messages by means other than the site, the actual revenue-per-user number hovers under zero.

Blockbuster has abandoned advertising TotalAccess, its also-ran DVD-by-mail competitor to Netflix. CEO Jim Keyes would like you to think his company's still a contender, though, and PaidContent's Rafat Ali is happy to oblige in a softball interview. Ali's far-from-knockout closer: "This is a hypothetical one. Would you be ever interested in buying Netflix?" We won't bother giving you Keyes's pat response about how he doesn't need Netflix. Instead, we'll just point you to PaidContent's handy financial summary included in the post. Blockbuster is worth $312 million. At $1.93 billion, Netflix is worth six times as much as Keyes's company.

You'll be seeing a lot of articles this week claiming the U.S. is 101 years behind Japan in broadband, or some similar number-fumbling. The source is a report sponsored by the Communications Workers of America, a union which represents more than 700,000 workers in telecom and other jobs (for comparison, AFL-CIO membership is just over 12 million.) Let's skip the bogus arithmetic and get to what they want: "With the government’s help, we can make the most of our network capacity." Knock it off with the network stats and give us your pork price tag, willya?

Miguel Helft of the New York Times looks at shareholder discontent at Yahoo another way: If one assumes insiders voted their shares for the company's slate of directors, and discounts those, then the withheld votes on CEO Jerry Yang and Roy Bostock, the board's chairman, are even more striking. One problem with this analysis: It assumes that insiders just blindly voted the company line. From what we hear, there's as much discontent with Yang and Bostock inside Yahoo as therei is outside the company. [Bits]

"Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization" is the new cover story from Adbusters. If you're not familiar, Adbusters is a fun, angry, Starbucks-hating publication whose credo states that we've all been brainwashed by advertising and mass media into an orgy of overconsumption that lets the American Empire destroy the rest of the world to feed our fat faces. I buy it at Whole Foods.

Apple profited some $330 million from 3G iPhone sales over its first weekend, Fortune's Philip Elmer-DeWitt estimates that . His back-of-the-envelope formula factored in iSuppli's estimate of the manufacturing costs of each iPhone 3G, Apple's numbers on how many iPhones it sold over the weekend, analyst estimates on how much AT&T and other carriers subsidize each phone, and what a survey says about the sales split between the iPhone's $199 and $299 iPhones models. All that, a little bit slower now, in Elmer-DeWitt's bullet points below.

Analysts say the craziest things when trying to guess what the supersecretive Steve Jobs is up to at Apple. Last quarter, Jobs has only billed the company for $30,000 in business-related travel reimbursements. That's down from the $550,000 peak in the previous quarter, which was the high-altitude mark for the year. Meanwhile, the stock price has gone up around 30 points in the same year. That has lead Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer to speculate on what the sudden drop in private-jet expenses means. One scenario? Jobs is busy micromanaging employees on the latest batch of new products ahead of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

ABC News's thesis that "Everyone Is 'Tweeting'" is quickly disproven — in the latest article on Twitter from ABC News. It begins with the obligatory anecdote about James Buck, the Berkeley student briefly jailed in Egypt:

Interviewing Muxtape's Justin Ouellette for Listening Post, Eliot Van Buskirk asked "How many users are there at this point? How many muxtapes?" Ouellette's response — "more than the population of Germany, less than the population of Japan" — puts the number between 82 million and 127 million users. Compete.com puts the number around 52,000. Ouellete might have been joking, but Van Buskirk published the numbers without comment. And remember, with Ouellete and his Muxtape partner Jakob Lodwick, whom Barry Diller fired from his post as founder of online-video site Vimeo, you can't judge what's actually going on based on what they say.

Yahoo beat analyst expectations for its first-quarter revenues by $30 million, $1.35 billion to $1.32 billion. Its net income, at $542 million, was considerably higher than Wall Street had hoped for, too. But $401 million of that profit came from a noncash gain, Yahoo's take from Alibaba.com's initial public offering, from which Yahoo profited because it owns 39 percent of Alibaba Group, Alibaba.com's parent company. Investors have taken this caveat into account, bidding Yahoo's stock slightly down in after-hours trading. Commenter WagCurious wants to tar and feather Yahoo CFO Blake Jorgensen for including these gains in Yahoo's quarterly revenues. But one-time gains like this are a well-understood phenomenon, and there's nothing unusual about Yahoo's treatment of it. If nothing else, Wall Street understands making money from buying and selling pieces of companies.

There's no real market for applications written for Google's Android cell-phone operating system — the sad, software-only remnant of the abortive quest for a Googlephone — but Google's trying hard to create an artificial one. Participants in Google's Android Developer Challenge submitted 1,788 Android programs. In May, Google will award 50 semifinalists $25,000 apiece. Eventually Google will pay out $5 million in prizes, or about $2,800 per entry, according to quick bit of math. Why not actually make a Googlephone? That seems easier. (Photo by Kai Hendry)

Here's what you really need to know about Ning, according to Fast Company writer Adam Penenberg. Its chairman, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen, has an egg-shaped head. Its CEO, Gina Bianchini, who posed for Fast Company's cover in a tank top, is a "hottie." And Ning, a provider of websites for niche social networks, is poised to hit "critical mass" and "no one can stop it." Two out of those three statements were factchecked.

To fend off Microsoft, Yahoo is conducting a test with Google to have the latter broker ads for Yahoo's search results. The notion: Google will be so much more effective at selling ads than Yahoo that it will raise Yahoo's revenues, and therefore boost its value well beyond Microsoft's $44.6 billion offer. The test is supposedly "limited," covering only 3 percent of Yahoo's search traffic. But Mike Stoppelman, a former Google engineer, thinks that the deal may be more far-reaching than Yahoo or Google would like you to think.

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is an entrepreneur now, but back in the 1990s, he ran a publication called Silicon Alley Reporter. And sometimes, his journalist roots show. Like during this recent interview with The Deal when Calacanis explained who uses Mahalo. Seems 80 percent come from one place and 80 percent from another. Watch for when reporter Mary Kathleen Flynn nods in a big way, as if to say, "Makes perfect sense to me."