Two Dishes But To One Table

=pi() - today()

Boy have I enjoyed introducing my detectives to Excel!

Two or three times a month, on a Friday, especially if it's the day after a test or quiz, we give everyone a laptop and they spend an hour trying to write Excel statements.  For the first couple weeks I think 75% of the class had a hard time doing the spreadsheets. They either stumbled through it with me helping them every 5 minutes or they didn't get it at all.    Now, months later, I think everyone can write something like  "=sum(A5:G5)/365.25.   

I like doing a spreadsheet emphasis in our Forensics class because

1. This is my public high schools lower track science class. Less than half of these students will probably finish a 4 year degree succesfully.  They could be standouts in their job with a skill like this.
2. If these forensics students go on to actual police department jobs there must be plentiful opportunity to keep track of arrests, evidence, warrents on the computer.
3. I think once they learn it, the skill will be rather permanent, unlike what I'm teaching them about fingerprint patterns and neutron activation analysis of hair.
4. The logic statements are a foot in the door for REAL computer careers could be a sort of 'gateway drug' to actual scripting or database programming.   I would love to hear someday that a student was able to parlay her understanding of "=IF("A7 <= 18", "Minor", "Adult") into pursuit of a computer science degree at college.  I would really, really love that

 

Download 114_nmr  Right click and select Save-As if you want to see a typical exercise.  This one took my students about 40 minutes to complete.  Feel free to use it if you find it helpful!

 

ItI have been able to find police department statistics on the web for things like arrest warrents

The Tails of the Gaussian Curve

Here's something that bears following up -- in a survey of 17,000 elections, the actual result and the poll result were compared by The 538 Blog. It's not a surprise that the polls are barely more accurate than a Farmer's Almanac weather prediction, but the actual numbers are interesting.

Forty percent of the time, the actual result was more than two standard deviations outside of the survey prediction!  Recall from Statistics Class that a result two standeard deviations should only happen 5% of the time.

More at 538., an innovative statistics site that was originally focused on a crucial number of Congress seats, 538, and, like all good blogs, went from being one man's dream to being part of the big media scene: Nate Silver now blogs at the New York Times!

Finding Things Using Microsoft Windows

I think I just got 99 times better at finding things on my computer thanks to Indexed Tags  and Preview Pane.

To get Preview Pane click the blue and white square in the upper right corner of Explorer (the name of the program Windows uses as a file browser window). Now every time you highlight a file, you see the first page of the file. For example I was trying to remember which test had a stern warning against cheating on the first page.  Looks like it's not this one:

Preview pane is not cutting edge - my mom's old Windows 2000 computer uses it.  I just didn't know where it was in Windows 7 for some reasons.  My other discovery, tags with indexing is more profound.

Putting tags on my files will be enormously useful. In teaching I have increased my amount of spiral curriculum , which helps students learn but it has also increased the difficulty of finding all the mentions of a given topic.  For example since I teach density in multiple chapters, I need to be able to go back later and see when I first mentioned density, what level I have tested density at, which homework examples I've recycled from the last time I taught density, etcetera.  By tagging density throughout the year in every file that has it I make this easier.  I make it more portable for when I teach a different version of chemistry too (New York State Regents, SAT, A.P., etc).

Windows won't find tags if you don't tell it to fully "Index" those parts of the drive.  To do that, hit the blue "?" while you are in Explorer and look up Index FAQ's. 

Then to tag, the Explorer file window has a space to add tags at the bottom every time you highlight a file.

One way to

Between the Lions

Imagine the mutual thrill: I bumped into a woman at the church potluck who turned out to be a retired career librarian from the Mid-Manhattan NYPL branch, a veteran of one of the world's great libraries and an enthusiastic patron of that library.  She was happy to talk and I was happy to listen; she had lots to lament and I had lots to ask. 

Bitter at her forced retirement, one of this librarian's vindications was that The Nation published a critique last month of the NYPL's modernization strategy. 

The trend at our library here, as elsewhere, is toward's "efficiency", a term which seems to mean hiring expensive conusultants who recommend firing the best staff members and comoebsating the CEO to the tune of $800,000 a year, plus perks, such as a Park Avenue apartment and scholarships for his children.  There is a push at the NYPL to dissolve the rare and unique parts and turn it into a series of small, ordinary neighborhood lending libraries. The main building, the landmark structure built in the era of Carnegie philanthropy, is to be maintained as a visual tourist attraction but cleansed of its collections. 

The Nation article is a little long.  I plan to read it on the train home from the Riverside NYPL branch now.