Sunday, January 13, 2013

Heading to Ithaca

Moving to Ithaca tomorrow (more or less). Time in the Twin Cities has flown past. Back to the monastic mathematical lifestyle!

Besides wrestling with Sage code and thinking a bit about polytopes and reconnecting with family and old friends, I spent some time learning about R, the statistics software I mentioned in an earlier course. I decided to take the quick introduction to R offered by Coursera, one of the major new forces in the MOOC movement. It is a nice way to structure my learning as well as learn about a potentially major competitor in the higher education landscape in coming years. Among other things, it's interesting to see how other professors teach: this is not something I experience much these days!

If/when I learn very cool new things from R, I will put some of them up here. For now, I have learned a very tiny amount about the growth of guinea pig teeth as related to vitamin C consumption, from a data set included with the standard distribution of R.

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