Migrating to whoknows.ca

I’m moving.  I’ll now be at whoknows.ca.

It appears I am MathMan

So, I had a pretty funny experience today.  When my Math C30 (pre-calculus) students walked in today, one of them held something behind her back and told me she was about to change the way I looked at the world.  I was speechless.  She then produced a comic book.  It’s called “The Add-ventures of MathMan”, and I’m the main character.  They were creating this in their spare for the last month or so.  Unbelievable.  They gave me a nice laminated hard copy, but also threw it up on the web here:

http://mathmanaddventures.wordpress.com/

My favorite bit:
Evil villain Theta: “But how did you escape?”
MathMan: “I shrunk one side of the triangle so the sum of the two smaller sides wasn’t greater than the third side.  The triangle ceased to exist!!”

Sometimes, being a teacher is a lot of fun.

P.S. Whenever you guys read this — thanks.  You made my day.

Using Google Docs to Teach Statistics

In the spirit of sharing, here’s a lesson that I’m using with my Math B30 students right now.  We’re working on Data Analysis (Stats), and in particular, the normal distribution and related probabilities.  I was getting a bit tired of the dated examples in the text, so I thought I’d create my own problem with the students.

Each student will do a poll of other students in the school, with each student getting a minimum of 20 results.  The two questions they are asking are:

• how many hours do you watch TV in an average week?
• how many hours are you on the Internet in an average week (surfing, email, IMing, Facebook, YouTube, etc.)?

Each student will then post their results to a Google Docs spreadsheet I set up (one spreadsheet per class, like this one) that anyone can edit (to eliminate the need for them to log in).  After all of the students have added their results to the Google Docs spreadsheet, they can then use the aggregate data to perform the statistical calculations required (z-scores, what these results mean to a school population that we assume is normally distributed).

The handout that I’m giving the kids is available here.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Trying to be more social…

About a year and a half ago, I opted to quit blogging, and trimmed down my RSS subscriptions to be as few as I could.  The basic rationale was that I was trying to simplify my life as much as I could, and minimizing the time I spent online helped a lot.  However, I’m going to give it another go, though I’m going to keep a close watch on my time to keep myself sane (and married   ).

So, after resisting for quite some time, I’ve finally joined Twitter. My username is danschellenberg, so let’s hook up and see how this twittering experiment goes…

Also, although I’ve been using Picasa as a web photo sharing site for awhile now, I’m going to be posting a few shots to flickr as well.  This is mostly so that I can be a part of the 366photos group,  as I’m making the mistake of letting others see my mediocre photos.  Ah well, you have to start somewhere…

ECI blog feeds

To simplify the subscribing process when getting yourself hooked up with everybody’s RSS feeds in this class, you can import this OPML file in Google Reader (or whatever other reader you use).  You’ll want to right click and save that file to someplace on your computer (that you can remember, like the desktop), then follow this screencast tutorial to import it into Google Reader.  Be patient, the tutorial seems to be taking a bit of time to load.

Enjoy!

Hello world! Part 2

This is the renewal of a blog that I began in the middle of 2004, then went on hiatus in 2006 due to my lack of patience for the amount of comment spam that I was dealing with.  We’ll see whether this attempt can achieve a bit more longevity…

Note that in the importing of all of my old posts, there are a few things broken.  In particular, categories have been discarded, and images that should appear in some posts do not.  Hopefully I’ll get around to fixing this soon…

Running Ubuntu on a G3 iMac DV

When attempting to install Ubuntu Dapper on an old G3 iMac DV, I kept running into stupid display problems (the boot process simply stopped at a blank black screen). After a bit of research, I finally discovered how to fix this problem, and will record it here for myself…

drop to console (ctrl – option F1)

** if you need to log in use the name ubuntu to log in. **
sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

change the frequencies in monitor section as follows:
** find this part in the file you are now in (xorg.conf) and make these changes **

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Generic Monitor”
Option “DPMS”
HorizSync 60-60
VertRefresh 43-117
EndSection

** after the changes then type command-o, then command-x (save and exit nano)
** restart X by running the following:
sudo killall gdm
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

That should do it…

Ubuntu Linux

I’ve been a casual user of Ubuntu Linux for about a year and a half now, and really enjoy it’s simplicity and ease of use. When showing my computer science students a linux distribution, I inevitably choose the Ubuntu LiveCD. One small annoyance is that the menu’s do not auto-update when you install new software. This causes folks used to Windows a bit of angst. Just so I don’t forget it again, here is how to “rebuild” your menus after using Synaptic to install new software.

- open Synaptic, and install ‘menu’
- from the command line, run ‘update-menus’ to rebuild your menu

Open Selected URL via Quicksilver

I am a big fan of Quicksilver, a free application launcher (and so much more) available for free on your Mac. It is a great way to avoid endless clicking when opening an app, and allows for some things that the built-in Mac OS X Spotlight search feature does not.

While marking my CS30 student’s php assignments, I was selecting the URL of the “live version” of their code, and thought their must be a better way than having to copy the URL, open Safari, select the location bar, and then paste in the URL. So, I spent a minute or two Googling it, and found a post from 43Folders explaining how to “Send to Quicksilver”.

In summary, you can open a selected URL from any application by simply hitting “CMD-Escape” (which sends the text to Quicksilver), and hit “Enter”. Two quick keyboard commands. Much nicer, and I will definitely be using the send to Quicksilver functionality much more…

Fixing MS Office’s Stupidity Regarding Equation Editor

Note to self:

To fix Word’s (completely inexplicable) occasional inability to open up the built-in Equation Editor on Mac OS 10.4 (perhaps earlier versions of OS X as well), just delete the whole ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft folder. It took me a couple of minutes to find this again, and it’s the third time I’ve had to do it, so I’m making it easy to find if it happens again.