Month: March 2013 Page 1 of 3

Day 587 of 1000

Lorerna is back from the beautful Monterrey, Nuevo Leo, Mexico.  We barely survived without her.  It is profoundly safer now that it was this time last year.  We will be going down there on a regular basis if it remains like this.  She got to see all of kids except two who live in Toluca, for whom I am the Favorite Uncle^TM.  Here is a picture of some of them, that outside two of which are scheduled to visit us in the U.S. this summer.

Jorge, Brunito, Valeria, Matias, Brandito, Marlito, y Dayanita

Kelly just texted me with the news that she was offered a job at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as a Statistical Intern.  They made her a better offer than Caterpillar and she will be doing things like design of experiments, sample size calculations, data cleaning, and other stuff that is dead center in the subject area of her degree and the type of work she wants to do.  We are very excited.  Tonight we will talk about her options.  So far, she lost out on the NIEHS position, but she has two hard internship offers with a third from a financial services company still up in the air.

Day 582 of 1000

A guy at work made an interesting comment about the Microsoft Surface when I asked him whether he liked it.  He bought one on eBay for $250.  I told him I had heard it was really lousy for typing.

He said, “That is true, but that is not how I use it.”

I said, “How do you use it?”

He uses it as a tablet.  He said that if you think of it as a computer like any other laptop, you are not going to like it.  If you think of it as a tablet with a keyboard that is better for typing than on-screen keyboard, then you will be much happier with it.

I said, “OK, then.  How does it compare with other tablets.  Is it as good as a Nook or a Kindle?”

He said, “It is not fair to compare the Surface to that class of tablets.  The Surface is WAY better than tablets like the Nook and the Kindle.”

I said, “Wow,” because I love my Nook.

I thought about that a little and said, “Well, then, how does it compare to the iPad.”

He said, “As only a tablet, I like it a LOT better than my iPad.  It is just as easy or easier to use, the form factor is better, and, in a pinch, you can use it as a computer.”

Now I am really tempted to buy a Surface on eBay.  It would be great on airplanes.

Kelly and the NCSU’s LoveData statistical analysis team presented their findings at the Datafest this afternoon.  We are not sure how they did yet, but they looked good and, in the end, that is all that is really important.  I will report the results when I get them.  Kelly did not hear all the teams present, but of the ones she heard, their team was the only team that tied their analysis to the needs of the business rather than internal analysis of the data that did not attach to the bottom line.  She said they did not have the slickest presentation.  Some of the other teams had done this before.  She cannot wait until next year because she thinks they really did great given their lack of experience.

Day 580 of 1000

We received a note that Lorena had arrived safely in Mexico.  We had a long and eventful Saturday.  Lorena flew to Monterrey, Kelly did Datafest, studied for her finals, and sprained her ankle coming down the stairs in SAS Hall at NSSU when we picked her up to go home   Christian met friends to do a Math class project.  It is a little calmer this morning, but it will heat up again after meeting.  I think it is going to be like this until Wednesday afternoon.  Our plan is to sleep in A BUNCH on Thursday, then get up and shovel out the house before our friends arrive from Indiana.  We are SO looking forward to that–both sleeping in and our friends.

Kelly is eating good. Enuf said!

Some of Kelly’s Chinese friends invited her to participate on their team in the intercollegiate statistical competition called Datafest. Kelly jumped at the chance. They are having a great time. Most of the teams tried to give themselves edgy names like Regression Session and I Regress, but Kelly’s team has, by far the best name, LoveData, picked by the Chinese girls. They asked her if it was OK and, of course, she told them it was fabulous.

She has two really big tests coming up next week.  In fact, both the NCSU teams have big tests, so they are ping-ponging back and forth between studying for the tests and working on the competition.  The other NCSU has all seniors and one junior.  Kelly’s team only has one senior, but he is not a statistics major.  He is kind of a ringer though because he has serious SAS skills, so LoveData is quite a bit of an underdog, but could surprise some people.

The other really big thing about this competition is that all the competitors get FREE FOOD all weekend long.  And I thought Kelly was in it for her love of statistics!

Day 579 of 1000

Lorena flies to Monterrey to see Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita.  I was thinking I would finally get a chance to drive the Fiesta, but Kelly needs to practice her driving for when she goes off to her internship this summer, so I got stuck again in the drivers seat.

Christian and I are reinstalling Windows 7 on a computer for Kelly in the NCSU Undergraduate Math Lounge in SAS Hall.  When we first visited SAS Hall, we kind of made fun of the lounge.  It seemed like a place nobody would use, but boy were we wrong about that.  Christian is here most days because it is so convenient.  You have to be a math major for your student ID card to open the door.

Meanwhile, Kelly studies for tests and participates in the Datafest statistical analysis competition with her team upstairs in this same building.  I hope to have some pictures of that here later today.

It is only just my opinion, but I honestly believe Mexican pizza feature the worst combination of ingredients of an pizza I have ever eaten.  I have been married to a Mexican woman for over twenty years.  She is the best cook I have ever met.  She does great Chinese food, great Greek food, great Korean food–you name it, she does it and she does it extremely well.

She even does great Italian food, except when it comes to pizza.  Well, that is not exactly correct.  She even makes great pizza if someone else picks the ingredients.  I am not saying the pizza in the picture is bad, but I don’t know that many Gringos who would make a pepperoni, mushroom, and pineapple pizza.

That is not even the worst of it.  In Mexico, I have eaten pizza with boiled egg slices and bologna on it.  I have even had a hot dog and marshmellow pizza.  It is somehow just wrong.  I wonder how this one goes down.  Actually, right now it is smelling pretty good.  I must be REALLY hungry.

Kelly is competing in Datafest 2013 this year.  I hope to get some updates aw the fun-filled “big data” weekend progresses.  Here is what it is all about from the Datafest web site:

It’s time for DataFest 2013! DataFest is a data analysis competition where teams of up to five undergraduates have a weekend to attack a large and complex dataset. Your job is to represent your school by finding and communicating insights into these data. The teams that impress the judges will win prizes as well as glory for their school. Everyone else will have a great experience, lots of food, and fun!

This is the second DataFest at Duke, and this year the event will be even bigger than last year, with participants from Duke, UNC, and NCSU. We’ll start the event on neutral grounds at SAMSI (transportation will be provided, see the schedule for more details), and return at the end of the competition for presentations and judging. This is a great opportunity to meet students from neighboring campuses with similar academic and intellectual interests, and get experience working with real world data.

This year DataFest celebrates the International Year of Statistics. Click here for a full list of Statistics2013 activities.

Day 578 of 1000

This is the fifth in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

[Previous post in series]
[Next post in series]

When we first started to think about college for the kids, we thought of a small, Christian, liberal arts college not too far from us.  We went to visit them and, based on test scores and a few other things, we were told Kelly could get a scholarship that would bring her tuition down to about the level of what she would pay if she went to North Carolina State University.  We thought that sounded great, but after further investigation, found there were some issues.  In addition to some hidden costs, we found that there were really no small, liberal arts colleges of any stripe that could provide the breadth of a large, national research university in the areas of hard science the kids wanted to study.

So our next option was to look at the local, national research universities in area.  We are fortunate in that there are three of those within driving distance of our house:  North Carolina State University, Duke University, and University of North Carolina.  Duke was out of our price range, so that left NCSU and UNC.  Christian wanted to be able to take engineering classes and UNC’s only engineering program is Biomedical Engineering which it does jointly with NCSU, so NCSU became the obvious choice.

We considered trying to put the kids directly into NCSU, but it seemed pretty overwhelming to drop a 14 year old and a 16 year old straight out of homeschool into a huge state university.  We are confident they could have handled it academically, but there were a lot of social challenges that made us decide to try the local community college for a semester or two before making that leap.  Our local community college, Wake Tech, is only five miles from our house, so we ran down there one afternoon to figure out what we had to do.

At first, we wanted to try to enroll them as dual enrolled students attending Wake Tech part time while we continued with homeschool classes.  We quickly found out that was not going to work so well.  Dual enrolled students had a very limited selection of classes they could take. We talked to other homeschoolers who had dual enrolled and they said it was actually pretty difficult for a homeschooled kid to get a dual enrollment class because, even if the school policy did not state it, the government school kids got first pick for what was available. In addition, if a student under 16 years old is dual enrolled, he has to have a parent sitting with him in all the classes he takes.  This would have precluded Christian from taking any classes.  Fully enrolled students under age 16 do not need such a chaperone.

All this lead us to the decision to enroll the kids full time.  This benefited us greatly in the following ways:

• The  Wake Tech tuition cost was roughly half that of NCSU.
• There was no chaperone requirement for students under age 16.
• All of the classes for which the kids met the prerequisites were available to the kids.
• Fully enrolled students register for classes before dual-enrolled classes so the problem of classes filling up before the kids got to them was diminshed.
• Wake Tech was a seven minute drive from the house while NCSU is a 30 minute drive.
• Professional teachers as opposed to research professors and grad students taught the classes at the community college¹
• The kids were continually told that Wake Tech STEM graduates performed better at NCSU than students who spent all for years at NCSU²
• The kids made good friends that transfered with them to NCSU and professors with whom they remain in contact

One of the big worries for both of the kids was about how accepting graduate schools would be of their attendance at a community college.  Now that they are both actively talking to tier one graduate schools, we have found those fears to be unfounded.

1. Purely anecdotal, but certainly true in my experience.  The kids had truely stellar teachers in Math, Biology, and Physics.  This was somewhat mitigated by really bad English and Art Appreciation instructors, but they also had excellent liberal arts class instructors in History, Speech, New Testament, and Literature.
2. Purely anecdotal.

Kelly took a class in Agricultural Marketing this semester.  It has turned out to be a great course.  There have been a bunch of free market guest lecturers, Kelly got to interview our friend Al Tripp about his life as a sales professional, and today, she is scheduled to give a talk about one of the best television advertisements I have ever seen.  The video speaks for itself.

I got an email asking me if I wanted to post an infographic they had made of some positive benefits that might be derived from the judicious use of a television.  I went back and looked at my old post here.  I was even more drawn to a comment by our old Sonlight friend, Luke Holzman who blogs here.  Luke represented that Facebook and Twitter are just tools.  The comment was a thoughtful one about which I am pretty agnositic right now.  I honestly believe the harm of a television in the home so far out weighs the benefits, I encourge people–especially people with children–to “Kill Their Television“.

I have to admit, though, that I am on the fence with Facebook.  I had an open Facebook account (I hear you can never really erase them) for a period of two or three weeks several years ago.  I hated it.  It certainly did not bring out the best in me.  Even further, I have to admit that I check out Lorena, my wife’s Facebook at least once per week to see what family and friends are up to.  I am also agnostic about Instagram and Twitter.  I have them even less figured out than Facebook.

So what am I saying here?  I am wondering if anyone could tell me how to use Facebook in a way that is comfortable.  How often should I read it?  How often should I write something?  What is appropriate/inappropriate for people of different ages in terms of what they do on it?  There are lots of different questions that could be asked.  I guess the real answer I am looking for is whether there is a way I could have and use a Facebook account as a tool in a way that is not creepy.  Is there a way I can use Facebook in a way that comports with my worldview and accrues to a positive good great enough to bother with the effort?

I really do not know the answer to these questions.  I am sure the answers are different for everyone.  I really do want to know the answer.

Then there is Pinterest.  Can a real man really have a pinterest account?…

Day 576 of 1000

This is the fourth in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

[Previous post in series]
[Next post in series]

Christian’s entrance into college after the eight grade at 14 years old was a result of his performance on three tests.

• Test 1:  A friend told us about the Duke TIP program where the ACT or SAT college entrance exams are given to high performing seventh graders to determine whether they are good candidates for early entry into college.  We checked with the North Carolina Department of Non-public Education and found that the ACT is one of the tests accepted as a yearly, nationally normed, standardized test for homeschoolers.  Christian took the ACT as a seventh grader and received a 23 composite score.  A lot of people scored higher than Christian, but it was still pretty good–sufficient to earn him state-wide honors in all the test categories and a medal from the TIP program.  This score was high enough for him to enter Wake Tech Community College.  It gave us the confidence that Christian was getting close to the place where he could perform well in college.
• Test 2:  When Christian took the ACT mid-way through his eighth grade year, his composite score jumped up to 27.  This was good enough to get him into North Carolina State University if he wanted to go there.  We thought he was a little too young to think about that when he was in the ninth grade, but he had the option.

After the second good ACT, Lorena and I decided we would go ahead and put Christian into Wake Technical Community College as a dual enrolled student.  The plan was to put Kelly there full time as she had gotten a smoking good score on the ACT.  When we checked with the school, we found that students under the age of 16 had to have a parent with them, actually sitting with them everyday in class, if they were dual enrolled in the community college and high school at the same time.  We were very frustrated trying to figure out how to do that when we decided to find out if a full enrolled student had to have such a chaperone.  They did not, so we used Christian’s CLEP score, made up a transcript of his homeschool work, and enrolled him full time.

• Test 3:  The school required new students to take a math placement test.  Christian was only half way through his Precalculus studies at the time he took the placement test, but he got a high enough score to place him into first semester Calculus.

This was huge for both Kelly and Christian because it meant that they could take their math classes together.  We did not know it at the time, but it turned out to be a huge social benefit to the both of them.  They made several good friends including to Venzuelans, an Iraq war vet, and an amazing math professor in their math classes.  It also allowed Christian to get through all the math sequences he needed without any summer classes and still graduate on schedule in four years.  Since Christian was now a fully enrolled student, we decided to get him a light, but full time schedule of 13 credits.  He did well enough on those 13 credits that we let him keep going.  At the time of this writing, Christian is a 17 year old senior in Applied Mathematics with a minor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at NCSU.  He is still scheduled to graduate on schedule in the Spring of 2014 when he is 18.

I want to reiterate that we honestly do not believe Christian got to where he is because of any special talents unless you count tenacity as a talent.  We helped him build his early reading, writing, and math skills, then helped him with the early parts of the planning for his degree.  We rarely do anything for him any more with respect to his school other then help him pay bills and drive him a few places.  He does all the class planning, meetings with advisors. undergraduate research, graduate school planning, and graduation planning.