Clueless Fundatma

Obama on Education

2012-02-01T11:16:00.000-05:00

Diane Ravitch points out the hypocrisy in President Obama's speech, and his actions (via Race to the Top).

I don't know about you, but I am growing convinced that President Barack Obama doesn't know what Race to the Top is. I don't think he really understands what his own administration is doing to education. In his State of the Union address last week, he said that he wanted teachers to "stop teaching to the test." He also said that teachers should teach with "creativity and passion." And he said that schools should reward the best teachers and replace those who weren't doing a good job. To "reward the best" and "fire the worst," states and districts are relying on test scores. The Race to the Top says they must.

Deconstruct this. Teachers would love to "stop teaching to the test," but Race to the Top makes test scores the measure of every teacher. If teachers take the President's advice (and they would love to!), their students might not get higher test scores every year, and teachers might be fired, and their schools might be closed.

Why does President Obama think that teachers can "stop teaching to the test" when their livelihood, their reputation, and the survival of their school depends on the outcome of those all-important standardized tests?

Anthony Cody blogs about a similar Jekyll and Hyde situation:

In a town hall meeting hosted by Univision, President Obama was asked by a student named Luis Zelaya if there could be a way to reduce the number of tests that students must take.

His answer was superficially reassuring, but underneath, rather alarming. He replied:

"... we have piled on a lot of standardized tests on our kids. Now, there's nothing wrong with a standardized test being given occasionally just to give a baseline of where kids are at.

Malia and Sasha, my two daughters, they just recently took a standardized test. But it wasn't a high-stakes test. It wasn't a test where they had to panic. I mean, they didn't even really know that they were going to take it ahead of time. They didn't study for it, they just went ahead and took it. And it was a tool to diagnose where they were strong, where they were weak, and what the teachers needed to emphasize.

Too often what we've been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools. And so what we've said is let's find a test that everybody agrees makes sense; let's apply it in a less pressured-packed atmosphere; let's figure out whether we have to do it every year or whether we can do it maybe every several years; and let's make sure that that's not the only way we're judging whether a school is doing well."

What is he thinking? Does he not see the disconnect between his words and policies? Should the Department of Education be abolished?

Howard Marks on Taxing the Rich

2012-01-31T15:51:00.000-05:00

I like Howard Mark's writing because it cuts the rhetoric and attempts to look at an issue from multiple angles. In a recent memo, he frets about the increasing use "the rich should pay their fair share" in political circles. "Fairness" may really be a eye-of-the-beholder thing, he argues quite convincingly.

As as example he says about tax deductions:

The drafters called them deductions: provisions that reduce the net income on which taxes are levied. Critics call them loopholes, suggesting there’s something underhanded about those provisions. And politicians use the laudatory-sounding term tax incentives to describe tax code provisions that reduce tax revenues in order to encourage certain behavior. It all depends on your point of view.

And later:

As I’ve written before, I was very impressed when, as a young man, I heard an interesting explanation for America’s economic progress relative to Great Britain: “When the worker in Britain sees the boss drive out of the factory in his Rolls Royce, he says ‘I’d like to put a bomb under that car.’ When the worker in America sees the boss drive out of the factory in his Cadillac, he says ‘I’d like to have a car like that someday.’ ”

In recent weeks, much has been made of nation-wide polls which say something like "75% of the people support increasing taxes on the rich" etc. or something similar.

That is such a stupid question to ask/poll.

Sure, as rational self-interested individuals, why wouldn't they? It is a classic case of tyranny of the majority. Despite the superficial difference, it is not completely unlike popular support for banning the hijab in France (which much of the media saw as somewhat bigoted).

PS: I am a card-carrying member of the 99% :). I think the memo is a great read, simply for the nuanced views it presents dispassionately.

Andre Agassi's Open

2012-01-23T09:00:00.000-05:00

Andre Agassi's autobiography "Open" (written with Pultizer Prize winning author J. R. Moehringer) tells the story of tennis prodigy forced to hit balls in his backyard by an overbearing father growing up to become world champion.

Despite hating the game.

From the book flap:

From Andre Agassi, one of the most beloved athletes in history and one of the most gifted men ever to step onto a tennis court, a beautiful, haunting autobiography. Agassi's incredibly rigorous training begins when he is just a child. By the age of thirteen, he is banished to a Florida tennis camp that feels like a prison camp. Lonely, scared, a ninth-grade dropout, he rebels in ways that will soon make him a 1980s icon. He dyes his hair, pierces his ears, dresses like a punk rocker. By the time he turns pro at sixteen, his new look promises to change tennis forever, as does his lightning-fast return. And yet, despite his raw talent, he struggles early on.

He played tennis for 21 years, winning 8 Grand Slam titles (7th on all time list), and is one of the very few people who have won all the four Slams (and the Olympic Gold at Atlanta '96). For some time, he was the oldest #1 player, and has an incredible record at the Davis Cup. In the book, he paints a fascinating portrait of key matches in his career, many of which I remember watching when I was in high school.

Reading the book was like watching the director's cut version of a movie. You've seen it before, but now you see it again with new eyes.

His metamorphosis as an individual, from a brash, nonconformist, expletive-spewing American with funny hair to a composed, Zen-master with no hair, happened in front of a camera.

The best part of the book, in a very gossipy sort of way, is the insider's view of other tennis players that it affords (however colored). We learn about Connors being an incorrigible prick, about Borg being an amazingly gracious man. We find out that Agassi never got along with Boris Becker (his first "coach" went on to become BB's trainer), and was annoyed by Michael Chang pointing to the sky upon winning (as if God took sides in a tennis match). We understand his love-hate relationship with Pete Sampras, who always seemed to have Agassi's number.

Overall, it is a very nice read (it is rated nearly 5-stars on Amazon).

As I said before, it is a story of "growing up" - albeit under a spotlight. A particularly poignant line in the book (which could as well be a summary of his life so far), is when he says people confused his "self-exploration as self-expression."

Foxconn on This American Life

2012-01-18T12:15:00.000-05:00

This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass, is one of my favorite public radio programs. A recent episode, entitled "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory" (audio), featured an excerpt from Mike Daisey's production "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs".

Mike Daisey, a self-proclaimed Apple fanboi, describes his journey to Shenzhen (which depending on how you count may be China's third biggest city) and into Foxconn - the maker of a number of Apple products.

He is a gifted story-teller. He takes an inherently dark and sad subject and makes it into something humane, funny, poignant, and inspiring.

For those familiar with the format of This American Life, "Act II" is called "Act I", and does some fact-checking of Mr. Daisey's claims.

PS for Jan 18, 2012: You may have learned by now that pressing the *Esc* key when the wikipedia blackout page appears, takes you to the article.

Education and Finland

2012-01-16T11:35:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting take on the success of the Finnish education model: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play.

... Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students' performance if you don't test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?

The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America's school reformers are trying to do.

Worth a read.

Feynman and Why

2012-01-13T14:43:00.000-05:00

As a father of a curious three-year old, I know how hard it is to answer "why" questions, beyond a certain point. Just recently, I had the following conversation with my daughter.

Her: "Why is the cow eating with her mouth?"
Me: "Because she does not have any hands."
Her: "Why does the cow not have hands?"
Me: "Hmmm. Because God did not give her hands." (I shamelessly invoke God all the time)
Her: "Why did God not give her hands?"
Me: "I don't know. Go ask God!"

I bumped into the following Feynman video, in which an interviewer asks him "why do magnets attract/repel each other?" Feynman goes on about how difficult it is to answer such why questions without a framework.

Worth a watch!

Hard Work versus Intelligence

2012-01-10T15:13:00.000-05:00

I am currently reading Jonah Lehrer's fascinating book "How We Decide". If the rest of the book lives up to the three chapters I have read so far, I will recommend it enthusiastically.

In chapter 2, there is an intriguing discussion of the role of mistakes in the learning process, that are potentially relevant in an academic setting (apparently, Neils Bohr once remarked that an expert was a person who had committed all the mistakes possible in a narrow field).

The whole idea is that mistakes aren't things to be discouraged, but rather they should be "cultivated, and carefully investigated". Lehrer talks about a series of experiments performed by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck on the correlation between future performance and quality of praise.

A bunch of fifth-graders students were given a relatively easy test. Half the kids were praised for their intelligence ("you must be smart at this"). The other half were praised for their effort ("you must have worked really hard").

These kids were allowed to choose the level of difficulty of their next exam. The first choice was described as hard, but educational, while the other was described as being similar to the one they had just taken.

90% of the kids praised for effort chose the harder test, while a majority of the kids praised for intelligence picked the easy test. They shunned the risk of making mistakes. This aversion can seriously inhibit learning.

Dweck then gave all the kids yet another test. This one was really really hard. In fact, it was written for eighth-graders. Dweck wanted to see how kids respond to the challenge. The "effort" kids got very involved, and tried to tease the test apart, while the "intelligent" group got easily discouraged.

After the test she asked the two groups of students to make a further choice. They could look at the exams of kids who did better than them, or worse than them. The "intelligence" kids almost always chose to bolster their self-esteem by comparing themselves with someone who had done worse. The other cohort were more interested in the higher-scoring exams - "trying to understand their mistakes, to learn from their errors , to figure out how to do better."

She was not done yet.

She gave one final "exit" exam, which was supposed to be similar to the initial test. The "intelligent" group saw their scores drop by 20% on average, while the other group improved by 30%.

As a teacher and parent, this is really important practical stuff. In fact here (pdf) is a relatively recent article on how to raise smart kids by Dweck.

Scientific Computing: Interactive Modules

2012-01-07T14:42:00.000-05:00

Michael Heath and company present a bunch of educational Java modules relevant to Scientific Computing. They are fun to play around with in a browser.

As an interesting side note, we used the book on which many of the modules are based, in our Algorithms 1 undergrad class.

Mathematica Integral Fun

2012-01-03T09:35:00.000-05:00

Consider the evaluation of the integral of 1/r between -1 and 1, in Mathematica.

The function f(r) = 1/r has a discontinuity at r = 0.
The indefinite integral of 1/r is simply log(r), which is real for positive "r", and is complex for -ve "r", and goes to negative infinity as r approaches zero.
One might be tempted to think that getting definite integrals is easy if one knows the indefinite integral
Not so fast. Discontinuties can complicate things!

Let us go back to the integral of f(r) between -1 and 1. From the symmetry of the figure it may be apparent that f(r) is an odd function, and the area under the curve (or the integral) should go to zero.

If we try to use Mathematica to integrate it with Integrate[f,{r,-1,1}], it complains that the integral does not converge.

We say, hmmm. Why don't we simply try to substitute the limits in the indefinite integral:

The answer makes sense since Log[1] = 0, and Log[-1] = i * pi, but is clearly not the correct answer?

The reason for this is that the First Fundamental Theorem of Calculus requires the antiderivative to be continuous over the range of integration, and from the second plot above, it is clear that this condition is violated.

So how do we figure this thing out? We could isolate the discontinuity by integrating close to zero (using "epsilon"), and perhaps take the limit later.

This gives the expected answer of zero.

The Next Best Mate

2011-12-08T12:51:00.000-05:00

The so-called "Sultan's Dowry Problem" (a.k.a "Beauty Pageant Problem", "Secretary Problem" etc.) is sometimes used as a model for searching a mate. It is a nice model for decision-making under a certain type of uncertainty.

According to the wikipedia entry:

The basic form of the problem is the following. Imagine an administrator willing to hire the best secretary out of N rankable applicants for a position. The applicants are interviewed one-by-one in random order. A decision about each particular applicant is to be taken immediately after the interview. Once rejected, an applicant cannot be recalled. During the interview, the administrator can rank the applicant among all applicants interviewed so far, but is unaware of the quality of yet unseen applicants.

There is an elegant solution to the problem, when the objective of the game is to maximize the probability that the candidate chosen has the highest quality. We assume quality can be reduced to a simple number. The so called "1/e" or "37%" solution to this problem involves letting the first 37% of the candidates pass, remembering the quality Q of the best candidate from this set. Thereafter, the first candidate whose quality exceeds Q is chosen.

Todd argues that the way humans search for their mates is very different from this optimal solution. He points out that the 37% rule finds the best solution more often than any other algorithm, 37% of the time. However, what happens during the 63% of the times is not very flattering:

For instance, if applied to a set of 100 dowries ranging from 1 to 100, the 37% rule returns an average value of about 82, that is, the mean of all dowries chosen by this rule. Only 67% of the individuals selected by this rule lie in the top 10% of the population, while 8% fall in the bottom 25%. And it takes the 37% rule an average of 74 tests of potential mates that is, double the 37 that must be checked before selection can begin before a mate is chosen.

This probably explains why normal people do not apply this strategy. It turns out that normal people tend to use a much smaller "screening" period. It turns out that the length of the screening period is dependent on your appetite for risk.

If you are fixated on maximizing the probablity of ending up with the best candidate, then the 37% rule works fine. But if you are a risk minimizer - if you would rather protect your downside - while accepting anybody in the top 10% for example, the optimal screening period is much shorter - closer to 10%.

I first heard about this problem more than a decade ago, and have been fascinated by it ever since. I used this problem to create a programming assignment in the class I am currently teaching.

Text in Inkscape

2011-12-02T01:32:00.000-05:00

Inkscape is a fantastic program for creating vector graphics. It is free, platform independent, refreshingly clean and efficient once your master some keystroke shortcuts, and amazingly powerful in terms of the things it can do for you.

It does have a few pesky features though, particularly with "text". For example there is no intrinsic way of creating subscripts or superscripts, and sometimes Greek symbols just do not render properly.

This post explains my workarounds.

1. Subscripts and Superscripts: While there is no natural way of getting these, you can always select some text, and then press Alt + arrow-key (up, down, left, or right arrows) to move the selection in that particular direction. Here is a screenshot of how that works.

2. Greek Symbols: You can try to select the Symbol font from the font dialog box, but very often, it won't get you anywhere. A handy but inconvenient workaround is to use Unicode. If you know the Unicode Standard (pdf), then you can directly enter the code of the particular character. For example, the symbol for "beta" is 03B2.

To enter this in Inkscape, first open a text dialog box as usual. Then press Ctrl + U. The status bar at the bottom of the screen prompts you to enter the code. You type 03B2 (or 03b2), and you will see it echoes the symbol "beta". You press enter, and the symbol is inserted near the text cursor.

3. LaTeX Support: Inkscape supports LaTeX expressions by default. I did not know this until recently, but you can go to Extensions > Render > LaTeX formula... (in some cases it may be under Effects > instead of Extensions >).

It opens up a dialog box, in which you can enter your formula. Inkscape calls LaTeX and converts the DVI output to SVG, and embeds it in the document. Since it is a scalable equation (or any other LaTeX object), you can now interact with it natively in Inkscape.

Links:

2011-11-30T14:42:00.001-05:00

1. Old issues of Quantum, the magazine of math and science, and paper with the shortest abstract ("Probably not.") (H/T Mathematics under the Microscope) While the abstract is cute, it reads more like a conclusion than an abstract.

2. A talk by Marten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL). I enjoyed the part where he explains why working from home is harder than working at an office, because you can simply BS your way.

3. Daniel Kahneman at Google Talks.

Matlab: Profiler and parfor

2011-11-21T12:05:00.000-05:00

Two videos on extremely-useful-but not-so-frequently-used features in Matlab.

1. Profiler: While "profiling" may be a bad word in common parlance, it is a good word in software. It helps you identify potential areas in your program that may be targets for optimization.

2. Parallel "for" loops: An easy way to exploit multicore (or distributed cores) machines for task-parallel computations. Useless trivia: I went to grad school with the person doing the video (Jiro Doke).

Weekly LinkFest: Econ Edition

2011-11-19T08:42:00.001-05:00

1. Steven Keen's lecture on the Great Recession. If you are interested in Behavioral Finance, you should check out the entire YouTube playlist.

2. While on the subject of behavioral economics, check out Dan Ariely's talk on "Money Changes Everything".

3. Michael Mauboussin is an amazing thinker. He works at Legg-Mason, despite the fact that his writing feels very academic (I mean that in a good way). Here is very nice collection of his articles, which are well-researched and neatly presented.

4. Surge in rich Chinese who want to come to the US.

Elite Institutions and Career Earnings

2011-11-15T13:30:00.000-05:00

I finished reading Charles Wheelan's interesting book called "Naked Economics: Undressing the dismal science". It is a highly entertaining book for anyone with even a passing interest in how the world around us works. In tone, it resembles Freakanomics, but in terms of span, it feels much wider and more comprehensive, perhaps because it is not merely a collection of vignettes.

In one of the chapters, he points out to an interesting study by Krueger and Dale (2002). Graduates of highly selective schools earn higher salaries later in life than graduates of less selective schools. This does not seem very surprising.

Next, they examined the outcomes of students who were admitted to both a highly selective school, and a moderately selective school. The outcome (also the title of their 2002 paper) was that "Children Smart Enough to Get into Elite Schools may not need to Bother."

There is a more recent follow-up to that study, essentially reiterates the same conclusion.

The average SAT score of the most selective school a student applies to, is the best predictor of his or her future (monetary) success.

There is an important caveat. Minorities and other disadvantaged students gain the most from choosing an elite school over a less selective one.

Here's an interesting summary of what that means in practical terms:

Mr. Krueger gets the last word:

My advice to students: Don’t believe that the only school worth attending is one that would not admit you. That you go to college is more important than where you go. Find a school whose academic strengths match your interests and that devotes resources to instruction in those fields. Recognize that your own motivation, ambition and talents will determine your success more than the college name on your diploma.

My advice to elite colleges: Recognize that the most disadvantaged students benefit most from your instruction. Set financial aid and admission policies accordingly.

Bystander Psychology

2011-11-12T21:56:00.001-05:00

Recent events at Penn State have no doubt been troubling.Time has an interesting article on bystander pschyology (subtitled: why some witnesses of crime do nothing). For those not in the know: the current wide-receiver's coach and a janitor saw Jerry Sandusky (an extraordinarily celebrated coach at Penn State) in compromising situations over a decade ago, but never called the police. From the article:

(We) would like to believe that no matter how small or scared we were, if we saw a child being raped, we'd step in and stop it, or at the very least call 911 immediately. But social psychology research on "bystander" behavior suggests that many of us might actually turn away.

The most famous instance of witness apathy involves the 1964 murder of 28-year-old Kitty Genovese in New York City. News accounts — and later, social psychology texts — said the victim and her screams were ignored by 38 witnesses as she was stabbed to death on a Queens street. (Genovese's killer was denied parole this week.)

But while research has shown that many such witnesses do fail to intervene, in part because they assume others around them will do so, it turns out that the popular account of the Genovese case is largely urban legend. There were not in fact 38 witnesses, but many fewer, and most onlookers said they did not see or hear the full assault; many of the witnesses did call police.

Still, says Mark Levine, a social psychologist at Lancaster University in the U.K., the Genovese story is a "very powerful parable. It taps into something people feel about human psychology, probably mistakenly: that somehow, when we're with other people, we lose our rational capacity or personal identity, which controls our behavior."

Tips on Plotting with Grace

2011-11-09T14:30:00.000-05:00

Grace is a nice program to make journal-quality graphs. A while ago, I blogged about how to use it to make inset plots.

If you are a regular user of Grace, the following tips (which I gathered from here and here) can improve your productivity:

1. Make a template plot:

You can make default settings by opening Grace, making your adjustments, and saving the file as Default.agr in

~/.grace/templates/Default.agr

If the .grace/templates folder doesn't exist, create it in your home directory.

I like to make my axes labels larger (usually fontsize 150) so that they are readable even when shrunk to fit a single column of a journal article. You can choose the font you like (I use Times-Bold).

In similar vein, I like my tickmarks and legends to be fontsize 125. I also like my symbols "filled".

Once you make a Default.agr, these settings are used anytime you open a blank Grace plot.

2. Default Printer:

I usually like to "print" ("export" in Grace) my graphs out in EPS format. While it would be nice to be able to do it in the Default.agr above, you cannot. However, you can create a file "~/.grace/gracerc.user" that simply contains the line

HARDCOPY DEVICE "EPS"

3. Font Tool:

Everytime you have to write a complex symbol in a textbox (while labeling an axis for example), you can press Ctrl + E, which opens up a Font ToolBox that lets you choose the symbol from a palette.

Short Cuts:
"\x a" produces "alpha" (\x is a proxy for \font{Symbol})
"\f{}" goes back to default font
"\2" is "\font{Times-Bold}"
"\S" is for superscript
"\s" is for subscript

Weekly LinkFest

2011-11-06T13:45:00.000-05:00

1. Roger Lowenstein on MF Global: I enjoyed his book "When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management", which informs this perspective.

2. The Divided Brain (RSA Animate)

3. Addiction is about the anticipation of reward: An interesting video. "Dopamine is about the pursuit of happiness." Watch it!

Bruce Lee

2011-11-04T15:14:00.001-04:00

I was recently on a plane with a very entertaining colleague from Physics. He was talking with great animation (volume?) about some of his work, when a lady in front of us turned around and said with noticeable exasperation, "Sshhhh. I can't hear myself think!".

My friend quickly looked at her with feigned irritation, and said, "Think? Do you know what Bruce Lee said?".

"Don't think," he said, closing his eyes.

"Feel!", while he exhaled out a deep breath.

I couldn't help a chuckle.

Here's the (YouTube video) scene from "Enter the Dragon."

Two GNU Octave Tips

2011-11-02T11:18:00.000-04:00

1. Changing directories

The standard command looks very much like the *nix "cd".

cd NameOfDirectory;

But if "NameOfDirectory" was stored in a variable (DirName = "NameOfDirectory";), then trying something like,

cd DirName;

would fail because Octave would try to literally look for a directory named DirName. In *nix command lines one would circumvent this issue by "cd $DirName", but this does not work in Octave.

The solution is to use parenthesis. So the following does the trick:

cd (DirName);

2. Quotes: One can use the system command to issue instructions to the shell from within a Octave program. So to list the files in the present working directory one would say:

system('ls');

However, if one wanted to use a Unix program or utility that itself uses quotes, then there are problems in parsing. So something like,

system('awk '{print $0}' infile > outfile')

would not work. The solution is again quite simple. Use double quotes which cause the argument within the double quotes to be interpreted. Hence,

system("awk '{print $0}' infile > outfile")

does what one would expect it to do.

Weekly LinkFest

2011-10-28T12:08:00.002-04:00

1. A "Spherical Cow" from Abstruse Goose

2. Best Statistics Question Ever (via FlowingData)?

3. CometDocs a free-online document converter (H/T the Simple Dollar). (Yeah! the PDF -> ODF conversion is not too shabby!)

Passing parameters in Matlab or Octave: fzero and quad

2011-10-25T10:59:00.000-04:00

Consider a simple function f(x) = 2x written in Matlab/Octave (myfunc.m).

function y = myfunc(x)

    y = 2*x

end

You could easily use the functions fzero and quad, to find a root of f(x) and the definite integral of f(x) between limits, say "a" and "b".

You would say something like:

fzero('myfunc',1.0)

where 1.0 is the guessed root. The answer that Matlab finds is indeed zero.

or,

quad('myfunc',0.0,1.0)

where a=0.0, and b=1.0 are the lower and upper limits. The quad function computes the correct answer (1.0).

Let us say that we had a slightly more general function f(x) = c*x, where "c" is a parameter (c=2, in the previous case). That is, we have the Matlab/Octave function:

function y = myfunc(x,c)

    y = c*x

end

Quite often we want to use fzero and quad on such a function for a particular setting of "c". That is we would like to be able to pass the parameter "c" to the function.

There are several ways to doing this. Some of them (like making "c" a global variable are ugly). The one I find most convenient is the following:

c=2;

quad(@(x) myfunc(x,c), 0, 1.0)

or,

quad(@(x) myfunc(x,2.0), 0,1.0)

fzero works in similar fashion. You could say:

fzero(@(x) myfunc(x,2.0), 1.0)

Just to reiterate, this method works in both Matlab and Octave, and you could easily generalize it to passing multiple parameters.

Presentations using Beamer

2011-10-21T12:13:00.000-04:00

Finally.

Finally, I decided to jump, and started using a LaTeX package called beamer to make presentations.

I had been reluctant to make the transition because (i) like all non-GUI programs/packages, there is a learning curve, (ii) I liked the platform independence of OpenOffice Impress, which (iii) especially when combined with oooLaTeX let me display mathematical formulae with the cleanliness of LaTeX, and (iv) my presentations, unlike my documents don't have as many cross-references and citations.

A part of me also liked the freeform nature of dropping images wherever I liked, and the ability to sketch up schematic diagrams on the fly.

I gave beamer a test drive, learning from these tutorials. Since I knew LaTeX before, I was up and running in about two hours.It took me surprisingly less time than I had expected.

In fact, I just presented slides made with beamer at the Society of Rheology's annual meeting in Cleveland.

In the future, I expect to use this tool a lot more.

Math Links

2011-10-19T11:00:00.000-04:00

1. Two nice math videos (H/T Wild About Math)

2. The Cold Hit Problem (or are fingerprints unique?)

Another Legend Falls

2011-10-15T16:22:00.000-04:00

RIP Dennis Ritchie.

As Brian Kernighan, a colleague at Bell Labs, wrote, "The tools that Dennis built — and their direct descendants — run pretty much everything today,"

As a "tribute", I tried to collect some of his quotes from the Internet (Disclaimer: I have not assessed their veracity)

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do.

I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.