[Bill Finzer]

Hi Andee,

Below I’ve pasted a list of known problems. It’s worth noting that if you use an external keyboard with touchpad, many problems disappear. I use CODAP consistently and effectively on my iPad Pro. But it is harder than with a mouse!

• Can’t click and drag to select multiple rows
• Sampler on iPad: Sampler tabs are inaccessible once the model is locked
• Marquee select of points on map doesn’t display the selection rectangle. (But it does select points.)
• When attempting to use the calculator, the virtual keyboard comes up and can get in the way.
• Double tapping on the graph does not zoom the graph in
• iPad: Soft keyboard covers the formula editor
• Cannot reorder categories on a graph with touch (no problem with touchpad on attached keyboard

[Bill Finzer]

Hello Nick,

This problem surfaced a few days ago when Google updated its Chrome browser for Windows. (It occurs in version 96.) The problem does not occur on Firefox or on the Mac.

Apparently there are quite a few problems caused by this Chrome update so we expect that Google will fix them soon.

A workaround is to make a new document from the Getting Started document that already has the Mammals data in it. In fact, here is a link to a shared document you can use for this purpose.

I hope Google fixes there problem soon!

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Andee,

1. First get both CODAP datasets in the same document. You can do this a number of ways. I find it easiest to use the Ruler menu on the case table to “Copy to Clipboard,” then create a new table and use the Ruler menu there to Import Data form Clipboard.
2. Then drag the “key” attribute (the one that has a match, the source) onto the case table in which you want the data to be joined (the destination).
3. Release. The matched rows in the destination acquire attributes from the the source.

I hope this helps,

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Nick,

Nice project to undertake!

Myself, I would try Story Builder. You can certainly meet all of your requirements using it. I even have access to a few more “getting started” style checkbox tutorials you could embed.

I’ve posted a link to your question to a couple of internal Slack channels, so we’ll see if anyone pops up with more thoughts.

Please keep us posted with your progress.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Jim,

Sorry to be so slow in getting to you. Your post got marked as spam for some reason.

The apparent “freeze” is because the Sampler is trying to animate all those balls. If you change the speed to fastest, it will forgo the animation and give you your sample.

Hope that helps (and glad you love using CODAP),

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi,

Thanks for this question! It has an interesting, if somewhat complicated, answer.

When the Census Bureau does a survey, whether it’s the decennial census or the more frequent American Community Survey (ACS), a “weight” gets assigned to each person. This number is the number of people in the actual population that this person represents. For a decennial census, this weight should be 1 since each person is just representing themselves, but it turns out that even for the decennial census adjustments need to be made.

For the ACS, with its much smaller sample sizes and a frequent goal of being able to able specific questions about subpopulations, weights are quite varied within the sample. One person might stand in for 1,000 while another, as a member of a subpopulation for which detailed information is sought, might stand for only 100.

For students, actually for most people, weights add a layer of confusion. If you’re using more statistically sophisticated software than CODAP, you avoid the confusion by specifying the variable that represents weight, and the software does the rest. We didn’t want this black box capability for students working with census microdata obtained through our portal, so we worked out another solution which we validated with a statistician at IPUMS in Minneapolis.

Basically, we downloaded our samples from IPUMS, with each person having a weight and then modified the portal’s sampling process so that it is as if each person appears the number of times specified by their weight. So if a person’s weight is 1,000, it appears as if that 1,000 of that person are present. With this charade in place we can simulate simple random sampling for which each person in the population has equal probability of appearing in the sample.

We think that this is a good solution for our target audience of grades 5–14 because they already have plenty on their cognitive plates.

There is a downside of course, which is that in a sample a given person may appear more than once. This is noticeable if the person is an outlier in some respect; e.g. has a very high income. It is more likely when sampling from states with lower populations.

Does this help? What has come of your conversations with your students about census and ACS sampling? Have you had to introduce the concept of stratified sampling that leads to an assigned weight for each person?

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Jacob,

Currently the shared view link stays active indefinitely. Eventually we will have to bring about a mechanism by which they become invalid.

When you create a shared view, a copy of the document in its current state is stored on a server maintained by Concord. As you know, this copy does not “track” the original document, but gets updated when you have the document in front of you and Update Shared View.

Some groups have used the shared view mechanism as a backup to saving files. It’s a bit cumbersome, but it certainly does work.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Andee,

Yes, this happens. The cause lies in the CSV or in the way the CSV was created. Typically the CSV has extra commas with nothing between them.

Thanks for the report!

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Travis,

CODAP allows for any of four keys to be used as you can see in the accompanying screenshot.

Note that the simple county name is allowed, but, for common county names, will be insufficient. It was included for those situations in which a small number of counties are displayed, all with unambiguous names.

Bill

Attachments:

1. 

   county_keys.png
   

[Bill Finzer]

Hello Andrew,

Thank you very much for this important bug report! We’ll have it fixed in the next build.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Thomas,

I just tried this with the API Tester and I got a notification on deleting the last attribute.

{ “action”: “notify”,

“resource”: “dataContextChangeNotice[New Dataset]”,

“values”: {

“operation”: “deleteAttributes”,

“result”: {

“success”: true,

“attrIDs”: [

25

]

}

}

}

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Andrew,

You’ve definitely uncovered a bug. Switching the legend attribute to categorical should produce the three lines. We’ll fix it!

Meanwhile, here’s another workaround that might work for your students:

1. Drag Company Number all the way to the left in the case table so that you get a new table with just three rows.
2. Edit the three numbers so they are no longer pure numbers. (In the screen shot you’ll see that I just added the letter ‘A’ after each.)
3. Now, as shown in the screenshot, the desired three lines appear.

Hope this helps. And sorry for the trouble posting.

Bill

Attachments:

1. 

   Screen-Shot-2021-07-16-at-8.40.22-AM.png
   

[Bill Finzer]

Yes, when you open a shared link, the document will have no undo history in it.

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Andee,

When you open a shared link to a document there is no undo history. If you come upon someone midstream in their work on a document, there may be quite a bit of undo history, but certain operations are currently not undoable, and the undo history is cleared when the user brings one of those about. (We’re currently working on making all operations undoable.)

CODAP emits an anonymous log stream. Some projects have made use of that, but I haven’t seen anything come from it. I think it would be a bit of work for Concord and for a collaborator to make the log stream fully usable for research.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Rick,

I wonder if the graph screen capture is what you and Matt have been hoping for?

Bill

Attachments:

1. 

   Screen-Shot-2021-07-14-at-7.59.27-AM.png
   

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