Project Gutenberg offers free books that are in the public domain (eg, copyright has expired). Some of the Math books are even typewritten using LaTeX. Cool!
Posts Categorized: Teaching
Flipping the classroom: creating screencast lectures in Linux
I’m debating the idea (hype) of flipping the classroom for one of my classes next Fall where students watch lecture videos at home (or elsewhere) so I could spend class time doing more hands-on activities like discussing the art of data analysis and how to solve problems with statistics. I think Khan Academy, Udacity, and… Read more »
Improving academic talks
This is an excellent post explaining why some presentations suck and how to succeed in your own oral presentations. I have much to work on.
Mahalanobis distance explained
This post does a fantastic job of the Mahalanobis distance. Basically, one can think of it as a multivariate generalization of the z-score. That is, the standardized distance of a vector from the origin (mean vector).
Math Software
This post has a good list of available math software.
Public data sets
The Washington Post keeps a list here. There is also the UCI Machine Learning Repository. UPDATE 2012-03-29: Genome data of 1000+ individuals per this post.
Keep slides short and tell a story
I enjoyed this post. What did I learn? Don’t immediately jump to making slides when you have to give a presetation. If you have to use slides to help facilitate your presentation, start out by writing prose. That is, tell your story. Then make your slides. For a 20 minute presentation, try to stick to… Read more »
Testing a hypothesis and hypothesis generation
I like this podcast. It discusses some recent findings about genes possibly relating to Alzheimer’s Disease. In it, the guest speaks of not having a hypothesis going into the study. Then the host (or another guest) raised the question of conducting a study without a pre-defined hypothesis. The keyword was “hypothesis generation.” I’m happy this… Read more »
Teaching with a graphic tablet and a projector: replacing a whiteboard or overhead projector
Many times when I teach, I often want to keep a copy of what I write on the board. Why? I can have a softcopy to refer to when students have follow-up questions, I can re-use these notes for the next discussion if there are only a few people, and I can re-use them in… Read more »
plots: chemical structure diagrams
For some reason I’ve been wanting to learn how to make chemical structure diagrams. I have no use for them, but I just want to know how to draw them on the computer. I found out the programs that make such diagrams are called “molecule editors.” A quick search yielded a lot of proprietary software,… Read more »