Recent socr_rw items

The Rise of Infocracy: Virtualized Human Interplays, Decline of Physical Interactions, and the Adaptation of People’s Social Valuation System

Thu, 18 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Rapid technological advances, our insatiable appetite for instantaneous rewards, and the massive information overflow are impacting our everyday lives. The long term effects of the social informatification, people’s overreliance on massive amounts of dynamic digital information, remain enigmatic and poorly understood. Our ability to anticipate, prepare, react and adopt to potential negative consequences of the minute-by-minute existence in the new infoctratic world, complete virtual immersion into a digital information where most time, energy and resources are dedicated to rapid acquisition, processing and inference using large amounts of information, may have a significant long term impact on mankind. This opinion outlines the scope of our virtualized abilities to manage and interpret Exabytes of information and suggests that timely prediction and appropriate response to the information avalanche will be critical to managing the unavoidable social and cultural changes ahead.

Design and Evaluation of SOCR Tools for Simulation in Undergraduate Probability and Statistics Courses

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Technology-based instruction represents a new recent pedagogical paradigm that is rooted in the realization that new generations are much more comfortable with, and excited about, new technologies. The free and Internetbased NSF-funded Statistics Online Computational Resource (www.SOCR.ucla.edu) provides a number of educational materials and interactive tools for enhancing instruction in various undergraduate and graduate courses in probability and statistics using observed or computer generated data. SOCR includes class notes, practice activities, statistical calculators, interactive graphical user interfaces, computational and simulation applets, tools for data analysis and visualization. Based on the promising results from our pilot study in 2005-2006, where we saw a consistent trend of improvement in the SOCR treatment group compared to the control group, in terms of quantitative examination measures, our 2006-2007 study involves over 300 UCLA students. We use a cross-over...

SOCR Analyses: Implementation and Demonstration of a New Graphical Statistics Educational Toolkit

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The web-based, Java-written SOCR (Statistical Online Computational Resource) tools have been utilized in many undergraduate and graduate level statistics courses for seven years now. It has been proven that these resources can successfully improve students' learning. Being �first published online in 2005, SOCR Analyses is a somewhat new component and it concentrate on data modeling for both parametric and non-parametric data analyses with graphical model diagnostics. One of the main purposes of SOCR Analyses is to facilitate statistical learning for high school and undergraduate students. As we have already implemented SOCR Distributions and Experiments, SOCR Analyses and Charts ful�ll the rest of a standard statistics curricula. Currently, there are four core components of SOCR Analyses. Linear models included in SOCR Analyses are simple linear regression, multiple linear regression, one-way and two-way ANOVA. Tests for sample comparisons include t-test in the parametric category....

Law of Large Numbers: the Theory, Applications and Technology-based Education

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Modern approaches for technology-based blended education utilize a variety of recently developed novel pedagogical, computational and network resources. Such attempts employ technology to deliver integrated, dynamically-linked, interactive-content and heterogeneous learning environments, which may improve student comprehension and information retention. In this paper, we describe one such innovative effort of using technological tools to expose students in probability and statistics courses to the theory, practice and usability of the Law of Large Numbers (LLN). We base our approach on integrating pedagogical instruments with the computational libraries developed by the Statistics Online Computational Resource (www.SOCR.ucla.edu). To achieve this merger we designed a new interactive Java applet and a corresponding demonstration activity that illustrate the concept and the applications of the LLN. The LLN applet and activity have common goals – to provide graphical representation...

Expectation Maximization and Mixture Modeling Tutorial

Tue, 9 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This technical report describes the statistical method of expectation maximization (EM) for parameter estimation. Several of 1D, 2D, 3D and n-D examples are presented in this document. Applications of the EM method are also demonstrated in the case of mixture modeling using interactive Java applets in 1D (e.g., curve fitting), 2D (e.g., point clustering and classification) and 3D (e.g., brain tissue classification).

Central Limit Theorem: New SOCR Applet and Demonstration Activity

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Modern approaches for information technology based blended education utilize a variety of novel instructional, computational and network resources. Such attempts employ technology to deliver integrated, dynamically linked, interactive content and multi-faceted learning environments, which may facilitate student comprehension and information retention. In this manuscript, we describe one such innovative effort of using technological tools for improving student motivation and learning of the theory, practice and usability of the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) in probability and statistics courses. Our approach is based on harnessing the computational libraries developed by the Statistics Online Computational Resource (www.SOCR.ucla.edu) to design a new interactive Java applet and a corresponding demonstration activity that illustrate the meaning and the power of the CLT. The CLT applet and activity have clear common goals; to provide graphical representation of the CLT, to improve...

Integrated, Multidisciplinary and TechnologyEnhanced Science Education: The Next Frontier

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Contemporary science education at all levels presents several critical pedagogical and social challenges to educators and learners alike. Among these challenges are the widening Intergenerational Information Technology (IIT) divide and the need for a comprehensive and balanced multidisciplinary training. In the past few years, it has become clear that one significant hurdle impedes the efforts to integrate information technology in the classroom – the Intergenerational IT divide. The IIT gap eflects a different growing misalignment between providers and recipients of the science and technology educational content in terms of the expected vs. supplied, needed vs. perceived and contextual vs. abstract specialized learning. The common K12 teacher or college instructor is much less familiar with, and slower to adapt to, the new ether of communication and novel IT resources. The transfer and blending of data, research challenges and methodologies between diverse areas of science...