Mar 4, 2016
Remedial Placements
When you start at a community college, you take an English test and a math test and these results place you into the right place in the curriculum. And it's not just…
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Archive page 40 of 73
Feb 29, 2016
The Wave Equation in R
The wave equation is a classic example of a partial differential equation. It comes in several variants and has applications beyond the name. In principle, the wave equation describes the path of…
Feb 27, 2016
Instructor Presence in the Online Classroom
I think instructor presence is critical to student engagement, for all the obvious reasons. I've occasionally had students connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter, those are passive engagements. I once, in…
Feb 26, 2016
Cheerleading the Online Classroom
I have taught online for UMUC since 2010. And I quickly learned to explain that I was more like a class cheerleader than the class professor. In the online classroom, the student…
Feb 25, 2016
Notes on Expected Papal Life Spans
There's an interesting article in Significance about the expected lifespan of popes: Like other populations, popes have experienced a generally increased life expectancy – but statistically, how many years can the present…
Feb 22, 2016
Jimmy Butler is a Communist and Other Cold War Cartoons
I found a pair of old presentations I gave when I was an undergrad. At Maryland, I was in the College Park Scholars Program. For all the obvious reasons, when it came…
Feb 18, 2016
Tyler's Paper on the Advantages of Sustainable Mitigation
There's a great article by Jenna Tyler at IUPUI (who doesn't have a website?) on how to use green infrastructure for sustainable mitigation. The key take away is that FEMA could use…
Feb 16, 2016
Sleep with One Eye Open
I saw a job posting looking for programmers to make a chatbot. I've done this before, though it was almost 20 years ago. I created a chatbot in bash, mostly because my…
Feb 15, 2016
waterfall 1.0.0 released
Sometime, approximately forever ago, I put together a small package to produce waterfall charts in R. It provided two functions, one using base graphics and one using lattice graphics. I planned to…
Feb 13, 2016
Big Data in the Online Classroom
I am taking an online class in how to teach online classes. This is a bit meta and I've taught online since 2010, but that's okay. We have a group project in…
Feb 12, 2016
Zika For the Rest of Us
We keep hearing about Zika virus, and in pregnant women, can cause microcephalic births. That's pretty scary, but as a man who is not planning on having any children any time, I…