Acceleration

This term laboratory one was not returned until Wednesday, which increased the time on Monday to obtain acceleration of a RipStik. I changed the procedure this term, using a tape measure to measure off  800 centimeters. Initially I tried distances that increased, but this did not work out well. I then used 200 centimeter segments marked with chalk. A student timed my crossings of the 200 centimeters marks. This worked out rather well and generated a nice curve with an increasing velocity.

Ceyleen and Kimberly

Wednesday I handed back laboratories and covered them in some detail for the first 30 minutes of class. I realized that I need to spend more time clarifying what I want in the laboratories, and I did so this term.

I then worked the homework - the velocity between 200 cm and 400 cm, and 400 cm to 600 cm from the Monday RipStik acceleration exercise. This left too little time to have the students trace ball arcs on the board, so I ran that as a demonstration on Wednesday. No spreadsheet graphing of the function this term - just coverage of the shape and quadratic underpinnings. Essentially a lighter approach.

Rustem and Palikkun

Lab 032 then built on Monday and Wednesday, chasing the idea that a ball is at rest before it is dropped, and once dropped the ball has a non-zero speed. Therefore, acceleration happened. And that acceleration is the acceleration of gravity.

Hanna timing and dropping

The outdoor drops of 400 cm and 500 cm

Rolling balls and linear relationships

Spring 2012 laboratory 022 marked the fourth term of the even "no write up" laboratories. Assessment done spring 2011 indicated that the shift from writing up every laboratory to writing up only odd laboratories did not have a negative impact on the improvement in writing.

In laboratory 022 the location of the ball at each second is marked by a different student. Then the distance to the timing mark is determined. This makes the time the independent variable and the distance the dependent variable.

As this laboratory is often done in physics, the distance is preset and becomes the independent variable, with a timing determining the time to that fixed distance - such as a photogate on a air track. The ramp permits rolling the ball at a specific velocity that can be repeated. This allows the timing markers to stand near to the correct location for their particular number of seconds.

Only a single timer is actually needed, one student calls out the seconds while watching a stopwatch or other digital second timer.

In the 11:00 section a light breeze kept arcing the ball. The wind was a reversed rotor off the roof of the gym. This was turned into a tail wind by moving the sheet to the west side of the parking lot as seen below.

The laboratory was wrapped up by graphing the data in the field and discussing the resulting curves on the paper. The data was linear enough to run a visual best fit line and calculate the slope. Some rolls did slow down, and this could be seen in the data as well. This term I did not discuss the tangent as the instantaneous velocity.

Social media survey

A convenience sample survey of 73 students in the MS 150 Statistics class at the College of Micronesia-FSM Palikir national campus 09 January 2012 asked about social media membership.

Site	Sp 09	Fa 09	Sp 10	Fa 10	Sp 11	Fa 11	Sp 12
FaceBook	0	9	12	46	62	54	70
Twitter	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	7
MySpace	32	45	33	33	45	29	31
Bebo	17	41	27	37	42	20	19
Other	8	16	26	25	16	12	10
None	9	13	10	8	8	4	3
Sample size n	54	74	58	66	72	61	73

Number of students with membership in the listed site by term Note that the columns do not add to the sample size as students can have multiple memberships.

Percentage of students with membership in the listed site by term 

FaceBook continued to extend its dominant position among students in MS 150 statistics at the college, with 96% of the students having a membership in FaceBook. MySpace, Bebo, and "other" sites lost market share among the students. Not shown above is that while some students only use FaceBook, no student only uses another site.

In other words, of the 70 students who use social media, all use FaceBook. Of social media users, FaceBook holds 100% membership. The 96% is the result of three students who have no social media memberships. FaceBook is effectively the only place to be.

No student named Google+ in their responses. Seven students listed Twitter in the other category, this term Twitter is being tracked separately.

FaceBook on the spring 2009 survey may have caused to students to investigate the site and begin signing up for accounts. Because the survey and this report may have the unintended effect of driving "membership out of curiosity."

Kosrae Christmas marching in Kolonia

Being as Christmas fell on a Sunday, the Kolonia Kosrae Congregational Church marched on Christmas eve Saturday.

The day starts with food preparation at the house. Marching is not until the afternoon.

Joseph and Mary star in the Sunday School skit. Baby Jesus is no plastic doll either, a real live baby starred in the lead role.

Mary was very skilled - singing and marching while carrying a bag of candy and the baby Jesus. Joseph is very fortunate to have such a skilled wife.

First she removed her angelic hair band, then she proceeded to rip off those wings. She was clearly fed up with being type cast once again as the angel.

A family star bearer on the left.

The front line of Yonkumi choir.

Joseph also joined Yonkumi.

This was the last shot I got off before being strangled by that same towed.

Three sisters and a distant cousin as star bearers on the front line of Ichikumi. Shrue, Elterina, and Hanna take a turn on the front row.

Inac Sra Ioanis is the dot in the letter "i" for isuslac en Bethlehem.

"...look like an angel, walk like an angel, talk like an angel..." time to get wise!

Pualani, a more likely candidate for Ichikumi angel!

Christmas gift distribution at the church - a Kosrae church tradition casting the Deacons in the role of Santa Claus.

His mother forbade the consumption of soda, so he hid behind a car with a purloined can of fizzy pop and attempted to down it all before getting caught. His girlfriend did not want to be photographed...

All hopped up on sugar, this sugaroid-raging young lady takes her first and last swing at mom.

An Ichikumi star gets to take Jesus home.

SDA Christmas Concert

The Christmas concert, an event where parents dive into a photographic mosh pit with the latest in digital technology to get that blurry, unbalanced photo of their angel or little prince.

A shepherd out watching their flock and singing.

A singing shepherd is a happy shepherd.

Was also a shepherd, here standing with his instructor.

Statistics performance across the terms

The following chart depicts the average success rate on the MS 150 Statistics final examination fall terms only. The average success rate is based on an item analysis of the final, and the average is the average of the percentage of items answered correctly aggregated across the student learning outcomes. The standard deviation is based also on the aggregated student learning outcomes. The sample size n is the number of students.

Thunderbird grade book mail merge on Lubuntu 11.10

Attempts to perform a mail merge to email using LibreOffice.org 3.4.4 on a Lubuntu system led only to LibreOffice.org crashing. In searching for another way to perform a mail merge, I looked into what might be possible using Thunderbird 8.0.

I rather quickly found Alexander Bergmann's Mail Merge 2.5.0. The add-on page however, and even the web site left me somewhat perplexed as to how to actually perform the mail merge. The directions were spartan and minimalist.

Fortunately a video by PleaBargain provided me the visual information I needed. Once I saw the draft email with the fields, everything clicked into place.

I pulled the specific columns I needed from my grade book and did a special paste (values only) into a blank temporary spreadsheet. I cleaned up the field names so they had no spaces, and then saved the file as a CSV file.

first,Gr,perc,cperc,max,fxp,sum,fx,mail
Nolynn,D,0.666,0.666,383,0.55,255.2,24,nolynn@wacngin.fm
Maybelynn,B,0.806,0.806,383,0.66,308.65,29,maybelynn@wacngin.fm
Yeslynn,A,0.904,0.904,383,0.84,346.2,37,yeslynn@wacngin.fm

I then composed a new email. In the To: line I put {{mail}} and the subject line was End of term update for {{first}}. Then I composed the body, inserting fields by name where appropriate.

Once done I chose Mail merge from the file menu in the composition window.

I selected the CSV file using the Browse button and the add-on performed the 74 student mail merge flawlessly, putting each individual email in my out box. I could now individually edit specific messages if I chose, or even delete a message that I did not want to send out.

As my list includes students who have not dropped the class but have stopped attending the course, I deleted those emails. The a "Send Unsent Messages" from the main file menu, and Thunderbird began sending the individual emails.

There are some nice upsides to this. In the past, OpenOffice.org did not use IMAP to put sent copies in my sent mail folder on the server, Thunderbird does. That Thunderbird is the email merge agent also means that I am no longer wed to the LibreOffice.org Calc and Writer duo to accomplish mail merges.

LibreOffice.org is a powerful package, but resource hungry on an older system. LibreOffice.org invariably eventually crashes the lxpanel. LibreOffice, however, has been a necessary evil to date as I use mail merges to provide students with updates on their grades.

With Bergmann's add-on I am free to shift to lighter footprint (in GTK) packages such as Gnumeric.