Upside-down t-shirt

 4 out of 3 people struggle with math.  Sure. 

Teaching ICT in Lagos

My recent teaching website is bellseng on googlesites.  OK, the school is not exactly in Lagos, it's an hour drive from Ikeja.  

I only have one course to teach this semester, and fewer than 100 students.  Objectives include brushing up on math for some, open-ended math analysis for some others, and discussions of information and communication technology for most.  We'll have fun.  

Mahjong - I really didn't expect this high score

First you learn to win the game, then you find tricks to raise your score, but then you start losing because in chasing the high score you get stray off the straight and narrow path that leads to winning. 

Hence I started once again to play plain vanilla mahjong titans, and guess what I just did: scored my highest ever in Fortress. 

I wasn't even thinking about the scores, Man!

 Last time I looked, a couple of months ago, here were my high scores:
Interestingly, my absolute highest scores in four layouts (all except Crab and Spider) occurred between 16 and 25 July 2012.  For Crab, the second highest score was 18th July, and the 3rd, 4th, and 5th highest were all in the month before.  I recommend playing for high scores with the Crab layout as it responds well to the score-raising tricks.  
 Contrast this with Spider, for which the five highest scores all came before this score-raising season. 

My Mahjong solitaire scores for different layouts, as at late 2012

For an ordering of how well the score-raising tricks seem to have helped:  
Let high scores in June/July 2012 yield 5points for 1st, 4 for 2nd, ..., 1 for 5th, and add them up.  The totals are Turtle 6, Dragon 10, Cat 9, Fortress 12, Crab 10, Spider 0.  Therefore we have: Fortress, Crab/Dragon, Cat, Turtle, Spider

The tricks raise your score alright, but how much have you hurt the bottomline (win rate?)
What do you make of the fact that win percentages in early 2012 are roughly the same as in late 2012 above, except for Crab and Turtle which gained?  I say without the score-raising experiments, the win rates went up.  Then the sre hurt (caused losses) least in these two layouts.  In the other layouts, the sre-related losses possibly canceled out other increases in win rate. 

I'm officially bored done writing about Mahjong solitaire. What is exciting how many have used my tips to aid their play. Love it.

Looks like I'm really bad at playing regular solitaire

You know that I cracked Mahjong Titans, a solitaire game.  tips here.

But on my computer, there's this regular solitaire that I fail 6 out of 7 times. 
For as long as I can remember, my success percentage has stayed between 14% and 16% (Ok I don't remember going as high as 16 percent actually) and I've played it over 500 times. 

How to improve my play at solitaire?

I don't think it used to be this bad on previous computers, I think I won more frequently then. 
I mean, the solitaire I remember was just common sense: focus on the deep piles, don't get carried away with easy wins, plan for the future, try to balance your red and black tiles...
but now it seems more like tough, irreversible, luck.

Do I just have the hard version or something? 

Meanwhile, I'll post more on Mahjong/Mahjonng titans later.  I sort of stopped playing it so frequently, discovered some new tips, probably lowered my win rate while experimenting wantonly with the thing...fun stuff.  

A pioneering woman in mathematics

Born December 16, 1932, Grace Alele-Williams is now 80 years old.

Prof. Grace Alele-Williams

She has a brilliant reputation as a pioneering educationist, being

• the first Nigerian woman to receive a doctorate degree (University of Chicago, 1963) 
• the first female professor of mathematics education in Nigeria
• the first female Vice Chancellor of a Nigerian university  (University of Benin, 1985-1992). 

me and Dr. Williams at the ball (Sept 30, 2011)

 References: 
Women mathematicians at agnesscott.edu: A biography of Grace Alele-Williams
Punch Newspaper: Grace Alele-Williams hits 80
Wikipedia: Grace Alele-Williams 
YNaija: Photos from the TW Phoenix Gala Celebrating Matriachs and Protegées
Bellanaija: About the Phoenix Gala by TW (Today's Woman) Magazine, with photos  
AMU-CHMA: African Mathematical Union - Commission on the History of Mathematics in Africa

Carnival of Mathematics 93

Welcome to the 93rd edition of the Carnival of Mathematics.

Here's the roundup:

Mr Honner verifies that this is NOT a trig. function. 

Look closely: is this really a trigonometric function?

John D. Cook shows that the Probability of Long Runs is greater than we think. 

E-Painting: Eye - Iris, by Tosin Otitoju

Nithesh at Sententia adores this book and wrote a review.
The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy "is about the history of the several attempts made to solve the long standing problem in Number theory called the “Riemann Hypothesis”. It also describes the larger picture about the lives of mathematicians, their idiosyncrasies, insecurities and their passion for the subject." 

Book cover: the music of the primes

Ed at Learn To Fish demonstrates how to draw regular polygons.

How to draw a regular pentagon

White Group Mathematics features advice for examination candidates at the A-levels: Focus on what comes next.

E-painting: Let's Fly, by Tosin Otitoju

Pat B constructs antiparallels, recommending the topic for high school geometry. 

Dragon, by Joan Martines, Messine, 1583

If you want more pictures, see The Golden Age of Maps/Charts online or at the French National Library till next month

If you want some physics, the Foundational Questions Institute has announced winners of this year's essay contest.

Gracias + Te amo: Cora Sadosky passed away exactly two years ago.   She was the best math professor, ever. 

See Carnival 92 at White Group Mathematics.
Carnival 94 will be hosted in January 2013 by Paul at The Aperiodical

An unexpected power law that relates site traffic to ranking by site traffic

How easy is it to estimate your number of site visits from site ranking and vice-versa?
Very easy: double the visits to halve the ranking.
I just blogged at upnaira.blogspot.com about finding the connection, and how rewarding to end up with such a neat graph:

Relationship between Alexa rank and monthly visitors

Here's the data I used:

Site	%Traffic Reach	Est. Monthly Visitors*	Alexa rank
yahoo	20	1000000000	4
craigslist	1.5	75000000	42
meetup	0.2	10000000	465
nairaland	0.08	4000000	1385
jobberman	0.02	1000000	4653
cp-africa	0.004	200000	44206
wemabank	0.00028	14000	557445

*The monthly visitors numbers are estimated by assuming jobberman has 1million visitors per month (I think that corresponds to a ranking around 5k) and that the traffic reach percentage (data given by alexa for each site) is simply number of visitors for this site / a fixed number corresponding to all traffic.  That is, take the traffic to be proportional to the traffic reach percentage.

Well, who wants to do this experiment on a large scale?
Plot Global rank against Traffic-reach % or Traffic-Reach-estimate-of-Monthly-Visitors and see how well the data fit this law.
Alexa.com ranks at least 10million sites, so you could test with that many datapoints.