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jimhefferon

3,407 karma · joined January 6, 2012

I teach college math. And, I have been fooling with computers and open-sourced software for far too long. For my free math texts and contact information see https://hefferon.net.
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jimhefferon··on Demystifying the regular expression that checks if a number is prime (2016)
Everything is easy once you know how.
jimhefferon··on Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid
For those of us who don't walk on cliff edges, though, it is a concern.
jimhefferon··on Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations
Hard to see, though, how to do that with hundreds of students in a room, and be reasonably uniform and fair about it.

An argument perhaps that there should not be hundreds in a room.

jimhefferon··on Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations
Can you say more about the startups stuff?
jimhefferon··on Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
> My major point of friction with LaTeX is that using unicode is not straightforward.

Possibly you are describing how it used to be before the input encoding standard for LaTeX switched to UTF-8?

jimhefferon··on Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs
At this moment, the error rate seems to be that of a beginning graduate student. Or at least, that's what Terry Tao thinks. That's pretty good.
jimhefferon··on Identification of officer from Sir John franklin's Northwest Passage expedition
Isn't Gambier the admiral who would not support Cochrane's fireship attack at Basque Roads?
jimhefferon··on Learning 101: The untaught basics [pdf]
Sure, you are welcome.
jimhefferon··on Learning 101: The untaught basics [pdf]
I'm not sure who is the audience for this, but if it is students then it is not going to be very helpful, IMHO. For students to get it the authors must give concrete examples.

Let me pick on B, on spaced learning and interleaving. In those two paragraphs there are no concrete examples. If a student asks, "OK, I'm at the library and I have my book open. What do I do?" then the answer is not there.

I'll talk about college math because that's what I teach.

If you want students to learn what to do, you have to tell them. Maybe, "Set your timer to a half hour, pick out five problems, three from the current section and two from sections you did last week, and do them. If you get stuck take a peek at the answer, but don't peek until you are stuck. If you get really stuck, mark the question in your notebook and ask about it at the start of the next class. But under no circumstances just read the book." Then you have told them how to practice recall and to interleave in a way that they can actually do it.

Four half hours remembering how to do both current problems and also some from before for every hour spent in class is a good whack at learning the class's material, at least in the first two years.

Just using the two words recall and interleave is not enough.

jimhefferon··on The centrality of stupidity in mathematics
In its impact on teaching, I'll say that based on teaching since 1979, students take feeling stupid as convincing evidence that their instructor is doing a bad job. No amount of assuring them that it is the gateway to enlightenment or however you put it will save you.
jimhefferon··on Learning to Reason with LLMs
I assume the poster meant how much progress the models have made. Roughly late high school capability to late college-ish. Project forward five years.
jimhefferon··on Stonebraker Seeks to Invert the Computing Paradigm with DBOS
In the article he says that DBs are now much faster.
jimhefferon··on Floating points between zero and one
This post is not about real numbers, though. It's about floating point numbers.
jimhefferon··on Make sports betting taboo again
I'm concerned about the effects of the staggering amounts of gambling money on the sports themselves. It all quickly gets to where you ask yourself if what you are watching is real, or is it professional wrestling?
jimhefferon··on The Expert Mind [pdf] (2006)
I have a thing that I do. I would like to be better at it. Insight into how worldwide-recognized experts achieved their expertise is of interest to me.
jimhefferon··on Increasing Retention Without Increasing Study Time [pdf]
Thanks for the tip.
jimhefferon··on Deals with the devil aren't what they used to be
One thing I never understood about dealing with the Devil. When the Devil shows up, it changes the calculus. Now the person knows there is a heaven and hell, etc. What used to be a reasonable decision is now outrageously wrong.
jimhefferon··on Does Astrology Work?
Doctors fixed my heart in 2002 and I think that's better performance than I would have gotten from an astrologer.
jimhefferon··on On Front Porch Forum, politics is fair game but unkindness is prohibited
Did this happen on FPF?
jimhefferon··on Does space dust fall on the roof of my house?
I think finding such stuff is regarded by the author as cool. I don't remember the author saying so, but personally I would think finding it is cool whether it first landed on my neighbor's tree, or went straight to my roof.
jimhefferon··on Does space dust fall on the roof of my house?
Are you saying these did not originate in space? Isn't that what microgravity means?
jimhefferon··on Belenios: Verifiable online voting system
My reading of the news is that in the US (and that I can see, in many places) a lot of people have been convinced not to believe experts.
jimhefferon··on American Institute of Mathematics: Approved Open Textbooks
I used to use Sourceforge. They became unacceptable. I switched to Google code. They turned off, as I understand it because people were uploading pdf's (pitated ones, but big tech seems not to want to make a distinction like that). Then I used GitHub and in the run up to getting bought they made some changes that I thought looked ominous. So I am now at GitLab. Can you blame me for wondering if it is too much to hope that a site will freely host me for, say, a decade even if I go away?

By the way, I put a stable version of my latest on GitLab.

jimhefferon··on The rich history of ham radio culture
I agree that there are a lot of people in a certain demographic. But you can have a lot of fun playing with various technologies.
jimhefferon··on American Institute of Mathematics: Approved Open Textbooks
I am the author. They are Free.
jimhefferon··on American Institute of Mathematics: Approved Open Textbooks
I have a book on the list. I'm lucky enough that at this moment I'm at an institution that will cover the download traffic. But my prior school actually withdrew that support at some point, and in any event I will retire someday. I don't think I can ask my wife for us to pay for that. (I won't mention the possibility of a deadly bus encounter.)

In thinking about where the work might live in order that I could hope it is available, say, for the next decade, it is reasonable to look at people who can use the traffic to keep their lights on.

jimhefferon··on American Institute of Mathematics: Approved Open Textbooks
Which books? These folks work hard to get it right, is my experience, but of course stuff happens.
jimhefferon··on Back to the future: Are hackers the future of amateur radio?
What does that mean? They want to use a cheat-discouraging browser?
jimhefferon··on I am starting an AI+Education company
I'm sorry, but you wrote this post. Did you self-teach writing?
jimhefferon··on Math is running out of problems
My Theory of Computation text mentions a lot of unsolved problems. Some are in CS of course, but I was just editing an example about whether for all n there is a prime between n-squared and (n+1)-squared. That seems like a problem a US sophmore could appreciate.
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