I just finished my fourth week of school. I've learned that I need to leave 10 or 15 minutes earlier in the morning than I think I should when I'm going to Sylvania. The difference in traffic getting off the freeway onto Capital Highway and then to the campus can be huge. Anyway, here's what I've been doing in school.
Math 243 - Statistics I
After calculus this class seems fairly easy. You probably don't really care about this stuff. I find it interesting. I'm looking forward to the rest of the term. Tough but fair instructor. I don't really want to but I may commute to Sylvania again next term to take her for Statistics II. You can use a page of notes for tests if you want to. I think I did pretty well and there was an extra credit question that I felt pretty good about. I'll know Tuesday morning (I ended up with 89/100). As always, I spend time doing the non-graded homework. At this point it doesn't take nearly as long as trig or calculus homework. Six more weeks of this with one more midterm exam and then the final exam. Here is what I have learned so far.
- Constructing frequency distributions, histograms, bar charts, boxplots, stemplots, dotplots, scatterplots
- Identifying and measures of shape, center, and spread
- Interpreting boxplots
- Properties of density curves, normal distributions, and standard normal distributions
- Proportion notation
- Finding the area under a normal distribution (Normal CDF)
- Finding the cutoff value (Inverse Normal) when given an area
- 68-95-99.7 rule
- Scatterplots - explanatory and response variables
- Scatterplots - direction and strength of associations, outliers
- Coorelations - identify, find, and interpret value of r
I'll probably never know for sure, but I think I'm glad I ended up with the different instructor. She seems very neutral and able to identify and biases. I think there should be more emphasis on critical thinking, starting in high school maybe. The online posting thing is going better than I was expecting it to. The homework is relevant and not too taxing. The reading is the same. I'm enjoying this class a lot. There is a plenty of debate and interaction between and from the students. It's interesting to see how all three of my classes this term are tied together through concepts that I'm learning. That just kind of happened. Oh, and no midterms, only a final exam.
- What is science?
- Scientific method
- Making accurate observations
- Anomalies
- The burden of proof
- Explanation, theory, and hypothesis
- Causation and coorelation
- Cause and effect, causal mechanisms, underlying processes, laws/principles, functions
- Rival explanations and Occam's Razor
I've learned a lot about international politics, but there is so much to cover and the class interest level is so high that we are not spending as much time on any one subject as most would like. And the events of the past week in the greater middle east is certainly grabbing our attention and class time. The instructor is quite a character.I like him and respect his vast knowledge and commitment to his ideals, but I would have actually preferred a less biased instructor. Not that I don't agree with pretty much everything he says, but it almost feels like the idealist (and intelligent) version of Bill O'Reilly. Although that is hyperbole. He is inspiring though and has introduced a lot of interesting people and events to us. I'm looking forward to seeing Vandana Shiva in person next month.The two talks by Dr. Nasser Abufarha were super interesting and inspiring. I have a lot of respect for him, his ongoing accomplishments with fair trade and his positions on the Palestine/Israel problem. I've been confused about that political hot potato for quite some time. In the last few weeks I've managed to learn a great deal about it, in class and plenty of research on my own time. I'm embarrassed at the role the US has played in much of this. We do an awful lot of bad stuff. We aren't the worst by any means, but we are no longer the best at much of anything.
I did a short interview with a man who came to the US about 3 years ago from Latvia (one of the first countries to break away from the former Soviet Union) for my first paper. It was enlightening and interesting to hear his first hand accounts of what is like in eastern Europe. I came up with some followup questions and need to try to talk to him a little bit more. I started doing a little bit of wiki research and have already learned a lot about the area and it's history of the last 30 years.
We have already covered a lot of information. There is a lot of reading and it is kind of boring, not well written, and biased. It was written for a US audience, more or less claiming that the only important conflict is between realism and liberalism, and is very uncritical of free trade. The instructor hates the text, but it was chosen while he was still in India so he had no choice about it.
We've covered a lot so it's hard to list everything, but here is a brief overview.
- Global geography and statistics
- Evolution of the Political System
- State and non-state actors
- States, nations, power, nationalism
- Collective security, group think
- Emmanuel Kant, Yukio Hatoyama
- Assorted various -isms (Constructivism, Marxism, Post Modernism, Liberal Feminism, etc.)
- The "Iron Triangle" of the military industrial complex
- War, terrorism, WMDs, the "War on Terror"
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