Welcome to our blog about online teaching and tutoring at the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS). This blog was specifically created for the American Board of Funeral Service Education General Session for funeral directors. Presenter Emily Boles will discuss online teaching at UIS through her experience as a Computer Assisted Instruction Specialist in the Office of Technology-Enhanced Learning at UIS and presenters Lindsey Perrine, Kristin Nisbet, and Kandice Pryor will discuss online tutoring through their experience as online tutors in the Center for Teaching a! nd Learning at UIS.
online tutoring demo session
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
"1001 Questions for MCAT Physics" by Jonathan Orsay
I'm only through the first lecture and I can already tell I'm going to need a lot more practice.
Let me stress the fact that it's not the hard facts of the material that's challenging. You've probably heard and read over and over (including here on this blog) that the MCAT is NOT testing your ability to memorize and regurgitate information. The MCAT is a passage based exam which tests your ability to apply the basic sciences to answer questions through reason.
This is true.
If this were just strict memorization, I have no doubt I could manage to pull off a perfect or near perfect score, as could many other students. It's hard to explain in words now (if you've never taken a practice test), but a common bit of advice to get a better score is to do as many practice problems and take as many practice MCATs as possible. And that's where this book comes in:
Comments left on Amazon and other comments on the Examkrackers forum say the same:
You shouldn't buy each of these books (Physics, General Chemistry, Biology and Organic Chemistry) if you don't need to. These are only recommended to those who feel weak in a subject.
This is one of my subjects.
I'm probably weakest in the Physics passage based questions. I'll be ordering this today or tomorrow.
I'm aware that I recommend a lot of books on this blog. I have a ridiculous amount of books myself and I've read & used them all. The MCAT is coming and I'm beginning to feel the pressure. I figure if there was one time to be on top of my studying, be thorough and not ! cut any corners it's now. I'm just trying to follow through (! unlike s ome of my previous semesters where I really could have given a little more).
mcat question of the day
Let me stress the fact that it's not the hard facts of the material that's challenging. You've probably heard and read over and over (including here on this blog) that the MCAT is NOT testing your ability to memorize and regurgitate information. The MCAT is a passage based exam which tests your ability to apply the basic sciences to answer questions through reason.
This is true.
If this were just strict memorization, I have no doubt I could manage to pull off a perfect or near perfect score, as could many other students. It's hard to explain in words now (if you've never taken a practice test), but a common bit of advice to get a better score is to do as many practice problems and take as many practice MCATs as possible. And that's where this book comes in:
Comments left on Amazon and other comments on the Examkrackers forum say the same:
You shouldn't buy each of these books (Physics, General Chemistry, Biology and Organic Chemistry) if you don't need to. These are only recommended to those who feel weak in a subject.
This is one of my subjects.
I'm probably weakest in the Physics passage based questions. I'll be ordering this today or tomorrow.
I'm aware that I recommend a lot of books on this blog. I have a ridiculous amount of books myself and I've read & used them all. The MCAT is coming and I'm beginning to feel the pressure. I figure if there was one time to be on top of my studying, be thorough and not ! cut any corners it's now. I'm just trying to follow through (! unlike s ome of my previous semesters where I really could have given a little more).
mcat question of the day
Gormok oneshots a blue tank
The title was commented so many times in all undergeared posts that we thought we make them a nice picture:
The "Gormok oneshots a blue tank" idea is an M&S wishful thinking based on "what I'm too dumb to do is impossible to do". While they accept that some "lower tier" content that "does not matter" may can be done in blues, but the "real game" needs what they have (gear) and not what they don't (skill). The logs prove that poor Gormok was oneshotted. The tank HP was never low. It's not magic guys, it's just the "no-lifer" ability to switch to Snobold Wassals.
The last raid started awesomly. At first 17 lvl 80 were online. Never seen so many! Forming the raid was hard and mostly arbitrary. Those outside the raid found their way to pass their! time while waiting if replacement is needed (one was needed due to DC):
First of course we went to Ulduar, 3 shotted Mimiron (one try missing since I forgot to switch log on). The first try failed because the bots made some massacre, the second failed due to trigger happy melee killing the bottom part. My unusually high damage taken came from being head tank (and the logs still don't show my elemental).
Vezax two shotted, wasn't hard at all. Then came Yogg + 3 (Mimiron stays out). Lot of people did it the first time (I think most of our members are not in HC guilds, but in casual ones, wanting more than boosting tards in ICC 4/12). On the fourth try we got P2 without a single extra add. Since only 1 person out of 4 jumped into the portal and it was 21:40, I thought we are way too tired for Yogg. So we went and oneshotted Gormok and friends.
Next week we go and clear ToC at least up to 4/5. If th! ere are as many people online as this time, just to annoy the M&S naysayers, we'll kill Gormok25 too.
The "Gormok oneshots a blue tank" idea is an M&S wishful thinking based on "what I'm too dumb to do is impossible to do". While they accept that some "lower tier" content that "does not matter" may can be done in blues, but the "real game" needs what they have (gear) and not what they don't (skill). The logs prove that poor Gormok was oneshotted. The tank HP was never low. It's not magic guys, it's just the "no-lifer" ability to switch to Snobold Wassals.
The last raid started awesomly. At first 17 lvl 80 were online. Never seen so many! Forming the raid was hard and mostly arbitrary. Those outside the raid found their way to pass their! time while waiting if replacement is needed (one was needed due to DC):
First of course we went to Ulduar, 3 shotted Mimiron (one try missing since I forgot to switch log on). The first try failed because the bots made some massacre, the second failed due to trigger happy melee killing the bottom part. My unusually high damage taken came from being head tank (and the logs still don't show my elemental).
Vezax two shotted, wasn't hard at all. Then came Yogg + 3 (Mimiron stays out). Lot of people did it the first time (I think most of our members are not in HC guilds, but in casual ones, wanting more than boosting tards in ICC 4/12). On the fourth try we got P2 without a single extra add. Since only 1 person out of 4 jumped into the portal and it was 21:40, I thought we are way too tired for Yogg. So we went and oneshotted Gormok and friends.
Next week we go and clear ToC at least up to 4/5. If th! ere are as many people online as this time, just to annoy the M&S naysayers, we'll kill Gormok25 too.
maths is fun tanks
Math Homework Solver
Check out our math homework solver in the android market. This program is the ultimate application to solve your math homework. It will also step you through solving the problem, so you can learn, or show your work for the teacher. It explains every problem in clear, easy to read steps. This program has a new system of architecture, that is extremely innovative and flexible. It allows us to support a new problem in less than an hour. Any requests for our next problems to support, please email at ebg1223@gmail.com We support mulit-variable system of equations, pythagorean theorem solver and equation evaluator, quadratic equation solver, proportion solver, area solver for different figures, and an 'i' exponent value finder. THis program was created by high school students so it generates exactly what the teacher is looking for!
math equation solver
math equation solver
Carnival of Mathematics #67
Editorial
The Carnival of Mathematics #66 was hosted at Wild About Math! This is Carnival of Mathematics #67.If you're new to the Carnival of Mathematics, check out Mike Croucher's introduction at Walking Randomly.
My first task is to choose an interesting fact about the number of the carnival. Well, the excellent Number Gossip tells me as well as being Odd, Prime, Square-free, Lucky, Odious, Deficient and a Lazy caterer, 67 is the largest prime which i! s not th e sum of distinct squares, which seems interesting. Just to demonstrate the level of trivia in the world of numbers, here are some other contenders:
- 67 is the smallest number which is palindromic in bases 5 and 6 (What's Special About This Number?);
- 67 is the only number such that the common alphabetical value of its Roman representation is equal to its reversal (LXVII - 12+24+22+9+9=76) (Number Gossip);
- 67 is the sum of five consecutive primes (exercise for the reader to work out which) (Wikipedia);
- 67 is the smallest prime which contains all ten digits when raised to the tenth power (Number Gossip).
Headlines
Since I've started a 'news' theme, we'd better have some headlines.Over at AMS Math in the Media, Allyn Jackson edits a collection of Summaries of Media Coverage of Math for June 2010.
It is worth taking a look at the MAA's Math in the News archive for recent maths news.
The next Carnival of Mathematics host, Plus Magazine, have published their issue 55.
My own interest in mathematics news and maths in the media is fuelled by my role as the "maths" half of the new Math/Maths Podcast, a ! weekly conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA.
Culture
At the Make: Online blog, George Hart, for the Museum of Mathematics, writes a Math Monday article on Mathematical beading. This includes the image above - can you tell what it is? Go to the article to find out. George gives five examples by Bih-Yaw Jin, and asks What interesting shapes can you make with beads?At General Musings, Daniel Colquitt considers the Sierpiński Triangle in Nothing inside infinity, giving an interesting roundup as part of a series of articles he has written on objects which are infinite in some dimensions but finite in others.
Edmund Harriss of Maxwell's Demon has been playing with spreading text over tilings and gives some examples based on some of his favourite typefaces in Tiling Typography. The example above is a Penrose Tiling based on Garamond.
Alexander Bogomolny of CTK Insights writes A curious variant of the Pythagorean theorem, in which he gives a symmetric form of the Pythagorean theorem in which no one angle is being paid special attention.
Education
Joel Feinstein of Explaining Mathematics has been screencasting his lectures (read his case study), but recently has been struggling with the question of whether students really benefit from his doing this; so he asks: Should we make videos of our lectures available?Tom DeRosa of I Want to Teach Forever writes a provocative post Why We Fail at Teaching the Language of Data, in which he gives his opinion on the emphasis placed on data analysis at school level and argues more time should be spent learning to look critically at data.
Design
In The design of mathematical notation at The Number Warrior, Jason Dyer considers mathematical notation as a design issue and gives a series of examples of design that hinders, rather than aides, understanding.
On the subject of poorly designed notation, don't get Murray Bourne of squareCircleZ star! ted on the notation for natural logarithm! In Logarithms – a visual introduction, he motivates logarithms from a historical perspective, and uses an example to show how logarithms are useful and how they are used.
Gadgets
Recently I hosted a seminar by Birgit Loch at the University of Nottingham and played with her new iPad, stuffed full with every free mathematics app in the Store. There was some interesting stuff there, so I am pleased to see Mike Croucher has started a new series of articles on Walking Randomly to explore the options for doing mathematics on this new platform. Start with Math on iPad #1. Meanwhile, David Warlick writes at 2¢ Worth with a roundup of tools for taking mindmap notes in Taking Notes on the iPad.
Computers and technology
Fëanor writes to say that at bit-player is Disentangling Gaussians, in which Brian Hayes writes ! about ho w ideas going back to the 1890s have been used recently to provide a computational (polynomial time) solution to a statistical question answered, to a mathematician's satisfaction, in the 1950s and 60s.At f(unctional)=>f(un), Samuel Jack asks: How do you guess what language a piece of text is written in? The answer is "using math!" Samuel shows a very simple, but surprisingly effective algorithm and provides an implementation in C#.
John D. Cook at The Endeavour writes Math library functions that seem unnecessary, in which he gives examples of functions in the standard C math library that seem unnecessary at first glance, and the special cases that make them indispensable.
Fredrik Johansson posted Incomplete elliptic integrals complete, in which he describes his implementation of the arbitrary precision calculation of incomplete elliptic integrals in the free, open source mathematical software mpmath.
Katie O'Hare of NAG writes with a post by Mick Pont to The NAG Blog, which asks Why is writing good numerical software so hard? Mick discusses the reasons why software development is still needed.
At the Wolfram Blog, Ed Pegg Jr writes in The Circles of Descartes with a description of the Descartes Circle Theorem and an implementation in Mathematica.
Review
"Shecky Riemann" of Math-Frolic! writes with The Savant Mind At Work, a book review of "Embracing the Wide Sky" by autistic savant & "math whiz" Daniel Tammet.Puzzles
James Grime writes with a classic puzzle he recently featured on his YouTube channel: Two Trains One Fly. This YouTube video is below and the solution can be found in Two Trains One Fly Solution.Meanwhile, over at Mind Your Decisions, Presh Talwalkar discusses solutions for another of James' YouTube puzzles in Salem witches – a math puzzle.
Cartoon
xkcd: Handy exam trick: when you know the answer but not the correct derivation, derive blindly forward from the givens and backward from the answer, and join the chains once the equations start looking similar. Sometimes the graders don't notice the seam.
Sport
The Plus blog has a roundup of World Cup maths stories, for those who are that way inclined, while Tim Gowers is musing on a year of tennis in A mathematician watches tennis II.
And finally...
To end on a bit of fun, like all quality news reports, during a recording of the Math/Maths Podcast, Samuel Hansen showed me a couple of spoofs from David Simmons-Duffin: In ar! Xiv vs. snarXiv, the game is to say which of two article titles is from the real arXiv, a "highly-automated electronic archive and distribution server for research articles", and which is from the spoof snarXiv, a "random high-energy theory paper generator incorporating all the latest trends, entropic reasoning, and exciting moduli spaces". Meanwhile, the Theorem of the Day generator is cooking up realistic looking 'theorems' and 'proofs' using a context free grammar.Here ends Carnival #67. If you liked it, the sister carnival Math Teachers at Pla! y #27 has been posted at Ramblings of a Math Mom. Carnival of Mathematics #68 will be hosted at Plus on 6th August. Please submit your articles via the carnival submission form.
math answer generator
Integer GPU computing apps..
Integer programs are now being routed to GPU en massse..
In one year RSA, molmud, elliptic curves ops, parts of factoring in ECM and Mersenne GIMP programs, logarithm discre problem solver,have been ported:
First see Bernstein GPU work:
(e)ecm on gpu january 09 : edward curves 48g mulmod/s on 280bit mod GTX295
called gpu-ecm
software avaiable (with source)(1-fase) chung meng cheng research page..
cuda-eecm: september 09 best optimized curves edwards on cell,cpu and gpu
now 500g mulmod/s on 192 mod (scales as pow(280/192,2)) so 6-7 times faster than previous record..
CPU imp now ported from GMP to MPFQ and better EECM usage:
GMP-ECM->EECM-MPFQ software with source avaiable at:
I think gpu soon avaiable in cpu page..
nearsha gpu and cpu client
RSA see dublin research group (also best aes imp and good mulmod on Zp or ZN)
Factor code:
Msieve 1.44 gpu download win32 binary :
with c160 gpu load 99%
On SVN source has VC2008 projects by Brian Gladman..
says 27x 9800gt vs intel core duo
examples:
9370548739750343689742077059611741296688413458087068027338328923603585147935698143105876573510157864118212297131774808193943011745511363829026508600700379919701
3414023265048252827894893895448283501597256998523545196425280040055849104721167589947328246556695586532677342768160211760950557294071424000
Mersenne programs:
Maclucasfftw_cuda (now using cufft instead of fftw) seems validated computations altough direct porting.. uses doubles so gt2xx i think and low
speed developers waiting for fermi 5x impr at least expect..
now seems gtx275 with 2048k and 4096k fft seems 2x perf over highly optimized single thread on 3ghz core 2 so at least fermi with 5x perf better than nehalem or k10 (?)
logarithm discrete solver 0.3: 0.1 in 2007 was better 16x than previous state of the art code all at x86 with 0.2 in 2008 have 64bits support and better scalability and now in spet 2009 cuda code with python interface..
the python interface is promising as has dll for cuda version so you know how to call it and has cubins.. for testing decuda..
no sources..
CPU implementations are getting faster:
GMP 5 released with better asimptotic very fast mult, div,etc.. also mingw64
support so the best probably better than before 4.3 with gladman vs2008 port using yasm and probably better than mpir as is gladman win stuff with yasm
MPIR 1.3(4) in SVN with Nehalem assembler and tuned mp_param also seems some code is very good before with fft mul,etc.. so has to test gmpbench 0.2 with mpir trunk and gmp5 x86 and 64 on windows and linux at least..
MPFQ 1.0rc2 released in october (windows support? or fixes..)
there exist MPFR and a lib using transcendentals on google code..
Also two breaktrough news:
pi world record on nehalem
768 rsa factored zimmerman stuff..
Last AMD GPU has integer sad and new integer instructions see
SA2009 course..
in parboil benchmark has sad (h.264) test would be good porting to ocl for getting sad optimized with ati ocl sad instructions what speedup vs fermi?
logarithm solver
In one year RSA, molmud, elliptic curves ops, parts of factoring in ECM and Mersenne GIMP programs, logarithm discre problem solver,have been ported:
First see Bernstein GPU work:
(e)ecm on gpu january 09 : edward curves 48g mulmod/s on 280bit mod GTX295
called gpu-ecm
software avaiable (with source)(1-fase) chung meng cheng research page..
cuda-eecm: september 09 best optimized curves edwards on cell,cpu and gpu
now 500g mulmod/s on 192 mod (scales as pow(280/192,2)) so 6-7 times faster than previous record..
CPU imp now ported from GMP to MPFQ and better EECM usage:
GMP-ECM->EECM-MPFQ software with source avaiable at:
I think gpu soon avaiable in cpu page..
nearsha gpu and cpu client
RSA see dublin research group (also best aes imp and good mulmod on Zp or ZN)
Factor code:
Msieve 1.44 gpu download win32 binary :
with c160 gpu load 99%
On SVN source has VC2008 projects by Brian Gladman..
says 27x 9800gt vs intel core duo
examples:
9370548739750343689742077059611741296688413458087068027338328923603585147935698143105876573510157864118212297131774808193943011745511363829026508600700379919701
3414023265048252827894893895448283501597256998523545196425280040055849104721167589947328246556695586532677342768160211760950557294071424000
Mersenne programs:
Maclucasfftw_cuda (now using cufft instead of fftw) seems validated computations altough direct porting.. uses doubles so gt2xx i think and low
speed developers waiting for fermi 5x impr at least expect..
now seems gtx275 with 2048k and 4096k fft seems 2x perf over highly optimized single thread on 3ghz core 2 so at least fermi with 5x perf better than nehalem or k10 (?)
logarithm discrete solver 0.3: 0.1 in 2007 was better 16x than previous state of the art code all at x86 with 0.2 in 2008 have 64bits support and better scalability and now in spet 2009 cuda code with python interface..
the python interface is promising as has dll for cuda version so you know how to call it and has cubins.. for testing decuda..
no sources..
CPU implementations are getting faster:
GMP 5 released with better asimptotic very fast mult, div,etc.. also mingw64
support so the best probably better than before 4.3 with gladman vs2008 port using yasm and probably better than mpir as is gladman win stuff with yasm
MPIR 1.3(4) in SVN with Nehalem assembler and tuned mp_param also seems some code is very good before with fft mul,etc.. so has to test gmpbench 0.2 with mpir trunk and gmp5 x86 and 64 on windows and linux at least..
MPFQ 1.0rc2 released in october (windows support? or fixes..)
there exist MPFR and a lib using transcendentals on google code..
Also two breaktrough news:
pi world record on nehalem
768 rsa factored zimmerman stuff..
Last AMD GPU has integer sad and new integer instructions see
SA2009 course..
in parboil benchmark has sad (h.264) test would be good porting to ocl for getting sad optimized with ati ocl sad instructions what speedup vs fermi?
logarithm solver
Have questions about math problems
Have questions about math problems, get help on this website. You will learn the toughest questions with the easiest way to solve it!!
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