[HN Gopher] MIT Mathlets
___________________________________________________________________
MIT Mathlets
Author : huftis
Score : 171 points
Date : 2021-09-03 15:43 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mathlets.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (mathlets.org)
| woofie11 wrote:
| What I find obnoxious, and typical of MIT, is how credit is
| allocated.
|
| "Copyright (c) 2009--2015 H. Miller"
|
| Only hmm (H. Miller) didn't do the work. The "About" page,
| fortunately, lists the authors, but doesn't really credit who did
| what.
|
| Nothing personal about hmm, but a lot personal about the MIT
| culture of credit theft. MIT didn't have this culture 25 years
| ago. If this was (c) MIT, it'd be okay. But it's the PI on the
| project, who often doesn't do much of anything, who gets to pick-
| and-choose what goes to whom, and more often than not, allocate
| anything of value back to themselves.
| mynameismon wrote:
| This might explain the reason for the copyright:
| https://mathlets.org/training/
|
| Edit: More specifically:
|
| > This self-paced short course by Professor Haynes R. Miller,
| Ph.D. [ Biography ] focuses on the use of technology in
| mathematics education at the university level. The course
| begins with an introduction and then explores the MIT Mathlets
| collection by providing examples of Mathlet use in three
| different contexts.
| realsimplesynd wrote:
| > the MIT culture of credit theft
|
| This makes me think about who we revere as scientists and who
| we compare ourselves to.
|
| A lot of success in life is out of our control. Conditions
| produce outliers, not diligence and hard work (Outlier X
| probably did work hard, but the conditions were so for their
| nervous system to act as such).
| queuebert wrote:
| Besides this, the phenotype that academia reveres is a
| particular type of low-level bureaucrat that works by
| quantity, not quality.
|
| For example, I'm in academia, but I prefer to solve
| interesting problems and create new things of high quality. I
| have never had to retract a paper, nor has anyone found a
| mistake in my work. I don't supervise more than one or two
| students at a time, because I want to be able to devote time
| to them. People like me languish and do not get promoted to
| tenure.
|
| I have colleagues who pride themselves on how many e-mails
| they answer a day and recruit large labs of grad students who
| download neural net codes, tweak and publish. They talk of
| "least publishable units, or LPUs" and are always submitting
| and chairing ... submitting grants, submitting papers,
| chairing committees, etc. They get tenure very quickly and
| make a lot more money than I do. But they aren't scientists,
| they are bureaucrats who send emails. They decide what
| science is done, because they chair funding committees, so we
| get boring, incremental science that is stuck in local
| minima.
| jonsen wrote:
| How is copyright the same as credit?
| [deleted]
| pfortuny wrote:
| Yep.It should be copyright MIT, especially if he is using his
| post and other personnel to make this.
|
| Nothing against him personally.
| queuebert wrote:
| Unfortunately, all of academia is like this now. The most
| successful PIs are the best marketers of work produced by an
| army of grad students recruited for their cheap labor costs
| more than their future in the academic world.
| unix_fan wrote:
| Nun of these seem to be accessible for screen readers, unlike
| what PHET has.
| stevenpetryk wrote:
| Shameless plug for my React library for creating interactive
| visualizations on the web, in case anyone wants to make similar
| things. Probably needs a little work to make things this
| sophisticated though :)
|
| https://mafs.dev/
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| This looks really interesting! Very nice work!
| globuous wrote:
| Really really cool !! The example section is sweeeet, real nice
| work ;)
| jonsen wrote:
| On iPad your page shows for .2 seconds then blanks :-/
| stevenpetryk wrote:
| Dang! I did test on iPad at one point. Thanks for the heads
| up.
| mynameismon wrote:
| Wow, this is stunning! I foresee this as a frontend
| visualisation tool for a Brilliant.org competitor (something I
| have been wanting to do for a while, but haven't been able to
| find time for)
| stevenpetryk wrote:
| Funnily enough, I built it largely to impress them when I
| applied last year. But they black holed me. Still happy I
| made it!
| mrtksn wrote:
| You definitely impressed some random strangers on the
| internet:) It's quite neat really.
| Bostonian wrote:
| Interesting, but in the first one I clicked on, "T distribution",
| there should be more explanation. It says only "The t
| distribution depends on one parameter.". I would say, "The shape
| of the t distribution depends on one parameter, the degrees of
| freedom, which controls the kurtosis. As df approaches infinity
| the t distribution approaches the normal distribution."
| martincmartin wrote:
| It's designed to be used in a MOOC, so there should be lots of
| text around them. edX math classes use them a lot.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| I would like a neurology site called brainlets.
|
| I think it would appeal to young people. Brainlet is a popular
| slang word these days.
|
| What do you think my friends?
| mixedCase wrote:
| It's an insult akin to "stupid" or "dense". It worked for git,
| but "git" at least wasn't in vogue.
| euske wrote:
| Slightly off-topic question: how would you call these playable
| things embedded in HTML these days? I would like to use the word
| "applet" but it can be still confusing to those who remember Java
| Applets. Any idea?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-03 23:01 UTC)