On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 10:22 PM, Declan <declanjmcc...@gmail.com> wrote: > Dear Ramakrishnan, > > Thank you for your kind offer. > > My hope is that interested professors like yourself would develop some > materials on Wikieducator to walk students through the basics of > statistical analysis.
If I can get permission (a Creative Commons license on a particular book) I will create a digital statistics text using current software in which every math statement is executable, like the algebra book I have been working on. http://booki.treehouse.su/algebra-an-algorithmic-treatment/_v/1.0/edit/ The point of the book was to teach students how to write their own statistics routines, and not be dependent on canned software. > Eventually there will be enough material on the > site so that you could choose a set from Texas (7 specimens came in > the post today) and a set from Alaska (I have 6) and use the data for > a t-test. I have 10 from the Northeast US and more than that from the > West. Alternatively one could choose a series from a range of > latitudes to run a regression. Another way to illustrate regression > would be to ignore latitude and simply measure length and width from a > series of skulls and regress one against the other. > > It has been my experience that simply providing data to biology > students falls flat. They are happier if they collect their own > data. In my own course I can bring out 30 skulls and calipers to let > them measure. But I suspect that few professors have a box of skulls > in their lab...even fewer high school teachers have such a strange > resource. That was the basis for the idea. When my students return > in September we will photograph more skulls and upload them. This is > actually a common research method; scientists usually do this by > visiting museum collections; I think the photographic approach is > fairly uncommon. It is very common in some kinds of archaeology, including 3-D images of cuneiform tablets, Mayan monuments, and other artifacts. A professor of the History of Mathematics once told our college math club that after a while you can get to recognize individual handwriting in Babylonian. Computational linguistics is full of statistical models. > I hope I can convince a few teachers or scientists to make > measurements from the existing photographs to see how this works. We > should be able to get the same measurement for length from the left > side and the right side of the same skull. Width should be the same > on the top and bottom views. Different teachers should arrive at the > same number. Also I want to make sure that the instructions are > intelligible. I have a long-term plan to create materials for teaching statistics based on the century and a half of records of many major sports, including baseball, soccer, cricket, and so on, and of chess, go, and other mind games. > Cheers, > > Declan -- Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
