Business Statistics

Business Statistics was one of the few courses in a massive auditorium that was actually good. Its quality was largely due to the highly entertaining professor. He knew the material, knew how to teach, and he was able to keep us entertained.

One of my favorite parts of the course was that generally once per class period, although I don't remember if he did it every time, he would randomly stop and ask someone to ask him a question. It didn't matter what. Maybe it was related to the class, and maybe it wasn't. Preferably it wasn't. I remember one question in particular. Someone asked him what was in his backpack. So he opened it up and showed us. He had about a dozen dry erase markers and some tiny running shorts. Classic.

I recall one class period where the normal professor was going to be gone, so he arranged a guest lecturer for that day. As soon as some people saw it was someone else, several of them left. After a few minutes, more people recognized the guy was somewhat clueless and left. This continued until people were leaving en masse. I don't know how many people stuck it out, as I left about midway. Even with as many people as had left, it took several class periods for the normal professor to undo the damage done by the guest lecturer.

A nice facet of the class, given the huge 300 person auditorium nature of it, is that we had a lab one day a week where we would meet with a TA and a smaller group of about 20-30 students. This gave us the opportunity to discuss course topics in a more personal setting. Our lab met on the fourth floor of the old Merrill Library, which has since been demolished and had a new building take its place. At the time, the library had the slowest elevator on campus. After it was torn down, the new science building I worked in, in spite of it being one of the newest and nicest buildings on campus, took the title of slowest elevator. I still remember the sight as they tore down the old library, that the elevator shafts were the last pieces of the building still standing after everything else had been dismantled. I can't find the pictures I took of the demolition, so here's a picture of part of the outside of the building. The elevator had a staircase wrapped around it. It was so slow that it was always faster to take the stairs, but there was still always a line of people waiting to get in the elevator anyway. I didn't help speed things up any as I would hit the elevator call buttons on each floor as I'd run up to the fourth floor, making the slowest elevator on campus have to stop on every floor while it brought my classmates up.

There was a small group of guys in my lab that would study together. They never invited me to study with them, for whatever reason. I just kind of did that on my own. We would always talk about what scores we got on our tests and homework, though, and it always frustrated them that I would score so much higher than them. Then they would work themselves up even more by asking how much time I had spent studying or working on my homework assignments, and it was significantly less time than they had. Hey, between a part time job and four other classes that semester, I didn't have a ton of extra time. Statistics came pretty naturally to me, so I didn't have to exert myself too much. If the guys had invited me to join their group, I probably would have, and we might have all learned more. I still remember trying to reassure them that since they were spending so much more time studying than I did, they were sure to remember what they learned more than I did, in spite of my higher grades. Their response was a classic college student response, that they didn't care if they remembered it later as long as they could perform for the test.

A fun part of our tests was that there were always a few questions based on a recent newspaper article that was photocopied along with the test. There would be various questions asking us to analyze the numbers given, determine what was suspiciously absent, and talk about whether we thought they were hiding something or blowing smoke. Hint: they were always hiding something or blowing smoke. This was a great way to apply statistics to daily life. As I've said before, I believe that statistics should be taught in high school and college, rather than calculus. We are always hearing about scientific and non-scientific polls, margins of error, medical studies that say coffee reduces your risk of heart attack, medical studies that say that coffee increases your risk of heart attack, free throw percentages, batting averages, probabilities here, people taking credit for things they have no control over there, and so on. We would do well to understand what all these statistics mean in order to understand when someone is hiding something or blowing smoke.

Hint: They're always hiding something or blowing smoke.

OccuFry

A recent tweet asked whether it was worse that a very simple and very harmless college prank was pulled or that it made the front page, above the fold headline in the local newspaper.

I think they're both equally great.

With the amount of damage that's likely done across the country by college pranks, it's nice to see something that really didn't cause any problems other than wasting a few minutes of time talking about whether "they" were really planning on removing a sculpture from campus. It's unfortunate that a previous prank included painting the sculpture, which did require some cost to fix.

I remember when the fries showed up on campus. Several of us wondered what they were thinking. We thought about creating a large cardboard french fry container to put around it, but someone else beat us to it. It was fun to see students build a huge snow hamburger next to the fries last year. Things like this get the museum director and art faculty all excited, because whenever anyone even talks about a piece of art, whether positively or negatively, they feel like they have contributed to society by starting the conversation.

Harmless pranks and common experiences create a sense of community on a college campus. Interesting local news in the local newspaper also creates a sense of community. I subscribe to the local paper, in spite of the looks I get from people when I explain that I, a person under 60 years old, choose to actually pay for someone to deliver a physical paper to my house, because of the tangible connection to the community.

I skip past most of the stories on foreign wars and the like, since I get my fill of that kind of news through Facebook, Twitter, and other online sources. I love the letters to the editor. I was intrigued by a random picture of my neighbor changing a light bulb in front of his house for no real reason. (There was a reason to change the bulb, I'm sure, just not much of a reason to put the picture in the paper.) I enjoy learning about some of the local lore, having not grown up here locally, yet having lived in Logan for longer than I've lived anywhere else.

Simple things make a community. Not just one simple thing but many. One big thing has the potential to bring people together, but it takes the simple things to keep it going. So what communities are you a part of and how do you know you are?

<Photo by Jennifer Meyers/Herald Journal>

Leadership

Just some leadership videos I wanted to have somewhere I could get to easily. The last one is just funny more than anything, but the first three have some important principles behind them, although it's far from a comprehensive list.









What are your favorite video clips for teaching leadership?

Syllabus Crap Detector

As I've been working recently on designing several courses, I've found some weird stuff, as usual. Part of our process is to review syllabi of similar courses being taught at other universities. We perform somewhat of the equivalent of a literature review to determine what is being taught and how, in order to determine what minimum standards need to be covered and where there may be places that we can make our programs better by filling in the holes missed by others.

The following are a few quotes that I have found interesting for various reasons:

• Regular attendance is rewarded because you will be exposed to what I think you need to know.
  
• When I talk, be quiet.
  
• Put newspapers away 20 seconds before class starts.
  
• I will clear the memory of all programmable calculators before each test.
  
• Get yourself a notebook or 3-ring binder, and start a journal to record your impressions/analysis about what you’re learning from your journalism reading. (in a class with large blogging, twitter, and social media components)

I found a particular faculty member, though, whose syllabus really takes the cake. Looking up his profile on ratemyprofessors, student comments seemed to confirm what I observed: unorganized, hard to follow, illogical, makes no sense whatsoever, don't expect straight answers to your questions, writes smart remarks back to the students, and gets off subject very easily. He seems to be the opposite extreme of the faculty who wrote the first four statements in the list above. He may be friends with the person who wrote the inconsistent final statement above.

So what is so illogical or hard to follow? Let's go to the syllabus (which happens to be in comic sans of all things), shall we?

The course has a subtitle of How to build your "Crap Detector" which is only referred to in one other place in the syllabus. I was hoping the other reference would help in understanding what he's talking about. You can probably guess that it doesn't. One of the learning objectives of the course is to "provide personally and socially meaningful responses to what Roland Barthes once called the 'question par excellence': 'Why the world? what is the meaning of things?' (e.g., design and use an effective 'crap detector')". So I looked up Barthes and found that he was a French literary theorist. Good enough, but what of this question par excellence?

I looked that up also. In talking about the difference between the technical and artisanal functions of writers and authors, Barthes discusses a paradox that occurs. "And the miracle, so to speak, is that this narcissistic activity has always provoked an interrogation of the world: by enclosing himself in the how to write, the author ultimately discovers the open question par excellence: why the world? What is the meaning of things? In short, it is precisely when the author's work becomes its own end that it regains a mediating character; the author conceives of literature as an end, the world restores it to him as a means; and it is in this perpetual inconclusiveness that the author rediscovers the world, an alien world moreover, since literature represents it as a question-never, finally, as an answer."

It's pretty deep stuff. Mull it over. Ponder. Enlighten yourself as you discover the hidden meaning of Barthes' paradox. Apply it to your own life and career. Then come back to the question at hand, and ask yourself what this has to do with a crap detector. I'm still not totally sure what a crap detector is, but if I had one, it would be going off right now, and we've got a ways to go.

In terms of inconsistency, in one area of the syllabus regarding how grades are earned, it states that you can receive an F for class abandonment, which in a different part of the syllabus he explains means more than 3 absences. In yet a third location in the syllabus talking about attendance, he seemingly confirms that excessive absences may result in unsuccessful course completion but then immediately proceeds to state that more than 3 absences will result in a reduction of one full letter grade. His syllabus also states that students may fail if they do not demonstrate mastery of writing and numeracy skills. He may fail his own class given his apparent lack of ability to think and express himself effectively in quantitative terms.

According to the syllabus, a student can be considered cheating by communicating in any way with another member of the class. This sounds like something the faculty who wrote the first four statements above might want to adopt in their classes.

There's more, but I'll end with this professor's teaching philosophy from the department's website:

I love mental spelunking. Each semester I get to take students through a dark cave of stalactite and stalagmite ideas, pointing the light at the ceiling-stuck cat or a three-legged donkey. “Over there,” I yell, turning the light in another direction. “Can you see it? Can you see it? . . . the NAKED CHICKEN, caught mid-stride in the next room?” With furrowed brows and searching eyes, students squint at the dark shadows, searching for even a hint of beak or comb. “Where? Where?” they ask. Then at last . . . “I see it! I see it!” one cries.

Then here is the really best part. She takes the light herself and points it far into the cave. “Can you see the lovely apple tree? Don’t you just love apples?” she says. My eyes follow the light, and there it is, right where it has always been, apples and all. But I SEE IT for the first time.

“Is that the tree of knowledge?” one asks. And, “was that the naked chicken of wisdom?” chimes another. “A look under the feathers.”

Then we all laugh together at our possibilities till our joyful tears form new mystery-shapes of our own on the floor, someday to be discovered . . . and I am once again blessed.

I have to say that as strange as it is, the more I read the teaching philosphy, the more I actually like it. I'm not so sure about the naked chicken; I believe the idea is a sound one, even if execution is lacking.

The extremes of the first few items in the list at the beginning of this post and of the who-knows-what-you're-going-to-get class by the naked chicken of wisdom both need to be tempered. If we bring the two components of structure and creativity together, we might come up with this college composition course based on The Simpsons. Now that's a syllabus!

Coincidence

All universities have course codes and course names. Most course codes follow a pretty similar pattern, with 3-4 letters signifying the department and 3-4 numbers that mean various things, including the level of the course.

At USU when they switched to the semester system back in 1998, they changed from 3 digits to 4 digits to distinguish between the quarter system and semester system courses. I've never done the math on it but always wondered how much it has actually costed over time to have all the extra zeros they added to the end of every course code. At the time, they still printed course catalogs. I don't know if they even do that anymore. Whether it's incremental ink or digital storage space, it's probably not much more than several tens of thousands of zeroes, which would be a few hundred printed pages or several megabytes spread over more than a decade. I'm sure that by far it cost more to make the switch than it has been to deal with the extra zeroes. The nice thing is that recently they started allowing departments to use the extra number as something other than zero, so you could have a lab just differ from the corresponding course by the last number, for example.

At WGU, the codes are quite different, but they have realized that their numbering system needs to change. They are currently 3 letters followed by 1 number. It used to be that the first two letters were something to do with the name of the course (like basic math started with QL for quantitative literacy). The third letter was a code stating what type of assessment the course used, whether project-based or objective, and the number was supposed to tell if the course was undergraduate or graduate.

Every time something major happened to a course, the code had to change, so you can see that they're going to run out of codes quite quickly. In the mean time, you get some funny things here and there with the nearly random course codes that are generated since the ones that made sense have been all used up. For example, a course I'm about to start teaching contains the initials of my boss who has been teaching that course. I might ask that they change the course to my initials if I didn't know they were already planning the renumbering anyway.

One course that's always been funny to me is AZC1. It's not like ROTF funny, just an interesting coincidence. The course name is U.S. Constitution, Law, and Citizenship. The way I always read it in my mind is Arizona Constitution, with the irony coming into play with some of the issues they are dealing with in terms of the citizenship or lack thereof of many of their residents. Without getting into the politics or what should actually be done to solve their problems, their situation has at least served as a useful mnemonic device as I try to remember hoards of less than meaningful course codes that seemingly everyone else has memorized. At least we'll all be on the same level when the codes change, and we all have to memorize them anew.

photo by pagedesign

IPv6: The Day the Routers Died

I don't know if the mainstream media is ignoring this problem hoping it will go away, not aware of it, or perhaps the network techs have us prepared and don't want another "overreaction" like Y2K, but I still don't hear a lot about IPv6.

If you're not familiar with the problem, think about what happens when a state or city runs out of phone numbers and has to add a new area code. But what happens when we run out of area codes? Or what will happen when we run out of Social Security Numbers?

We have been talking about it for awhile.

There's this video from 4 or 5 years ago (long but funny).

And this video from just a couple years ago (long, not so funny, but informative).

It goes back further than that, but suffice it to say it's not taking anybody by surprise. It's now been a year since all the IPv4 address blocks ran out (No more IPv4 addresses, Internet Runs Out Of IP Addresses), although it will be awhile before individual addresses are all completely allocated. There are plenty of techniques to run multiple devices behind one IP address, and there may be some ways to recover some previously unused or unusable addresses. These workaround can cause as many problems as making the IPv6 jump might make, so it makes sense to get moving. As Randy Bush explains in the second video, those people and companies who get it figured out now will be leaps and bounds ahead of those who wait until crunch time.

Intermediate Writing

English. Sigh. Where do I start with this one? I'm going to just throw it out there. This was a terrible class. Yes, it's English, so it was probably doomed to begin with, but of all the bad English classes I've taken, this was the worst one. My junior year of high school I had an awesome teacher, but other than that, I've had little success in that department. As much as I enjoy reading and writing, you'd think I would enjoy the subject, but I've learned more about writing from my business communication course and from Marion Jensen's blog than any English class.

I was able to skip English 1010, which is more of a creative writing course, because of my AP English and ACT scores. English 2010 is research and/or persuasive writing, and there isn't a way of getting out of it. Since there is no way out of the course and since writing is a fundamental skill, it is often a prerequisite for many other courses, and there are always hundreds of students each semester trying to get in the course.

Part of the problem of this course is that it is taught by 20-30 grad students each semester. With that many grad students teaching the course, every section is wildly different from all the others. It is a hallmark of a teacher-centered education system where the biggest influence of how a course is taught is who is teaching. If our education system was more student-centered, it would be student needs rather than instructor preferences that drive learning, but that is a completely different conversation.

I admit that a big problem in this course was that it was at 7:30 a.m. I took it at that time, because I wanted to fit all my courses on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I could work on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Unfortunately, that meant that I often was a few minutes late from just rolling out of bed. Unfortunately, that meant that I often missed the first couple questions on the teacher's quizzes that he started each class with. He always had extra credit questions, but they were random, obscure things that nobody in the class knew the answers to. But who starts every class with a verbal quiz anyway?

Beyond learning the few random extra credit facts during the be-on-time quizzes, there was really just little point to the class. The thing we really could have spent a good chunk of time on was actually doing real research. Instead, we did a little half-hearted fake research. I asserted in my final paper that the university should convert the large free parking area by the stadium to a paid parking area, which is something they were considering at the time, with the stipulation that rates stay minimal. Of course, they did implement the fee, and they have more than doubled since then. What I was thinking is that the parking lots for students who lived on campus and paid a lot of money for were falling apart, and it didn't make sense to let off campus students park for free while charging residents for a ripped up lot. A decade later, they finally saved up enough money to refinish the resident parking lots, so my recommendations kind of worked.

A big problem they have with the lower level English courses is that with grad students as the instructors, student ratings of instructor performance are part of the evaluation criteria used to determine who to let continue teaching. So even if they come up with a standard curriculum, grad students who want to keep their job will do everything they can to keep students happy (aka water down the course) to get good evaluations. Except not the dude I took the class from, apparently. Seriously, why did I get that one guy?

There is a reason that the business communication course had to add a grammar test as a prerequisite. English was supposed to be the prerequisite to ensure students would be able to write. It doesn't ensure anything.

What I would recommend is a class based on Wikipedia and blogging. Students would still do research papers on whatever topics they choose, but they would be opened to the world for review. If you can make substantial additions to a new or existing Wikipedia article and participate in the collaborative effort to bring those contributions to the level that they are accepted by the community, you've demonstrated an important skill and contributed to the community. The same goes for blogging. The important difference is that Wikipedia has a specific style that the community enforces, where a blog takes on the preferred style of its author (along with a few commonly accepted blogger protocols).

Don't waste all this half-hearted research effort that neither teaches students to write nor to research. Step it up into full-on research efforts that are vetted by and contribute to the internet community. Forget banning Wikipedia as a research source; make them write Wikipedia articles!

Projects in Visual Basic

Visual Basic is a fun little programming environment/language. It's good for creating quick prototypes or making a simple interface to perform repetitive tasks in a Windows environment. I'm sure you could do big, fancy stuff in VB, but generally you'd use a more powerful language for big projects that need to be optimized or run in cross-platform environments. Something that is neat about it is that it's the language used to write macros in MS Office. So if you have a great reason to use a macro, you'll want to know a little VB. Please don't use macros if you have anything less than a great reason.

Given the quick and dirty nature of it, it's no surprise that it's the language taught to business students who need to understand a bit of programming but don't need to be able to create their own compiler or operating system. One thing I liked about this course was that of all the programming courses I've taken, it was one of the few actually taught by faculty in my department. I worked in the Computer Science department for 5 years and don't have anything against CS faculty at all, but there's a greater connection having someone from your own department teaching a course.

As a case in point, look at this particular course. When I took it, it was the last semester that just one undergraduate version of the course was taught. The whole semester, the professor who taught it would bag on accounting students or other non-MIS business majors who didn't know anything about computers or programming. They were in the same section as the students with more technical majors, because there wasn't another option. All we heard about was how the professor wanted to move on to all these advanced concepts but couldn't because of the accounting students holding us back. This, of course, was the same thing I heard as an MIS student in CS classes, how we weren't real programmers like the CS students. So CS bags on MIS; MIS bags on accounting; maybe accounting bags on human resources or marketing? At least marketers have a handle on social media, so it's probably HR that's the bottom of the technology food chain.

However the pecking order goes, the next semester would see two versions of the course, for technical and non-technical business majors. I don't know how much they lightened the load in the non-technical version, since VB is already a junior version of programming.

For an example of a quick program I wrote in VB several years later, I created a small program to automate common tasks in the testing center I used to run. I created a map of the lab with a button for each computer and for common actions. You would select the computer and then click the button for the action you wanted to perform: view the screen, reboot it, shut it down, turn it on, or mark that it was being used to take a certain test. It even had an option to cancel the shut down command if you accidentally selected the wrong computer and realized it within 5 seconds. Students get freaked out for some reason when their computer shuts down on them in the middle of a test. The funnest options were to start up or shut down all the computers at the same time. It was like a race to see which computer would boot up first, and the silence when all the fans came to a stop was so peaceful.

The program was pretty simple and was very inelegantly written but saved a ton of time for those working the lab. An employee of mine sought to improve on my design and write a fancy version 2.0 with all kinds of customization options to work in other computer labs, but quick and dirty won the race. As long as he worked on it, he never got version 2.0 working.

Database Management

I really enjoyed this course. It was a good foundation of database skills, which I have used in multiple jobs. It was also fundamentally well designed, building from basic terminology to practicing part tasks to a final project of our own choosing. I would throw out there the random made-up statistic that half the spreadsheets that exist in the world would be much simpler if created as a database instead. I wish everyone could take this class.

We started out learning the basics of databases. What's a table, row, query, DBMS, join, etc.? Unlike the class I had taken where I should have learned some of these introductory concepts, it was actually clear this time around how they would be used.

We progressed from basic concepts to writing simple queries to create tables, load data into them, and query their contents. From there we got into various types of joins and the dreaded subquery. We did some relatively complex things, but nothing too out of control. For our tests, we could bring a single page cheat sheet (that I still have a copy of) with whatever example SQL syntax we wanted to include. So like you might have reference material in a real world situation, we could have some to remind us of the basics, but you still had to be able to understand the examples well enough to modify them so they would do what you had to do quickly on the test. Of course, as Mike Seaver learned in the classic Growing Pains episode, you learn the material better by making the cheat sheet in the first place. (Just don't let your teacher see the bottom of your shoe if it's not allowed and that's where you wrote it.)

We had plenty of time in class to practice our new SQL skills on our own and in groups, learning from mistakes and celebrating successes. Ultimately the course built up to a culminating project. It had to have a database of some kind involved, obviously. Other than that, it was up to us to determine what we would implement based on the other technical skills we had. I don't remember what my project was other than I worked like crazy on it, and it ended up close but never functioned quite right. Thinking back on it, I doubt the professor spent much time actually using our final projects and checking in depth how well they worked, as long as our documentation was in order and it looked like we had done something big enough, but it was motivating to be able to choose our own project and figure out how to make it work.

Meta Blogging

In September, I started a series of blog posts on college courses that I've taken. I wrote a post every day and got through about four or five semesters' worth, depending on how you count it (one year was quarters, plus some AP classes from high school). I haven't stopped but have slowed way down. Between not wanting so spam my (3) loyal readers and not having the time to keep up a post a day, I couldn't maintain that kind of production.

I don't know how the NaNoWriMo people do it. Well, I do know that of the hundreds of thousands of people who sign up, the average number of words written per person is just under 15,000. They're supposed to write 50,000. About one in five finish, which means about two in three write nothing.

I did write a post for every day that one month, which is something I wanted to try, and I have kept up my streak of at least one post a month for the past four years. Interestingly enough, I pulled in a little over 15,000 words in September, which means I beat a lot of NaNoWriMo people.

Something else I have let slip is my RSS reader. I had close to a thousand unread posts in there from all around the web. I unsubscribed from the feeds for a MOOC I stopped participating in, which dropped a few hundred unread posts off. I marked the posts from the You Are Not a Photographer blog, because everything is in there twice and they keep doing weird things with their feed that makes old stuff I've already read show up as unread again. I may end up just unsubscribing, since it looks like they stopped including the picture in their RSS feed, so you have to actually visit the site to make fun of how bad people are at photography. I've been considering unsubscribing from the Freakonomics blog for awhile now, but every once in awhile a post comes along that makes it all worth it.

I finally unsubscribed from Larry Ferlazzo's blog. I'm sorry, Larry. I tried to keep up. I really did. I subscribed when I found several interesting posts related to Bloom's Taxonomy, which I was reading about at the time. Seven posts a day is too much for me, especially if I get a couple days behind. To give you an idea of the volume here, he has well over 500 "most popular" posts. I have no idea how many unpopular posts he has. I was going to maybe suggest that he try Twitter, since his blog posts are mainly lists of interesting site related to teaching a given topic, and Twitter is great at sending out links to people. Of course, I should have known; he's got more than 30,000 tweets. That means that over 3 years on Twitter, he averages 27 tweets a day. Given an average of about 12 words per tweet, that's almost 10,000 words per month, so he's not much off the NaNoWriMo average and doing better than most would-be authors just on Twitter.

One thing I do need to do is go back and fix the pictures in my September posts. I didn't add a picture to every post, but for the ones that I did, I got lazy. I just randomly googled images and grabbed stuff wherever I found it. Normally I use photos licensed with Creative Commons on Flickr. When I use their photo, I will link back to their Flickr stream and leave a comment on the photo I used with my thanks for their sharing and a link to the post where I used it. The bus up there is just a random openly licensed photo I found that kind of popped out at me. Thanks for sharing but not sharing too much.

photo by didbygraham