Ethnogarden clean-up

Gary clears around the sugar cane.
The smaller plants require hand-weeding.
CharMarie, Nicole, and Charlene pull around the smaller plants.
Daryl David clearing around the Scaevola taccada.
Clearing the razor grass with machetes.

Looking a tad bedraggled, the instructor wraps by taking role and lecturing on some of the plants in the garden.

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Box and whisker plots in Google Sheets

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And then everything changed. For the first time since the loss of Gnumeric a spreadsheet was displaying a box and whisker plot. To back up to the beginning, MS 150 Statistics was built around spreadsheets. Students in the course were not statistics majors and the overwhelming majority were not in a scientific field. Most would wind up working on office desktops for which they would not be an administrator. Downloading R would not be an option and R would be steep learning curve for some for whom computers are an unfamiliar technology.

Spreadsheet based statistics, for all the faults and potential for error, would be at the center of the course. The use of Ubuntu in the classroom meant using LibreOffice.org or Gnumeric. Gnumeric provided the capability of including box and whisker plots. A change in computer laboratory technology to Microsoft Windows five years later saw the use of Gnumeric on Windows - until Gnumeric stopped supporting Windows. A further change of my work top to OSX f…
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Traditional food dishes of Micronesia

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Clara, Jennette, and Joanie presented ground hard taro cooked in an umw, effectively a hot rock oven.


Pohnpeian: rotama. Pingelapese: sero. Mwoakillese: rodma. Mortlockese: Amahd. Kosrae: rodoma. After cooking in an umw the rotama is pounded with the petiole of a palm frond.

Rotama is made from hard or swamp taro, known as mwahng on Pohnpei, mweian on Pingalap, pula in Mortlockese, and pahsruhk on Kosrae.

In traditional times on the outer islands the women had primary responsibility for tending the taro while the men handled fishing and climbing tasks.


Joesen and Noeleen presented fermented breadfruit from the outer islands of Yap such as Woleai and Eauripik. The raw ingredients were actually brought in from Yap, Noeleen prepared the maare.


 The leaf wrap is ti leaf - Cordyline fruticosa.


Pauleen, Barnson, Trisha, Verginia, Con-ray, and Maylanda from Kitti, Pohnpei brought in mahi umw, koahpnoair koakihr, and uht sukusuk. Above is breadfruit umw, mahi umw, one of the oldest of the tra…
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Creating histograms with Google Sheets

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My approach to creating histograms for the past sixteen years has been to have the students determine the minimum, the maximum, calculate the range, divide the range by the number of intended classes to find the width, and calculate the class upper limits. The class upper limits then permit the use of the FREQUENCY function in spreadsheets such as Excel, LibreOffice.org, OpenOffice.org, Google Sheets and Gnumeric. While in Excel and LibreOffice.org the existence of a gap width or spacing setting allows the columns to touch, Google Docs did not provide this option, hence the chart seen below.


The data is from an exercise in which the students weighed packs of MMs.

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