Archive for February, 2005

Finding planets

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005

The headmap sphaeric web page has a simple geometrical method for finding rough positions of the planets based on using concentric circles to represent the orbit of the planet and of the earth.

I’ll re-work this a little minus the ideology.

Note added 27th Feb : errors prove large for Mars. The smaller signal is the declination [...]

Cumulative frequency curves from the TTA

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005

Cumulative frequency curve summary from the Teacher Training Agency!
The TTA material covers the syllabus for the Numeracy test that newly qualified teachers must take
The material is presented as Web pages that are also available in a plain form for printing out
Areas of numeracy covered
There are interactive practice tests available as well as written questions
Could be [...]

Genetic fingerprinting – probability of false match?

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005

The Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching has a range of simple Web pages that set up a problem in a context using GCSE level Maths.

Chance of false matches in DNA matching (genetic fingerprinting) is a useful leader for a lesson on combined probabilities – and directly useful to Forensic science students!
Mistaken DNA Identification has [...]

MyMind mind mapper

Monday, February 21st, 2005

Sebastian Krauss provides MyMind 1.2 a small free outliner and mind mapping tool for the Mac OS X platform. Very simple and basic which actually makes it more useful than the all singing mind mappers around.

MyMind can export its map views as Web pages with a client side image map coded in. Site maps like [...]

Dissertation without tears

Sunday, February 20th, 2005

“The formula for writing Essays is rather loose. It was invented by Michel Montaign in the sixteenth century. It was a variation on the sermon. A sermon is traditionally appended to an opening biblical text which it refers, or at least alludes to, the holiday when the sermon was delivered. It is a fantasy or [...]

Maths for adults

Sunday, February 20th, 2005

The diagram above is re-drawn from Mike Ollerton’s book Getting the buggers to add up published by Continuum. Most of the issues he raises for engaging children and teenagers are alive and well for adults…

Take away aspects of ‘behaviour’ – less challenging anyway
Add in a big set of built in hangups and partial constructs about [...]

Short headings and summaries

Sunday, February 20th, 2005

Gerry McGovern suggests (see Secrets of great Web headings )

Headings and titles less than 8 words, nearer 4
Summaries less than 30 words
Online research indicates most summaries coming in at 17 words with a low of 10 and a high of 25

Idea for lesson activity: take typical Intranet news item text and write a page title [...]

216 colour cube

Saturday, February 19th, 2005

“The Netscape palette for foreground colors usually (but NOT always) consists of all the combinations of 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, FF for each of the red, green, and blue elements of the color descriptor. This results in 216 (6×6×6) distinct colors.” – Victor Engel

The Browser Safe Palette
Colour palette map
Color Primer

A colour taken [...]

Open quals

Friday, February 18th, 2005

http://www.openquals.org.uk/

Some stats simulations

Sunday, February 13th, 2005

Central Limit Theorem – you can roll up to 5 dice up to 10000 times and plot the frequency distribution of the total score. As you ‘roll the dice’ a second and third time, the cumulative score is shown so that the Normal distribution can emerge through repeated samples. Nice touch – imagine using this [...]

What is good hypertext writing?

Saturday, February 12th, 2005

Jutta Degener’s What is good hypertext writing essay is still relevant 7 years later, even though Web pages tend to look more like interfaces and less like documents.

The rest of her homepage looks sort of antique but still interesting. I like the paintings.

Transquoting

Thursday, February 10th, 2005

” It never occurred to me that the techies writing the software would try to use the computer to simulate paper Ôø? actually not even paper, but paper under glass. ” quoted in Grand Text Auto blog

Ted Nelson suffered character assasination in a well known Wired article about Xanadu. Anyone who can dismiss Word [...]

Central Limit Theorem

Sunday, February 6th, 2005

” The distribution of an average tends to be Normal, even when the distribution from which the average is computed is decidedly non-Normal “.

“Thus, the Central Limit theorem is the foundation for many statistical procedures, including Quality Control Charts, because the distribution of the phenomenon under study does not have to be [...]