Bill Peterson's Web Course Page

I teach in the department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Middlebury College. My background is in Operations Research, so I teach electives in OR, Probability and Statistics, in addition to sharing the department's load of Calculus and Linear Algebra.

I have an "official" homepage at Middlebury. Everything you see there I learned how to do by cribbing from other Middlebury folks' pages.

This spring I used (by rote) a set of Web templates developed by our Instructional Technology Office to paste together a home page for my Intro Stats non-major course. The templates use frames and tables whose construction I don't understand well, so I still find them hard to modify. (I've made a complete mess of the frames on several occasions.)

I am taking this course to develop some true personal proficiency in maintaining a site and presenting mathematics!
I will be using Netscape 3.01 on a PowerMac 8500/120 to access course materials.

Goals for the Course

I have been involved in developing a case-study course called CHANCE that introduces probability and statistics in the context of current news stories. The course satisfies a Quantitative Reasoning distribution requirement for liberal arts students. To support this course, I plan to develop

• Online tutorials on statistical terms used in the news.
• Interactive simulations to illustrate key concepts.
• An environment to promote electronic discussions among class members.

Assignments

1. This page!

2. Expected Value formula using entities.

3. Expected Value formula using LaTeX. Work in Progress!

4. Course Project As described in my Course Goals above, I plan to develop
   • Online tutorials on statistical terms used in the news.
   • Interactive simulations to illustrate key concepts.
   • An environment to promote electronic discussions among class members.

5. Link to summary of group discussion on Intellectual Property Rights case studies.

6. Here are some experiments with images
   • A photo of a student poster from my CHANCE course this past January. The original photograph was scanned and saved as a JPEG file.
   • A histogram created with the statistical package DataDesk on my Mac. I copied the window and pasted it into GraphicConverter, where I could convert it to GIF format.
   • Some Data graphics from USA Today.

7. Animation on hold for now!

8. Breather taken!!

9. Some experiments with
   • Scripts.
   • Fill-in forms.

10. A Java Simulation of Coin Tossing