This is just a bugfix release. Someone noticed that zsync would be vulnerable to CAN-2005-2096, due to it's use of zlib code. So the patch for that is now done.

This release also includes some HTTP protocol fixes, as there have been some complaints/observations on how zsync failed to correctly implement some details from the standard. I still have some of these to do, and the fixes in this release have not been heavily tested yet, so let me know if there are any problems.

Get it from the download page.

The Ubuntu CDs that I ordered arrived at last on Friday. I installed it at the weekend and, so far, it seems quite good.

The install was cruder than I had expected — did I hit an expert install without noticing, or does it really ask "human beings" which kernel they want? Technically I was impressed though: it picked up both other distributions installed and added them to grub, and even accepted me going behind the installer's back ane remounting the install CD in another drive when the first gave errors reading some files.

While still clearly Debian under the hood, I liked the default setup. sudo only to root is a good idea. The only thing I really had to change was to add a smarthost to the mail server setup.

There has been much coverage in the press about the state of A level maths. The report makes good reading, because there are few people better qualified than a group of maths professors for trashing government statistics. For some reason they didn't provide any graphs, so let's do some now.

That is their core figures — a 40% decline in 15 years. I couldn't find real figures online for before 2001; the Joint Council for Qualifications give figures for 2001 onward, which confirm a sharp decline in 2002. Here are the results for 2001-2004 for all UK, from the online results.

Table 3.1 of the government's own report on maths teaching also shows the same collapse in maths entries in 2002. It appears clear that the Curriculum 2000 reforms, which saw maths A levels, like other subjects, divided into an ASub part (roughly like an old AS level) and an A2 (which takes the subject up to A level standard), caused this collapse. The report notes that (section 3.23):

During 2000/01, serious difficulties with AS Mathematics were reported to the regulatory authorities. The overriding concern of teachers was that AS Mathematics appeared to be too difficult and was turning many students away from the subject. … The pass rate among the 17 year-old cohort was 71.8 per cent, very low compared to other mainstream subjects like English, history, …

Interestingly, pass rates improved, showing that at least in part students have been detered by the course being harder, not the exam. So the decline is due to students being scared off, not any essential difficulty, by my reading.

The government unhelpfully note that "In 2004 maths had the the highest entry rate of any GCSE and the third highest entry rate at A-level." — but the GCSE rate is to be expected since maths is taken by basically everyone, and maths as the 3rd most popular A level represents a sharp decline from being the most popular not many years ago (so the report says).

But with girls taking over at all levels of education, english and biology overtaking maths is no surprise, and is not a relevant benchmark. Importantly, it does not seem that the decline of maths is a gender thing: physics is more male dominated than maths, but has seen only stagnation and no serious decline; the proportion of A Level students, both male and female, taking maths is declining (from JCQ results figures).

Update: the graphs in this select committee report confirm the longer term decline — maths, now at 7%, was over 10% in 1992.

So it seems that, far from the problems being a temporory government recruiting mess, there is a real long-term decline in the number of maths students, and it is this that is causing the serious problems in teaching the subject. This article from the BBC, from 2000, looks disturbingly prescient now:

It claims that the biggest problem is a vicious circle of poor teaching leading to fewer people taking maths A-levels, thus creating an inadequate supply of mathematicians to become teachers.

The governments' own figures show that over 50% of all maths graduates each year need to be recruited each year to fill the allocated teacher training slots (2.65).

The most interesting feature, other than the decline in entrants, is the (resulting?) sharp rise in pass rate. To disentangle these, let's see the absolute numbers getting high grades (derived from the JCQ results figures):

So 2002 was a big blow, but there is a recovery after that. This may explain why this has not yet had much impact (except in 2002) on the number of maths undergraduates. But surely this recovery is in part the reaction to the perceived greater difficulty of the new exams — in other words the exams were made easier to maintain the pass rate? And, as the government report notes that the grade distribution for maths is out of line with other subjects; how long will the education authorities tolerate a large subject like maths giving nearly 40% A grades, while other subjects are averaging around 20%, and when the evidence is that maths is not achieving this through genuinely high standards, but is in fact in decline?