gbyeow.com

I don’t really have anything against animation in general. As a matter of fact, I love animation for the fact that it’s really great entertainment. However, there are some things that are just not meant to be animated. Case in point, mathematical formulas.

Was doing some statistics and needed the formula for calculating variance. While Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation on the subject. WL did a search of the web and provided me with a link to another explanation.

If you check out the site, you’ll find that the Fayetteville State University employs geniuses like this D. Wallace dude who, for some unbeknownst reason, animates statistical demonstrations.

While I can think of reasons to animate a presentation (e.g. timing and stuff), I usually find it more convenient to use an office tool like PowerPoint instead of animated gifs (Graphics Interchange Format).

Maybe he’s trying to protect his intellectual property (e.g. don’t want people nicking his slides and modifying them) but there’s password protection and export tools for that. His reasons are beyond me. Interesting to note that he’s teaching Psychology 233 (Statistics for Psychology). Probably trying to psych out all his students or some such.

The problem with animated gifs as a teaching aid is timing. The transition period between frames are hard-coded into the file and you can’t preemptively move on to the next slide. That means that if the transition is set to 5 minutes, you’ll have to wait the whole damn five minutes before you get to the next frame.

Check out the following animated gifs on the variance formula with transition set to about a minute. Nicked from Variance and Standard Deviation:

Takes about 10 minutes to actually view both the gif files, digest what it’s trying to say and understand the formula when it would have probably taken a couple of minute to read and understand a full text version of the same formula. The images play in a loop so you can’t tell start from finish. The best part is, they actually have a whole series of these animated statistic demonstrations. Genius? Absolutely.

As the Italians put it…

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 13th, 2007 at 9:01 am and is filed under WTF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.