News from TMP - 30 July 1994 ---------------------------- Dear All, Here are some items of news for the July period. This mailing list has been compiled from people making direct enquiries to TMP, and from email addresses left in the FTP logfile; if you don't wish to receive any further mailings, please let me know [p.kent@ic.ac.uk]. MODULE PROGRESS: 3 modules on INTEGRATION are complete in draft form. After some revision they will be put on-line in a few weeks time. At the same time we will upgrade all the on-line materials with any improvements which we've made; this will include a new version of the diagnostic test and comprehensive documentation on using/adapting it. We hope to prepare modules on ALGEBRAIC MANIPULATION and FUNCTIONS before October. TRIALS & EVALUATION: At Imperial College we will be trialing our software on 3 fronts: (1) as a comprehensive remedial program throughout the Autumn term in the Chemistry Department; (2) a more limited exercise for the first month of term in the Chemical Engineering Department; (3) as part of the annual Preliminary Maths program offered by the Maths Dept to all new students during the first month. We have been given a small grant to perform an evaluation during the trials; this will be largely formative, establishing what and how to assess the performance of our software; we hope to carry out a more intensive summative evaluation in Autumn 95. A report on the 94 exercise will be available sometime after Christmas. NEW FTP DAEMON: We are now running the more powerful Washington University (St Louis) FTP daemon. This allows, inter alia, on-the-fly compression and decompression during file transfer. I have not yet got to grips with configuring all the extended features properly - but let me know if you would like to use them. ACCESS BY E-MAIL: Those of you for whom ftp/gopher access is impossible or difficult may like to try out one of the following FTPMail servers. These can process ftp commands sent by you as email and send files back as sequences of email messages, which you re-combine and decode on your local machine. For initial help send this two-line email to the nearest address to you mentioned below: help quit The main (known) servers are: * ftpmail@doc.ic.ac.uk (United Kingdom) * ftpmail@grasp.insa-lyon.fr (France - requests European users only) * ftpmail@ftp.sunet.se (Sweden) * ftpmail@ftp.uni-stuttgart.de (Germany) * ftpmail@census.gov (USA) * ftpmail@ftp.dartmouth.edu (USA) * ftpmail@sunsite.unc.edu (USA) Our Addresses ------------- Phillip Kent, Phil Ramsden and John Wood, Transitional Mathematics Project, Mathematics Department, Imperial College, London SW7 2BZ. Tel: +44 (0)71 594 8503, Fax: +44 (0)71 594 8517. E-mail: tranmath-proj@ic.ac.uk . Gopher and FTP to: othello.ma.ic.ac.uk (155.198.192.26). World-Wide-Web at URL http://othello.ma.ic.ac.uk . Please send *technical* questions about WWW/gopher/ftp and the TMP software direct to p.kent@ic.ac.uk .