Science talk:MER

Hey, here is another challenge. I would like to give the content of a wiki page as an input to wolframalpha and have it display the graph wolframalpha produces displayed on the wiki page. Is the corresponding plugin capable of that?

Application: Let wolframalpha plot our statistics. If a better format to put the numbers in makes this task easier we can adapt to that. Here a sample link on what I think could be called as wolframalpha function

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Plot+{{-3%2C9}%2C{-2%2C4}%2C{-1%2C1}%2C{0%2C0}%2C{1%2C1}%2C{2%2C4}%2C{3%2C9}}

A very useful application, graph.tk, has API we can use to implement graphs easily using LaTeX. Unlike WolframAlpha, it's open source so we can use it basically how we like.

http://graph.tk/about/api.html

However, this involves iframes, which can be implemented with the iframe widget: http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/Iframe

Good find, looks interesting. I was just pointing to wolframalpha because I know it can be embedded into this wiki (see http://wiki.ubc.ca/Help:Widgets/WolframAlpha and http://products.wolframalpha.com/api/). Either way, is there a toy example on how we could get graph.tk to display anything in the wiki?

Not until we get the admin to install the iframe module. One thing that's not good about graph.tk is that it can't plot points...

I found a graphing widget, but if it's not good enough we can make our ourselves; it isn't too hard: {{#widget:WolframAlpha|id=45a99effbf17c0286917f132ab9d3595}}

Aehm, does your graphing widget plot equations? http://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/view.jsp?id=45a99effbf17c0286917f132ab9d3595 Next steps: Embed it in the user statistics page, and make it read input from that page. Too bad graph.tk can't do points :(

Both can plot equations. Integrating the WolframAlpha one will be a bit hard though because the MediaWiki widget doesn't allow other input parameters.

Before we reinvent the wheel, what about asking the wiki team what statistics they could offer us. They might have a lot already ready to go.

I found the solutions to these exams: 2011: http://www.math.ubc.ca/~gupta/m100-180_common/M100-180Final201112_solns.pdf 2010: http://www.math.ubc.ca/~gupta/m100-180_common/M100-180Final201012_solns.pdf

This saves us a lot of work (especially for 2010).

Good find. A little late, but maybe still helpful. I actually have the solution of a Dec 2002 exam, anyone interested in typing that in? Questions haven't really changed. Also, Alfred, I don't have your email, could you please message me?

I'll work on that once I'm done my finals. I sent you an email regarding the latter (there doesn't seem to be a private messaging system here).

Also, here are the solutions to December 2006 (they're not from UBC but I checked the answers and they should be fine): http://yukon-mathematics-assessment.wikispaces.com/file/view/UBC+Math+100+%26+180+Final+Exam+December+2006+Solutions.pdf

Hi, continuing the discussion from http://wiki.ubc.ca/Science_talk:Math_Exam_Resources/Courses/MATH100/December_2011/Question_5_(e)

Exam pages are flagged as one of the three: a) QG - (quality good) exam is solved completely. b) IP - (in progress) we have a couple of solutions, but exam is not complete yet. c) no flag - exam is invisible to students.

The intention is to avoid student frustration when they click on an exam that has no solutions. Hence, exams are initially in c). Once we think it is not a waste for the student to see the exam we flag it as IP, which makes it visible. The questions with solutions are clearly separated from the one where we are still working on the solution. Once all questions have reviewed solutions we mark the exam as QG. Only QG exams add to our counter of "complete exams".

The question was: Can we automatically change the flag from IP to QG when, say, all C,H,S flags start with QG. Two reasons we are not doing this automatically for now: i) It is technically challenging (impossible?) to implement. ii) What happens when later a student finds a typo in one of the solutions and we flag this solution as QB or R? Should the whole exam then also be IP again? In the current system this is not the case, an exam can be QG even when a few solutions are QB and need to be fixed. I think this is less confusing than having exams moving back and forth between IP and QG, especially since students' comments and QB flags should be our highest priority and hence resolve quickly.

If you have a different opinion, let's discuss.

IF statements inside of the wiki are fairly expensive functions and often difficult to implement. The way we flag things right now is using categories. And those are written inside the content of the page. We cannot have code that change the content of a page from the outside.

They way this wiki works, we don't expect the status of exams to change dramatically or change very often, especially once an exam is complete and given a GQ status. I agree with your suggestion to just let things be, QB flags have been so far dealt with fairly quickly.

If anyone is looking for a challenge: Simplify the creating of the exam question pages. I would just like to specify the number of questions (01-10), and the number of sub-questions for each question ((a)-(d),(a)-(c),...,(a)-(b)) and then all pages are created automatically at once.

automatic page creation takes some fairly advanced scripts, so it definitively is a tough challenge to simplify that part of the work for the moment.

Is it possible that our counters won't display numbers larger than 500? Reviewing questions as good does not change the QGS counter any more. Also, it is suspicious that QGQ and QGS should be the same, both at 500. One would expect QGQ to be larger.

Interesting. Let me check on this, I'll get back to you when I know more.

So the counter is clearly stuck at 500 (we both just passed two questions and yet...). I'll see if it is something I can handle, otherwise I'll email Will.

Sounds good. We should have some time before the exam counter hits this boundary :)

Hi, is it possible to modify the page http://wiki.ubc.ca/Science:MER/Flagged/CS (and corresponding counter) so that it only shows CS flags when the question is there (RQ or QGQ)?

Could we just add nocategory=MER_CQ_flag to the #dpl? Like at Sandbox:Alpha/MER

Wonderful! Would you mind updating the corresponding pages and also the counter on the main MER page? And do the same thing for CH as well. Thank you!

OK. Basically what I did was create a duplicate template of the original count flag and list flag, then altered it to list the ones that don't include CQ. I updated the Science:MER page as well as the MER exam progress table template.

Is there anything else?

Very nice! I would like to see the same thing for "hint" instead of "solution" as well.

Also, is there a way to, for this term, also hide the flags from courses we don't want to focus on. I.e. courses that don't have a final exam in December (101, 103, 105, etc)?

Good job guys!

Hey guys, why is there no "Like this wiki - help it improve/grow/world domination" banner on the Math_Exam_Resources main page? Let people who use this resource know that it's easy to get involved!

I've been thinking about this too. I'll make an update of the main page this morning.

The content of the expandable boxes which contain the statement, hint, and solution for each question should also have some padding around them so the text doesn't touch the box border, which makes it slightly harder to read. I think a padding of 0.5em or 1em around the cell would be nice:

Question Title
1em padding. Lorem Ipsum...
0.5em padding. Lorem Ipsum...
No padding. This is the current appearance. Lorem Ipsum...

Good point!

I just added 1em to the padding of those boxes (it's hidden in Template:MER Question page/Box for references)

Can I also change the main heading for the Science:Math_Exam_Resources main page? So it would look something like:

	Math Exam Resources

The text is centred along the width of the cell instead of whatever it is now...

Sure. Go for it.

I think it initially was meant to be sort of aligned to the left, close to the picture. But it doesn't seem to make much sense.

Thanks. Changed it!

nice, good work!

Nice indeed. Do you also want to change the template for the courses? E.g. http://wiki.ubc.ca/Science:Math_Exam_Resources/Courses/MATH104

Good idea. Alfred, want to take care of this?

Hi all,

I think it would be worth all having a look at the Wikipedia Mathematics Manual of Style page which talks about rendering math on wiki pages. The core idea is that since the latex rendering isn't always very pretty when used inline, the wiki community usually switches to some html rendition as often as possible there and keeps the latex itself to display more complicated expression on separate lines. For example, see the following two choices of rendition.

Example only using <math> tags

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. Consider the system of linear equations $A\mathbf {x} =\mathbf {b}$ where $A$ is a $(n\times m)$-matrix. Then what is the meaning of $\int _{A}b(x)\,dx$ if any? Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

compared to

Example using some html rendering

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. Consider the system of linear equations Ax = b where A is a (n x m)-matrix. Then what is the meaning of $\int _{A}b(x)\,dx$ if any? Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

I'm perfectly well aware that there is something a little broken with the idea of rendering some of the text in html and some of it in latex using the <math> tags, but the real question is how do we want to display the information we are providing. Having had a look at what we produced so far, most of the time it works great, but I think here and there there are improvements that could be made and since the wikipedia community has already agreed on some standards, we might as well just use them ourselves.

Thoughts, ideas, comments?

Hello David,

Truly, I really don't know which way is best. To be honest, I think at this point this point is relatively minor - getting the information on there first should be top priority - then eventually if people are choosy enough, we can go back and make the few minor adjustments. It will feel like we're doing work twice - but quite honestly, editing solved problems is much faster than solving them I think.

Thats my $0.02.

It is a fairly minor point I totally agree!

I think if we use both the HTML rendering and the <math> tags, we should format the font of the HTML rendering to a sans-serif font. I know L_aT_eX uses the Computer Modern font, which would be of course ideal. But to make that work well we would have to implement custom markup/tags.

Hi Alfred,

It is a good point, but I'm not sure we can get access to that kind of modifications. The wiki is used by the entire UBC community. If you look at the math pages on wikipedia, they end up doing something similar to what we try here. In the end it is not perfect, but works well enough.

One annoying issue are double derivatives... the ' ' has the wiki believe it should be italics. And besides ugly things such as using a nowiki tag, there isn't much we can do except going in math mode.

Maybe we can try using double quotation marks for the inline text (although you have to add a space between the f and the " )? The two apostrophes work with the <math> tags.

Examples:

Inline f "(x).

$\displaystyle f''(x)$

Hi all,

We will have a group meeting this Friday (Oct. 5) from 12-2pm in MATX 1118 (Math Annex building). This is a drop-in type event, so feel free to come whenever you can/want. The goal is to provide a space for everyone to ask questions and get clarity about how to do things. We'll host those every week at different times. Please check the discussion tab of the page Science:MER (and add it to your watchlist to be notified) to know about the next ones (I will also post that on the page itself).

Cheers, David

Great, see you then!

Hello. You find the right discussion, good job!

What is still to do before we can announce the wiki publicly?

• In my email from March 16th I said we could start to show the wiki to some students in our office hours. That way we can get some feedback. Carmen was right though, that this would probably mean that the word would spread super quickly from then on, without any control. What I meant was, show it to a student and ask him for feedback, but please also ask him to not mention the wiki to anybody else. And that you will announce it in class by next week. Not sure if that would work, but maybe you have a student you think would give valuable input without posting the link on facebook right away...
• I would like to organize another MER meeting to work on content together. Below, please let me know if Thursday, March 22nd at 5pm, or Friday, March 23rd at 4pm would work better for you. The meeting would be in Math 125, and, yes, we can go for beers afterwards :)

Sounds good chief - both times work for me as well so I say lets do it.

I'll see who I can find this week to give comments on the wiki. However I probably will just keep it hidden for now - I really do fear the spread like wildfire effect...

Hoping to put some hours in this weekend - but who knows given my schedule. I really need to make a time machine...

Turns out, with the Department dinner on Thursday we should have the 'MER meeting on Friday, March 23rd at 4pm in Math 125. We will discuss what needs to be cleaned up before the public announcement, which we then want to do the week after! Hope to see you all there :)