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excitement of the departures lounge to the distinctly unreliable Wi-Fi that seems to characterize any given resort, holidays lever you all away from screens and routines and help to strengthen any frazzled bonds.

Lone parents on Mumsnet are joyful when they discover a tour company that knows how to show single-parent families a good time and

they share their recommendations far and wide. СNow that my children are older, I tend to head for a glorified caravan

on one of the big European campsites; it’s a little bit like going on holiday to Piccadilly Circus, but the relative safety, range of activities and teeming hordes of other children their age means that I can settle down with a book

иwithout a scintilla of guilt, and actually get something approaching a holiday myself.

THREE-QUARTERS OF BRITISH CHILDREN CANNOT BOIL AN

EGG, STUDY FINDS

Many youngsters have no idea how long they should leave an egg on the hob for, with a quarter believing it should remain in the saucepan for at least 10 minutes.

A further 12 per cent of children admitted that they did not have a clue. The study also found that almost half of youngsters never or rarely help

Two in five said they were too stressed about homework or too tired to help cook.

It also revealed that a third of parents had learned to cook from their own mothers and fathers, and 80 per cent viewed culinary ability as an important skill.

Study author Annabel Karmel said: "Today's parents just don't have the time or the patience to get the children involved in the kitchen.

"A third of parents admit it's easier to let their children watch television than to enlist their help with the evening meal.

"Cooking is a great way for children to learn about maths, measuring, and understanding time, so it's worth the effort. What's more it's a great way to get fussy eaters to try new foods."

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She added that by the age of six, children should be able to chop vegetables, grate cheese and boil an egg, and that by 13, youngsters should be cooking fish, chicken and meat and baking potatoes.

By the age of 16 teenagers should have mastered risottos and pasta dishes.

The study was based on responses Сparents, who were polled online.

SECRETS OF CADBURY: HAS BRITAIN'S BELOVED иCHOCOLATE MAKER LOST ITS MAGIC?

British consumers are notorious chocoholics. Eating, on average, more than 16lb a year (more than 7 kg), we are beaten only by the Swiss in our love for theбАstuff. But something strange is happening at the spiritual home of British chocolate: Bournville. This is the model village, just outside Birmingham, created at the end of the nineteenth century by the Cadbury family. They were devout Quakers, who firmly believed that a healthier, happier and more educated workforce was a more productive one.

The beautiful playing fields and the arts and crafts swimming baths and cottages remain. But a strange smell is coming from the factory. And it is not caramel and molten cocoa. Every few months another controversy appears to emerge from Bournville: a change to the recipe of a much loved chocolate product, the shrinking of some packДsizes, workers losing their jobs.

For some, the gloss has been coming off ever since Kraft, the giant US food company, bought Cadbury in a hostile takeover in 2010 for £11.5 billion. The new owners did not get off to a good start. One of its key factories, Somerdale, near Bristol was closed and 400 workers lost their jobs.

The company says it still makes “all theИclassic Dairy Milk bars” in Bournville, except the small 18g one. But Dispatches discovered a number of Dairy Milk products that are made in Poland, including the 41g bar of Dairy Milk Oreos and the 47g bar of Dairy Milk Marvellous Creations. The location is not surprising. The workers are mostly paid 13 Zlotys an hour (£2.35), just over the Polish minimum wage, and considerably cheaper than what the company needs to pay workers in the UK.

Possibly the greatest threat to Cadbury’s status as Britain’s most loved chocolate brand is not where Mondelez locates its factories or how it treats its workers. It is what it does to the chocolate bars.

In the last few years, it has fiddled with the recipes. First, Dairy Milk’s corners were rounded “to improve the mouthfeel” and shrunk from 49g to 45g. Last year, it stopped using Dairy Milk on its Creme Eggs, replacing it with standard Cadbury milk chocolate. Perhaps most worryingly it appears to

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have stopped innovating. In the last few years, new Cadbury chocolate bars have appeared on shelves, but most are Dairy Milk with the addition of another Mondelez product.

From “The Telegraph”

СInstagram is going to show users older photos they might have missed

before new ones in a major change to its feed.

иThis means that when users open the Instagram app, they will see a photo from a close friend or a popular celebrity posted the previous night

The photo service’s users have grown accustomed to a time-ordered feed in which the latest photos appear at the top. But on Tuesday night, Instagram announced that it would begin ordering posts using an algorithm that tries to guess what the user wants to see, changing the chronological feed

popularity.бАInstagram has doubled users to 400 million in the last two years, meaning increasingly-crowded feedsДas people follow more accounts.

it has used since it was founded in 2010.

above a blurry snap of a former colleague’s breakfast posted the morning after, similar to the way that Facebook arranges statuses it thinks are more interesting or important at the top of its News Feed.

Instagram said that people tend to miss 70 per cent of the photos in

their feed, with it becoming harder to keep up as the service explodes in

In changing to an algorithmically-ordered feed, Instagram follows Twitter which made the change last month, although Twitter allows users to turn off the feature and use the traditional timeline. Instagram did not say whether or not it would allow users to keep their time-ordered feeds.

make sure we get it right. Some details will be determined during the testing period. We'll be able to share details when we plan to launch it more broadly," a spokesman said.

"We're testing ordered feed with a smallИgroup in the community to

“As Instagram has grown, it’s become harder to keep up with all the photos and videos people share. This means you often don’t see the posts you might care about the most," the company said.

"The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post. As we begin, we’re focusing on optimizing the order — all the posts will still be there, just in a different order."

From “The Telegraph”

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IF MATHS IS BORING, WHAT IS THE ANSWER?

If a circle is one unit in diameter, what is its circumference? The answer, as every schoolchild ought to know, is π (pi), that enigmatic and beautifully irregular number. The value of π is 3.14 – or thereabouts.

The intriguing thing is that it has no finite decimal expression, cannot be written as a fraction, and has captivated mathematicians for more than three

СThere's something about π that grabs the imagination. It crops up across the sciences, from geometry and mechanics to statistics. If its superstar status was in doubt, there is a movie named after it.

millennia.

иArchimedes arrived at a well-known rough estimate – 22 divided by 7 – by drawing up his calculations from a 96-sided shape rather than a circle; his efforts were halted when he was killed by a Roman soldier.

The ancient Egyptians came up with one of the first approximations of it – 256 divided by 81 – derived from an early board game called mancala. For

4,000 years, the calculation of π has been a running theme through the history of maths.

classroom.бАA report published by Ofsted last month claimed that pupils are simply turned off by the parrot learning of formulas to solve quadratic equations and the mindless application of the rules of trigonometry.

Isaac Newton is said to have tried calculating it just to idle away the hours

and made it as far as 15 decimal places. Today, a computer can easily

calculate it to billions of digits, which must have helped Kate Bush write her song about π, in which she recites it to the 137th decimal place.

Who said maths was boring? And yet, many children are bored in the

An obsession with teaching children solely to jump the hurdles of the testing regime is depriving a generation of a deeper understanding of the subject.

Everyone responds to good stories and mathematics is full of them, so why deprive students of the wonderful dramatis personae that have created our subject? As a professional mathematician, I have found that unearthing the stories behind my subject has been a revelation.

At university I fell in love with a precise formula for π which involves alternatively adding and subtracting the odd fractions. I was taught in lectures that it was called the Leibniz formula, after the great 18th-century German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, who discovered it using the powerful new tool of calculus for which he and Isaac Newton became so famous.

It therefore came as a huge shock to me to discover recently that a school of Indian mathematicians in Kerala in south India arrived at this formula several

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centuries earlier. It should, in fact, be called the Madhava formula, in honour of the Hindu scholar who first hit upon it.

π was not the only great mathematical discovery made in India. Negative numbers and zero – concepts that in Europe, as late as the 14th century, were viewed with huge suspicion – were being conjured with on the subcontinent as early as the seventh century.

СThe authorities in Florence temporarily "banned" the zero in 1299. Seeing

how the mathematicians of the past wrestled with the same problems that

contemporary students find difficult might help them realise that the

discipline did not appear from nowhere. There is something empowering in

иlove and politics. Some even went mad doing their maths. Georg Cantor spent many years in a mental asylum after contemplating the infinite.

knowing that mathematicians used to have trouble with the concept of zero and negative numbers.

Some eminent mathematicians made their breakthroughs while at school. The

revolutionary French scholar Evariste Galois discovered a new language for

Unlike inбАthe other sciences, mathematical theories are not overturned; the discoveries of the ancient EgyptiansДare as true as they ever were. Students who learn to calculate the area of a circle using π, or the volume of a pyramid

symmetry as a schoolboy before he was killed in a duel at the age of 20 over

Stories like these can bring the subject alive for those who find the

excitement of pure mathematics hard to tap into. It's not as if mathematics

and history are so far removed from each other; maths has an inbuilt

historical narrative. Each generation builds on the foundations of results proved by those who had gone before.

using calculus, are treading in the footsteps of 5,000 years of mathematicians. The Egyptians needed such formulas to calculate how to tax pieces of land

carved out by the winding Nile, or to know how many bricks to use in the pyramids of Giza. Today, when footballers positionИthemselves in the box to

tee up an incoming free kick, they are solving quadratic equations, a formula which, according to workings found on Babylonian clay tablets, was being applied as early as 1800BC.

Until recently, I didn't know a lot about the history of my subject. I believed that what matters most is the mathematics. If you understand the theorems and the proofs, is it important who created them or in what circumstances? The way we are taught in school and at university reinforces this ahistorical message.

Sure, it is possible to teach mathematics as pure reason that transcends cultural and national boundaries; that mathematics is a universal language is one of its attractions. But it is important to recognise that it is created by people. The stories of why they battled to solve quadratic equations and

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