Class 1, Tuesday April 4th
I was home sick this day, and got myself off the couch, showered, and drove down just for the class. Of course I got lost, and took forever finding the place. I made it just in time to find an official looking paper taped to the door of the classroom saying that the class would not begin until the following Thursday. Fuckers!!!! I drove all the way down here for a cancelled class? But, fine, I could wait another two days, especially since I was sick.
Class 2, Thursday April 6th
I was still sick on this day, but went to work anyway. :( After work, I drove down to SSCC again, didn't get nearly as lost, and then made it to the classroom, which had been moved. I found the new classroom, walked in, introduced myself to the instructor, and sat down. After "nice to meet you", the first thing he said was, "were you here on Tuesday?" ...I replied, "no, there was a note saying that class was cancelled until Thursday". To which he replied, "I heard about that, that note was incorrect, we had class in this room on Tuesday."
Oh well, I'm sure that the difficult situations I'll find myself dropped into at Oxford will make these seem like sweet sweet salad days. For whatever fortuitous reason, a woman (Allison) in my class approached me after class, wanting to trade emails and phone numbers in case one ofus missed class. I ended up writing her that night, and asking if she wouldn't mind me photocopying her book. She was cool with that, and so I ran about 100 pages at work Friday and had the weekend to do my homework. Other than this rather sucky start, the class is going fine, and the instructor is fairly ok.
One of the problems with taking a math class is how to take notes. Taking text based notes is really easy with Microsoft Onenote, which totally kicks ass. You can type away, it outlines really easily, it auto saves for you (the save function is actually disabled), it searches notes very quickly (beats thumbing through notebooks), and has a really cool flagging system to collate questions, important points, todos, etc. There are a ton of other features I won't go into here. You can even save them to a (microsoft proprietary) web page format, mht. The problem arises when you want to write non-text stuff like equations or graphs, etc. The intention behind Onenote is that you use it with a tablet computer, and it has lots of support for writing recognition, different pens for drawing, etc. However, I needed an "all in one" laptop... home recording, software dev, basic home computing, itunes, etc., and the IBM tablets aren't quite burly enough for these reqs just yet. So, I didn't get a tablet, and thus can't use a pen to draw graphs and equations. And, using a mouse for this kind of sucks. I can make these things in excel and import, but that is a slow process. What to do??? I decided to see what math students out there are using to take notes.
Taking Math Notes on a Computer
It turns out that there really isn't a great way to do this yet. There are a couple of approaches:
1. Use a tablet, draw out your equations with the pen. (not going to work, as previously stated)
2. Use an equation editor. There are a bunch of these out there, and they all work the same basic way. The editor lets you click buttons for math signs (σ, Σ, μ, √, etc.), other buttons for layout (exponent, fractions, etc.). The amount and variety of different math symbols really depends on the editor. Usually you can copy/paste to certain types of app, or save to a format that can be more universally pasted. Onenote doesn't really handle the breadth of embedded object types that word does, so the latter approach usually works better. The problem is that none of these are very fast to work with, so taking notes in class is a bit rough.
A few examples:
- Microsoft Equation Editor - comes with Office for free, outputs to wmf, kind of sucky.
- MathType - $99 from http://www.dessci.com/ , has lots more symbols etc., outputs to eps, gif, wmf. 30 day trial available.
- MathWriter - $49 from http://www.jpowered.com/ , didn't get this one, seems a lot like MathType.
3. Scientific Writing Aides. These are set up to help scientists and mathematicians write papers. So, they have a lot of formatting, graph importing, etc. These are usually complex and buggy. I tried using these as note taking vehicles (maybe skipping onenote entirely for math notes), but either had useability problems or bugginess sufficient to turn me off.
- WinEdt - freeware from http://www.winedt.com , this runs on a math markup system called TeX (http://www.tug.org) which is pretty cool from a conceptual stance, but WHAT A CLUSTER TO RUN! Apparently there's a bunch of server software to install, multiple packages to locate from different users' group sites, and difficult to find info on syntax. This must be great for Physics PhDs, but BLOWS for me.
- SciWriter - $49 from http://www.soft4science.com/ , 30 day trial available, saves data in something called MathML, which is a Math specific version of XML. This makes pretty readable web pages, but the text editing is pretty buggy and inconsistent. Tried using this for note taking, and spent way too much time screwing around with basic functions like bulleted lists and text selection that didn't work. No dice.
4. In line equations and cheesy substitutions. A lot of people do this, and at least you can write it out fast. For a basic stats equation like standard deviation....
...you can write it out in text like this:
s = sqrt(Σ[x-xbar]^2/n-1)
Symbols like Σ, μ, and σ are in the standard character set that Onenote recognizes, although you have to copy/paste them or look them up in the symbol tool if you want to use them. This method is pretty cheesy, and is a bit hard to read, and of course, a lot of the symbols have to get fudged with weak assed stuff like "xbar" instead of the proper: 
...but that's what I'm doing for now, because the other options really aren't panning out.
5. Use a Pen Mouse. There are a couple of these out there, but for whatever reason they're not too popular. The way these works is: you have an optical mouse that is shaped like a big fat pen...
... they usually have a couple of buttons and may even have a scroll wheel. You hold it like a pen, and it does the job of a mouse. You can even use it to draw, somewhat crappily it seems, but probably good enough for my purposes. They come in wired usb, wireless rf (with wired rf receiver) and bluetooth models, although everyone who's selling them is "going to have bluetooth models in stock soon". The companies that make these are pretty sketchy... weird foreign websites with lots of broken links and unitelligible english, discontinued statuses on most internet resellers, PC Mag reviews that are several years out of date, etc. Here are a couple I have found:
http://store.yahoo.com/saveateaglestore/ez5.html ...weird "generic" manufacturer design, seems too big, sketchy.
http://www.wowpenusa.com/ ...no visible way to buy, huge size, sketchy.
http://www.ipen4you.com/ ...probably will buy one of these, seems to be what I want, and is no sketchier than the competition. [update: ordered the RF version tonight, we'll see if it's worth a crap]
...That's probably more than enough about my recent "adventures". Time to do some homework!
1 comment:
After the instructor told you about missing class you should have pulled a
"Don't you know who I am?" Of course, math instructors at community college have probably heard it all. I was in a Shakespeare class at Portland Community College and a girl did that one time when she was late for class. It was totally rad because no one had any idea who she was, but apparently she had been in some local community version of Hamlet.
Good luck with math class!
In high school I used to always sing "Math" by Supernova on my way to class. That was fun.
Post a Comment