HUNTER ELLINGER — Background & Current Interests

Summary: Software developer with particular interest in mathematics, science (especially physics), education, politics, and community institutions. 

My professional career has been largely as sole or lead programmer in high-tech areas (mainly the experimental-support software for a university linear-accelerator lab and the control and analysis software for its spin-off company that produced the first higher-energy CT scanners designed for industrial use).  The programming has been at levels from microcomputers to mainframes, in languages from assembly to C#.  We (and our customers) also made extensive use of a programming language specific to the devices and processes, which I invented and could thus extend and refine as needed based on new equipment or applications.

My community/political volunteer work includes Peace Corps service in Nigeria, volunteer staff on an alternative newspaper, board-chair and advisory-committee service for a successful grocery cooperative (now over 45 years old), two terms as an elected community-college trustee, management of college-district annexation campaigns, and leadership of a community advisory committee for local service agencies.

Since retiring from professional high-tech work, my software-development efforts have been mainly in two areas: small-scale database-driven websites for various community groups, and web-based instructional-support software for statistics instruction.  Because my wife is a professor of mathematics and statistics, these efforts have benefited greatly from her requests and feedback so that many of them effectively support specific steps in learning statistical concepts at the first-year or graduate level.

I have been strongly interested in math and science education since teaching them in the Peace Corps, and have written explanatory math/science material in various contexts.  In particular, I have collaborated with my wife Mary Parker on a variety of instructional materials and strategies.  This includes joint development of a “math for practical arts” course and textbook – Mathematics For Measurement – which was also the basis for my thesis for a Master’s degree in Math/Science Education from UT Austin.  This spreadsheet-based course acquaints students with a coherent set of moderately-advanced mathematical concepts (functional modeling, noise and error propagation, trigonometry, graphical solution of simultaneous equations, curve-fitting, correlation) using minimal algebraic manipulation and no by-hand calculations.

            Our major curriculum project currently under way is an attempt to reorient the instructional approach taken to hypothesis-testing.  This is the only topic in elementary or intermediate statistics courses that talks about decisions, but as taught now it ignores the fundamental decision-theory concept: the relative cost of the two types of accept/reject mistakes.  This leads to an unmotivated (and thus arbitrary) choice for the accept/reject cutoff value, rather than deducing the value that results in the minimal total error cost for the specified data.  (A full analysis goes one step further and also considers the cost of additional data to determine the combination of accept/reject value and sample size that would yield the lowest overall cost.)

            My most substantial recent database-driven community software project arose as a consequence of some support work for people working to influence the Texas Legislature.  In order to facilitate tracking of education-related bills (and calls to action about them), I developed systems to read and extract relevant information from the official legislative website.  Because its contents are generated as web pages by automated systems, they have internal HTML tags that make it straightforward to dependably parse them.  How each legislator voted on a specific bill can be looked up by bill number on the official website, but not a summary of the votes of a specific legislator.  I addressed this omission with a site that shows how each legislator voted on all bills that were substantially contested (defined as an opposing vote of at least 25%).  The first application of this was to the 2021 regular and special sessions; I plan to extend it to the 2023 sessions when they are complete.