Adventuring - The Bear Creek Commentaries

--- Math in my world ---

I've avoided mathematics heavy curricula. One consequence of mathematics as a language is that my dyslexia interferes with mathematics also. I'm slow and make a lot of errors, but one of the advantages of math is that there are always checks. If you know how to check your work, there's never a reason to let an error in calculations get by you.

But I enjoy mathematics. I especially enjoy explaining mathematical concepts to others. I like opening up the mathematical machine and showing others how it works.

I took courses in college through integral calculus and I continue taking them via the Teaching Company, MIT OpenCourseWare, and other resources. One of my areas of specialization in graduate work was research methods (the other was vocational evaluation.)

I haven't done a lot of research, mostly helping others with their projects, but I have done a good bit of advisory work and think of myself as a pretty good statistician. I like teasing information out of real world data.

One of my long term projects is the software I offer in my website, the Therian Timeline. I'll be talking about that as time goes on. It's available in the Excursions section and there's a link in the Related Pages links to the right on this page.

Research is an issue in the therian community and I made these tools available as free downloads so amateur researchers could have easily accessible tools. I continue to build on them. For instance, DANSYS is a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet (Calc itself is a free download) that can already perform most of the commonly used statistical procedures, but the extended version, DANSYSX, can do far more. I'm currently working on a regression procedure that will build a best regression equation from a set of data, rejecting weak variables. That one will take a while for me to complete.

Some folks love numbers; some hate them. What about you?