We all remember, right, that blog came from weblog, which is a combination of the words “web” and “log”. Going back to the olden days of logs — records of what you’re doing — I’m going to muse about statistics for the moment. At the moment…

I just finished up some lecture note tweaking for my probability class. We’re going to look at exponential and Poisson distributions today, and normal and lognormal distributions. Despite loving Ruby more than Python I’m trying out some IPython notebook modeling of distributions for a nice way to visualize what’s going on. Python has a much different culture of documentation than Ruby and Rails, I must say, but that’s a different post. Back to the moment. I’d like to get students to work in class on some of these problems — not just doing problems, but doing problems, exploring connections, and working through proofs. I don’t have a computer-filled classroom so can’t do online activities. What would nice worksheets look like for this topic? We’ve been down this road before….. see earthcalculus.com!

Musing: primary goals for this class would include

• comfort with manipulating the normal distribution
• comfort with the relationship between normal and lognormal, and an understanding of why one comes from multiplicative effects and the other from summative effects
• a grasp of the memoryless property of the exponential distribution

If I come up with a decent worksheet I’ll post it.