danaleeling

I rarely buy raffle tickets. This is not a moral or ethical position. I simply do not want to risk winning. I facilitate learning in statistics. Unlike those who play the lottery or gamble in Las Vegas, I do not only do not believe I am lucky, I do not want to be lucky. Lucky means that a rare and unusual event has occurred. An event in the tail of a distribution. I do not want to be in the tail of the distribution. I want to be safely in the middle of the distribution. Live a life of average length with the average assortment of the usual issues of aging. Average is good, average is safe. Lucky is in the tail of the distribution. Lucky is rare. Rare is being struck by lightning. You have to be lucky to be hit by lightning. Or to come down with a rare, untreatable condition that baffles doctors. Or to slide off the road at the one small place where there happens to be a cliff. Engaging in raffles is risking being lucky, is asking to be lucky. I fear lucky. I needed a phone card t...

One year ago I resolved months of discomfort by going gluten free. At that time I felt odd, a singleton, with a strange inability to handle gluten. Morning doughnuts with my coffee, an island staple, were out. Along with bread, pasta, most breakfast cereals, and my occasional one beer with dinner to keep cholesterol at bay.  Then I learned that there were products which were specifically gluten free. I was suddenly a member of a market segment. A large enough group to support a segment of the food industry. I was clearly not alone. Still, runners's pride themselves on being healthy. And out here, in a nation that is ranked the number two nation for body mass index on the planet, being a runner causes people to think one must be unusually healthy. And able to eat anything. Surely the gluten free runner is a more unusual creature. And then the June 2012 Runner's World came in with an article titled Good-Bye Gluten? There are enough runners running gluten free ...

The mathematics curriculum alignment group met at Madolehnihmw High School on Friday 03 August 2012 to continue to work together on curriculum. Before the meeting began I was given a personal tour of the mathematics classrooms at MHS. The rooms still had poster sheets on the walls for some of the concepts the students were studying. The classrooms are modern, well lit, and in excellent condition. Each classroom has a white board and a projection screen above the white board. MHS feted the participants with a wonderful and bounteous lunch including MHS soup and local chicken. During the mathematics curriculum alignment meeting I briefed the participants on the mathematics results for the spring 2012 COMET including section analysis for PICS and MHS. After the meeting concluded, the MHS math instructors and myself remained. I ran a refresher of exponential and logarithmic concepts to help prepare the very capable faculty at MHS for the teaching of algebra and tr...

The  SC 130 Physical Science  curriculum is built around four course level student learning outcomes and fifteen specific student learning outcomes which serve four general education program learning outcomes. Student learning outcomes are prefaced by the phrase, "Students will be able to..." and followed by a measurable ability, knowledge set, or value. These course and specific outcomes form the core of the course outline. General Education Program Learning Outcomes 1.1 Write a clear, well-organized paper using documentation and quantitative tools when appropriate. 3.2 Present and interpret numeric information in graphic forms. 3.4 Define and explain the concepts, principles, and theories of a field of science. 3.5 Perform experiments that gather scientific information and to utilize, interpret, and explain the results of experiments and field work in a field of science Course and Specific Student Learning Outcomes 1. Demonstrate core scientific skills 1.1 Explor...

The second program learning outcome which SC 130 Physical Science addresses is "3.2 Students will be able to present and interpret numeric information in graphic forms." The sixteen students in physical science this summer were given six questions which focused on this outcome as skills pre-assessment at the start of the term. As reported in June , beyond a basic ability to plot data which was presented in an xy table, student abilities range from weak to almost no ability to complete the items correctly. The following table indicates the number of students out of sixteen answering a given question correctly on the pre-test instrument and the number who answered the same item correctly as part of the final examination  (post). Skill Pre Post Calculate slope from line on graph 4 14 Determine units from axis labels 3 13 Determine y-intercept from line on graph 1 11 Write out the equation of line fr...

Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow noted that the remembering mind rates experiences using a peak-end rule . Although I had not known this particular fact when I designed laboratory 15 five years ago, I had always shared George M. Cohan's belief that one should " always leave them laughing when you say goodbye ." Jackie juggles three in cascade pattern A class that ends on a pleasant activity makes for better memories looking back on the course. SC 130 Physical Science Laboratory 15 is both fun and yet is also a chance to introduce an mathematical model that is very different. Beverleen throws one high Laboratory fifteen in physical science sought to push the boundaries on the mathematical box for the students. In laboratory one a quote from Freeman Dyson was used to start a journey through the mathematical models that explain physical systems. Dyson calculated how an electron ought to behave. Later someone went into a laboratory and the electron b...