Raspberry Pi

I read today that Raspberry Pi had set up its Pixel OS so that it could run under Windows and OS X. Consequently, I downloaded the ISO and ran it successively under VirtualBox. It's certainly lightweight and is very responsive when running in the virtual machine environment. As explained on the Raspberry Pi website:

PIXEL represents our best guess as to what the majority of users are looking for in a desktop environment: a clean, modern user interface; a curated suite of productivity software and programming tools, both free and proprietary; and the Chromium web browser with useful plugins, including Adobe Flash, preinstalled. And all of this is built on top of Debian, providing instant access to thousands of free applications.

Unfortunately, Minecraft and Wolfram Mathematica are missing because the licensing agreement only applies to the OS running on a physical Raspberry Pi. No matter, it's still good to be able to experience and work with the software in a virtual environment.

Stoodle and Web Whiteboard

Reading Richard Byrne's Free Technology for Teachers site the other day, I was reminded of Stoodle that provides a free whiteboard that is shareable and downloadable. You don't even have to register to use the site, all that's required is the URL that's generated and which is passed on to the participants. It can be used in mobile browsers on Android and iOS where the touch screen capability makes the whiteboard even more useful. Just one of tools to bear in mind when the occasion requires the use of such a tool.

You can also use Google Hangouts to create a whiteboard by going to a site called Web Whiteboard and clicking on the Google Hangouts icon. Again, you don't need to sign up to Web Whiteboard but the boards only last for 21 days before they're wiped. If you sign up, the boards are permanent but the cost is $8 a month.

Here's a video describing how to do it.

STEP

I just noticed a tweet by James Grimes concerning STEP. Here is what it looked like:

I went to the site to investigate and it looks an interesting and useful resource. I've signed up to the site and this is what my profile currently looks like:

Assignments can be downloaded in PDF format and looking at the first assignment, the site should provided a good source of questions that are compatible with the sort of 4 unit HSC questions that I'm currently working through.

Here's the central STEP question in Assignment 1:

Symbolab

I've just had a look at a website called Symbolab that offers a many tools for the mathematics student and even the chemistry student. I tested it out with the following rather difficult integral:

I was impressed with the step-by-step solution provided for the problem. It was quite thorough. It seems to be largely free, although there is a modestly priced paid option, and there is both an Android and iOS app that I'll download and test out. It seems a worthy competitor to WolframAlpha that doesn't offer free, step-by-step solutions on its website or apps.

I was made aware of the site thanks to Richard Byrne's tweet:

https://twitter.com/rmbyrne/status/775696157171253248

I used to follow this guy but hadn't been doing so over the past year since I retired from full-time teaching. However, I reconnected yesterday and the reconnection is already paying benefits. I've opened a free account using my Facebook login.

UPDATE: having now downloaded the Android app, I've found that the step-by-step solutions are only available with a one-off payment of $9.99 (US dollars presumably) which is a lot more than WolframAlpha is asking. The iOS app is the same except that it wants $10.99. Consequently, I've uninstalled both the Android and iOS apps and will simply use the desktop version while it still provides the steps for free. The web version is still limited in various ways. For example, the full range of practice questions on various topics is only available via a subscription. 

Creating Online Courses and Classes

moodlecloud offers a free service along with paid plans

Despite my retirement from active teaching, I remain interested in education and am engaged in intermittent mathematics tutoring. I'm always on the lookout for ways to extend the tutoring session beyond the hour or so that I spend face-to-face with my student. To this end, I've made use of moodlecloud that provides a free service as well as paid options. Having so far only one student at any given time, I've found that the free service is quite adequate. Even though only 250 MB of storage is available, I've only used a small fraction.

The free service is adequate for those with a small number of students

Of course, it means that you can't upload large video files but you can link to them and that's enough. The free option is an excellent choice for people who work with only a small number of students.

When I was teaching full-time, I used the school-based Moodle installation most of the time but I did dabble with Edmodo and I still have an account. I recently archived my old courses and even posted to the Mathematics Forum. I may begin to experiment with it again. The site has an app that enables access via smartphone or tablet, so that's useful.

My Edmodo profile

I've also been experimenting with a site called Versal, that amongst other things offers an excellent tool for rendering mathematical expressions.

An example of the rendering of mathematical expressions

Of course, there's a hundreds of similar sites out there but these are three that I am using or have used, and they are all free. While writing this I was reminded of an excellent educational blog that I used to reference but haven't done so since leaving teaching. Here is the link. 

This site offers excellent reviews of educational resources

WolframAlpha

For the PRO version of the desktop WolframAlpha, there is a charge $6.99 per month (on a month by month basis) and I'm not sure whether the quote is for United States or Australian dollars. However, the mobile version of WolframAlpha seems to offer some, perhaps all, of the features of the desktop PRO version for a one-off cost of A$4.99. Whether it's totally equivalent to the PRO version or not I'm not sure but it certainly provides the step-by-step solutions that the former offers.

Anyway, I've made the mobile purchase and am experimenting with it. I tried the step-by-step solution to integrating ln(x^2+1) and it's displayed in the mobile app but I can't see how to copy it. Screenshots can of course be taken and this is what I've done below. The result is OK I guess.

Sway

Another spinoff of installing Windows 10 on VirtualBox was the discovery of Microsoft's Sway, described by Wikipedia as follows:

Office Sway is a presentation program and is part of the Microsoft Office family of products. Generally released by Microsoft in August 2015, Sway allows users who have a Microsoft account to combine text and media to create a presentable website. Users can pull content locally from the device in use, or from internet sources such as Bing, Facebook, OneDrive, and YouTube. Sways are stored on Microsoft's servers and are tied to the user's Microsoft account. They can be viewed and edited from any web browser with a web app available in Office Online. They can also be accessed using apps for Windows 10 and iOS. Additional apps are currently in development for Android and Windows Phone.

Sway is only available within Windows or iOS, so I have installed it on my iPad after discovering it on my Windows 10 installation and wondering what it was all about. Here is my first effort at creating a Sway presentation:

From Evernote to OneNote

With Evernote's decision to limit free accounts to access from only two devices, I decided it was time to abandon a platform that I'd been using almost from its inception. I'm sure I'll have lots of company. There's something very annoying about crippling a service that was formerly provided for free and increasing the price of the paid service options. 

I opted for OneNote over Google Keep (although I plan to test out the latter in the near future) and then investigated whether it was possible to migrate notes from Evernote to the OneNote. It turns out that is possible but the tool provided by Microsoft only works with Windows. I discovered that it was possible to run Windows 10 with no product key under VirtualBox, so I downloaded and installed it. 

I then downloaded Evernote for Windows, synched all my notes, downloaded the migration tool and moved all my notebooks, notes and tags across to OneNote. It turns out that I had 2001 notes. The migration is proceeding as I write and the whole process has proved relatively painless, with the major difficulty proving to be the download of the 4Gb ISO file. The downloaded failed two times but succeeded on the third attempt.

So as well as successively moving all my Evernote notes to OneNote, I now have an installation of Windows 10 on VirtualBox as well as the latest version of Ubuntu.

Precariat

When the Bilderberg Group listed precariat as one of their ten items for discussion at their 2016 meeting, many outsiders (and nearly everybody on the planet is an outsider) would have reached for their electronic or physical dictionaries to look up the meaning of this word. I know I did.

Well it turns out that precariat is a portmanteau formed by merging precarious with proletariat. Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article:

In sociology and economics, the precariat is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labour to live, members of the Precariat are only partially involved in labour and must undertake extensive "unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings". Specifically, it is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence. The emergence of this class has been ascribed to the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism.

 A recent article (June 8th 2016) in QUARTZ included this description:

The "precariat" is a term popularised by British economist Guy Standing, describing a growing class of people who feel insecure in their jobs, communities, and life in general. They are… 

… the perpetual part-timers, the minimum-wagers, the temporary foreign workers, the grey-market domestics paid in cash … the techno-impoverished whose piecemeal work has no office and no end, the seniors who struggle with dwindling benefits, the indigenous people who are kept outside, the single mothers without support, the cash labourers who have no savings, the generation for whom a pension and a retirement is neither available nor desired. 

This marginalised group—“alienated, anomic, anxious, and angry,” according to Standing—is fuelling the rise of populist politicians like Donald Trump in the US and similar rabble rousers in Europe and beyond. (Discussing this group alongside the middle class, which isn’t doing great either, is telling.) The resulting turmoil in politics, markets, and economics is a factor in nearly all of the Bilderberg meeting’s other agenda items.

The word isn't recognised by Blogger's spell checker but it is certain to become better known now that the global elite are discussing it and, by whatever name this category of people may be called, it is growing rapidly in size. Here is Amazon's review of Guy Standing's book:

Described by Noam Chomsky as 'a very important book', Guy Standing's The Precariat has achieved cult status as the first account of this emerging class of people, facing lives of insecurity, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives. 

Guy Standing warns that the rapid growth of the precariat is producing instabilities in society. It is a dangerous class because it is internally divided, leading to the villainisation of migrants and other vulnerable groups. And, lacking agency, its members may be susceptible to the siren calls of political extremism. He argues for a new politics, in which redistribution and income security are reconfigured and in which the fears and aspirations of the precariat are made central to a progressive strategy. 

Since first publication of this book in 2011, the precariat has become an ever more significant global phenomenon, highly visible in the Occupy movement and in protest movements around the world. 

In a new preface Guy Standing discusses such developments - are they indicative of the emergence of a new collective spirit, or do they simply reveal the growing size and growing anger of this new class?

Native German Words That English Uses

Today I came across a German word, Gegenschein, that I'd not heard of before. It means "a faint, elliptical patch of light in the night sky that appears opposite the sun, being a reflection of sunlight by meteoric material in space". In German, the word Gegenschein means counterglow (gegen meaning against and Schein means light). It reminded me of other words rather more common German words that have found their way into English unchanged. Here are some that I remember:

• Schadenfreude: delight in another's misfortune (Schaden means harm and Freude means joy)
• Weltanschauung: a comprehensive view or personal philosophy of human life and the universe (Weltan means world and Anschauung means view)
• Zugzwang: a position in which one player can move only with loss or severe disadvantage (Zug means pull or tug, Zwang means force, compulsion)
• Weltschmerz: sadness or melancholy at the evils of the world; world-weariness (literally world pain)
• Zeitgeist: the spirit, attitude, or general outlook of a specific time or period, esp as it is reflected in literature, philosophy, etc. (Zeit means time and Geist means spirit)
• Wanderlust: a great desire to travel and rove about (literally wander desire)
• Ersatz: used as an adjective meaning "made in imitation of some natural or genuine product; artificial" from ersetzen to substitute. It should be noted that the German word has a neutral connotation, e.g. Ersatzrad simply means "spare wheel" (not an inferior one).
• Gestalt: a perceptual pattern or structure possessing qualities as a whole that cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts (from Old High German stellen to shape).
• Leitmotif: in music, a recurring short melodic phrase or theme used, especially in Wagnerian music dramas, to suggest a character, thing, etc.; an often repeated word, phrase, image, or theme in a literary work (from leitmotiv leading motif).

That's probably enough for now, although there are many more.

Pareto Chart

While working my way through a text book on Business Statistics using Excel, I came across reference to a Pareto chart and needed to do a little investigating to find out what it was. Here is the definition from Wikipedia:

A Pareto chart, named after Vilfredo Pareto, is a type of chart that contains both bars and a line graph, where individual values are represented in descending order by bars, and the cumulative total is represented by the line. 

The left vertical axis is the frequency of occurrence, but it can alternatively represent cost or another important unit of measure. The right vertical axis is the cumulative percentage of the total number of occurrences, total cost, or total of the particular unit of measure. Because the reasons are in decreasing order, the cumulative function is a concave function. To take the example below, in order to lower the amount of late arrivals by 78%, it is sufficient to solve the first three issues 

The purpose of the Pareto chart is to highlight the most important among a (typically large) set of factors. In quality control, it often represents the most common sources of defects, the highest occurring type of defect, or the most frequent reasons for customer complaints, and so on. Wilkinson (2006) devised an algorithm for producing statistically based acceptance limits (similar to confidence intervals) for each bar in the Pareto chart.

These charts can be generated by simple spreadsheet programs, such as Apache OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc and Microsoft Excel, visualisation tools such as Tableau Software, specialised statistical software tools, and online quality charts generators. The Pareto chart is one of the seven basic tools of quality control.

The next issue was to check how to generate a Pareto chart in Excel. I thought that there might be a magic button but you have to do it all yourself. Here's what I ended up with:

I did get some help in doing this and here is a link to a very useful website that outlines step-by-step how to create a Pareto chart. There are some excellent tutorials available on this site.

Remembering PIN Numbers

Here is what's recommended by some banks as an aid to remembering a PIN number. Let's say your PIN is 1537. Make a grid of letters as shown below and decide on a word with the same number of letters as the PIN. For example, choose SHOP and then be careful to assign the number 1 to S, 5 to H, 3 to O and 7 to P. Thereafter, assign random numbers to the remaining letters.

All that is needed to retrieve the PIN then is to refer to the card. Of course, the relevant letters and numbers are not marked in red as they are here and so if the card falls into the wrong hands, it's not of any use.

An alternative is the PINFRUIT method in which letters, specifically consonants, are assigned to the numerals 0 to 9.

In this case, 1537 could be encoded as the words dolly mug with the associated image as shown below:

The image of Dolly Parton on a mug should be sufficient to recall the PIN number once the phrase dolly mug is retrieved. Of course, the PINFRUIT system takes a little getting used to but once mastered, it is easy to apply to any set of numbers that one encounters.

One can take this a step further and assign images to all number pairs between 00 and 99. In this system, the number pairs have preassigned words as shown below:

In this system, 1537 would correspond to towel hammock and so an image of a towel resting on a hammock should be sufficient to retrieve the PIN. 

If one intends to use the PINFRUIT system on a long term basis, then it's probably better to follow the latter system so that words don't have to be made up on the fly. A memory palace can then be populated with the images of words drawn from the 00 to 99 grid and applied to any number of numerals. 

For example, suppose one needs to remember the number 9948621987363. Firstly, divide the number into pairs moving right to left. The result is:

09 94 86 21 98 73 63

It is vital for numbers with an odd number of digits that the pairing process proceeds from right to left so that a leading zero can be applied. Referring to the 00-99 grid, the following words are generated from these number pairs:

soup - eyebrow - fish - hand - buff - comb - jam

A story or synthesised image can be then be generated for this sequence of words. For example, the following synthesised image works from the inside out:

It doesn't matter how odd the image is that is generated. In fact, the odder it is, the easier it will be to remember it.

Microsoft Classroom

I've just read this article about Microsoft Classroom, a new educational offering from Microsoft, slated for release around the middle of 2016. Here is what the article had to say:

Microsoft Launches a New Classroom Platform

The future of the classroom is taking shape through digital workspaces shared by teachers and students, and Microsoft is carving out its own place in an increasingly competitive market.

Today, Microsoft announced a new platform for education — Microsoft Classroom. Having stitched together tools from Office 365 and a series of learning management partnerships, Microsoft has high hopes that Classroom will become the central hub for the class experience.

"Classroom is deeply integrated into the fabric of Office 365," says Tony Prophet, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of education marketing. "It's a tailored experience for managing classrooms and assignment workflows."

Microsoft has faced stiff competition in the U.S. education sector. Google's Chromebook notebooks have gained tremendous ground in the market over the past five years, but Microsoft still dominates worldwide, according to a recent FutureSource Consulting report. Microsoft Classroom is the Windows giant's latest bid for maintaining that dominance in the classroom.

Like Google Classroom, which integrates various tools from the Google Apps for Education suite, Microsoft Classroom works within the cloud-powered Office 365, giving educators and students a home page for their everyday classroom activities. The tool unifies Office apps in an educational context, creating a digital hub for all class activities. From scheduling events throughout the month to delivering quizzes, starting class conversations and grading homework, Classroom automates the everyday paper workload that can slow down a class.

The platform has been piloted in several schools already, and one of the major benefits seen by educators has been time gain-back, according to Microsoft.

"This frees up our teachers so they can spend more time with students and less time administrating a classroom," says Prophet.

It also empowers students, giving them a digital space to collaborate on work. Through Microsoft OneNote Class Notebook, students can leave handwritten messages and sketches or place images and videos onto a shared canvas. Sway, a new app in Office 365, helps students create and share interactive reports, presentations and stories. Through another new release, Microsoft Forms, educators can launch quizzes and surveys, with the results displayed on a spreadsheet. Security features can be enabled to ensure students don’t switch apps to peek at answers online.

To facilitate Classroom's launch, Microsoft also unveiled a series of upgrades and tools. School Data Sync will give districts a running start when launching the new platform. The process streamlines the transfer of existing class and student information from 25 other learning management systems, including Edmodo, Canvas and Moodle, into Microsoft Classroom, easing the transition onto the new platform.

Microsoft will also be offering classroom enhancements to Windows 10 in the forthcoming Anniversary Update, including dramatically improved login time. Prophet says the average first login time for teachers will drop from 120 seconds to less than 30, with subsequent logins for students taking about 6 seconds.

Microsoft Classroom is slated for arrival this summer, just in time to prepare teachers for the new school year.

Also coming this summer — a free preview of Minecraft: Education Edition. Microsoft acquired Mojang, the company that created the popular exploration and building game, in 2014 for $2.5 billion. In January, Microsoft also acquired MinecraftEDU, a version of the game often used in schools. More information on Microsoft’s new version of Minecraft will be available closer to its release.

Of the alternative learning management systems mentioned (Edmodo, Canvas and Moodle), I've used Edmodo and Moodle but not Canvas. Currently, I'm using a free Moodle hosting service called MoodleCloud. The URL is seanreeves.moodlecloud.com and I have an astrology course there that I'm working on at the moment. Google Classroom is also mentioned in the article and here is a YouTube video showing some of this platform's capabilities:

Flyer or Flier

I received this email from Digg and it got me thinking about the differences between flyer and flier. The use of the latter looked wrong to me so I decided to investigate.

It turns out that they're pretty much interchangeable. This site seemed to be as authoritative as any other.

Flier vs. flyer

Outside the U.S., there is no difference between flyer and flier. They are interchangeable, though flyer is about twice as common as flier. American writers tend to use flyer for small handbills and flier for people and things that fly. This distinction does not run deep, though, and the two spellings are very often used interchangeably even in the U.S., so it’s safe to say that neither is correct or incorrect for any sense of the word.

An earlier version of this post said simply that flier is the American spelling for all senses of the word while flyer is preferred everywhere else. This is the conventional wisdom, but it’s not consistently borne out in practice.

There is little consistency in spelling of the word outside the U.S. The Guardian style book, for example, says “flyer, not flier,” while the Daily Telegraph style book says “flier, not flyer,” but in practice these newspapers and other non-U.S. publications use both spellings seemingly with no pattern except that flyer is more common. Obviously there is no agreement on the issue, and the flier–flyer distinction is unsettled for now.

Examples

American publications tend to use use flier for someone who flies and flyer for a small handbill, as in these examples:

American Airlines introduced the first of what we now know as frequent flier programs in May 1981, with 283,000 members.  [USA Today]

According to the flyer—which depicts a raised, clenched fist holding a pencil, a play on the movement’s symbol—Duggan plans to bring in guest speakers. [Wall Street Journal] 

The infrequent flier about to get on the plane at Reno-Tahoe International Airport had sores all over him. [Los Angeles Times] 

“Join us as we revisit a familiar and beloved neighborhood of the Christmas Tour,” a flyer for the event says. [Boston Globe]

Again, though, this is just a tendency and not a rule, and we could find plenty of counterexamples.

Outside the U.S., flyer is more common for all senses of the word—for example:

Something of his alert oversight probably came from his experience as a flyer. [Guardian (U.K.)] 

Once inside a store, look for items that are on the outside cover of the weekly specials flyer. [Globe and Mail (Canada)] 

Elected just 18 months ago, already a high-flyer. [Telegraph] 

They must also stop distributing or displaying any literature, flyers or signage containing any unregistered business name. [Sydney Morning Herald]

ASCIIMathML

The ASCIIMathML is a markup language that claims to be close to standard mathematical notation, easy to read and easy to type. In combination with a javascript program ASCIIMathML.js it will faithfully render mathematical expressions within HTML pages. I came across it when using a new online content management service called versal. Using the mathematical gadget provided by versal, I found the markup language very easy to use and was quickly about to create relatively complex formulae. Here is a link that describes the syntax in full. This is my public URL on versal. The free version allows for the creation of unlimited public courses whereas the PRO version (at US$50 per year) allows for the creation of private courses, the tracking of student progress and other benefits.

Remix OS

I'll kickstart this blog again with some information about Remix OS that I was reading about today. To quote from this source:

Remix OS, the Android based operating system aimed at improving the productivity of its users, is set to be made free to everyone by its developers at Jide. Starting January 12, anyone who wants to try out the Alpha of the unique OS, will be able to do so without being charged a penny.

It can be installed on a USB stick but I'm not sure if it will run under VirtualBox. However, I can test things out when I download it. It's important that I play around with such things or else my limited computer skills will atrophy even further.

This is the site where the OS should be downloadable from when it's made available: http://www.jide.com/en/remixos