Forensic pinboard is a new blog and the first post is about Blood Stain Analysis. The information could be useful to any B/TEC Forensic Science students who are basing Maths assignments on blood stain analysis.
Related links
The document sharing site scribd.com allows you to upload documents, and then display them on your Web site or blog as a FlashPaper object. The embed code works fine on blogger blogs and this page. Scribd has been set up to accept MS Office documents and OpenOffice documents, as well as PDF files. Might be useful for storing documents if you use a blogger blog with no file storage space.
I’ve taken the Pythagoras animation I made last year and I have added a sound track. The result is on YouTube and TeacherTube. You should see the two versions embedded above. There appears to be a problem with sound on the TeacherTube version, but older MOVS made with iShowU version 1.22 seem to work fine.
I’m wondering if the sound track adds a lot of value. Perhaps pulling things off a site like YouTube is easier for students, and perhaps the sound track gives a time frame to the exposition?
Unscripted, so no script here.
iShowU has been upgraded to version 1.33, some aspects of the user interface have been simplified. Don’t use the ‘low quality’ setting for sound, it sounds like the Clangers, the compression is much higher than it was. I used the high quality setting for this screencast and the results were good.
Only typographers could come up with this….
The Law of Optical Volumes states that the area between any two letters in a word must be of equal measure throughout the word, and remain consistent throughout the body of text.The Law boils down to the science of kerning. In typography jargon, kerning is the act of adjusting the space between two letters to make words and sentences lay out more evenly. For example in the word “VAST,†there is usually reduced space between the V and A, and maybe extra space between the S and T. Otherwise the “VA†would seem too far apart and the “ST†would seem cramped.
Above from an interesting article called Law of Optical Volumes: The Math Behind Wired’s New Logo on the Wired Magazine Web site, via Daring Fireball.
The lack of agreement between area and volume (ink on paper, volume?) reminds me of the way architects use the word ‘mass’. That seems to mean some kind of impression on the visual field, so probably a solid angle if anything.
Download a quick quiz with area, volume and circumference of a circle questions. [90Kb, PDF]
Just a one side PDF with some questions. I use these as lesson starters, to see if people can remember the major facts from the last lesson and to soak up the 5 minutes at the beginning of the lesson when the late arrivals make it in. With mature students, the late arrival is often difficulty parking or dropping children off taking longer, not the delights of the refectory!
Teaching is a bit like selling, and you can be your own small school. Get a blog going for one class, back it up with a few TeacherTubes and see what happens. Feed the blog with a useful link for each week for a year and you have Web links for next year.
Seth Goldin has advice for small businesses, he is saying get a blog and add a few other localised services. If I had to start BODMAS all over again, I would be using a blog backed up with TeacherTube videos. I would not be renting server space and hacking perl and php!
