Anyway, I wrote my CS 350 (Operating Systems) midterm last Friday. As I expected, it was relatively hard. A large portion of it was rote memorization from the lectures, notes and textbook. Then there were a few analytical questions that really required a deep understanding of certain topics (i.e. how virtual addresses are structured to incorporate multi-level page tables, etc.). Good thing ~1/9th of the total marks were for bonus questions.

CS 348 (Intro. to Database Mgmt.) and CS 341 (Algorithms) were scheduled back-to-back on Wednesday and Thursday. I don’t have much to say about the former – the course is pretty straightforward especially since I had a lot of prior experience with the material in previous work terms and hobby projects. Algorithms, on the other hand, wasn’t anywhere as easy. Though the topic is very interesting (examples here, here and here), proving optimality and determining time complexity is not. Especially when the proofs lead to equations with chain exponents and logarithms. For the midterm I actually had to leave certain questions unfinished because going through the math alone would eat up all of my time. Meh.

Anyway, it doesn’t look like I can relax for a little while longer since I have a ton of assignments to do for various courses. Out of the frying pan and into the fire much?

Anyway, I had my organizational behaviour midterm on Thursday followed by my marketing midterm on Friday. Needless to say I had a lot of reading to catch up on. I think between both of those courses I’ve went through around 400 pages of textbook reading. Speaking of textbooks… Ow.

Let’s start with PSYCH 338. One interesting concept about this particular course is that it’s divided into two parts: a standard lecture followed by discussion groups with TAs. This allows for more freedom to elaborate on weekly topics through various interesting activities (e.g. analyzing management styles in videos and teamwork exercises). It definitely helps considering my class size is well over 300. I thought all of the main concepts were articulated well; there was nothing that made me go “WTF is this?!”.

The midterm consisted of 55(+1) multiple-choice questions which I thought were relatively tricky. A large portion of them had options like “both A and B”, “all of X, Y, Z”, etc., while others contained negators and various keywords. Some were multi-part questions on a bunch of related terms. It definitely felt more like a 100+ question exam.

As for BUS 352W, I definitely enjoyed the lectures as there is a lot of discussion throughout (as opposed to most/all of my CS courses where everyone is just listening). A lot of the material resonated with me considering the stuff I read up on in my spare time (in addition to work experience). Good thing it’s summer though; I wouldn’t have liked walking to WLU and back in the snow.

I probably wasn’t as prepared for the marketing midterm as I could have been since I was heavily distracted by a few side projects. The exam was basically a bunch of “short”-answer questions followed by some multiple-choice. It was a lot of writing, but I actually finished with time to spare. Three minutes, in fact. Awesome! (Note: I suck at writing tests and even moreso when they’re within tight time constraints.)

On the aforementioned distractions: I’ve been researching like mad on various topics like computer vision, AI, OCR and more. I wonder if there are courses at UW for some of those topics… I know that there is one for AI in CS; the others might be in various engineering disciplines. Currently my focus is on OpenCV (a programming library for real-time computer vision) and Tesseract (an OCR engine). I’ll probably write something about them later if I find anything interesting.

April 23rd marked my last day at Indigo. After four work terms there in two different positions, I think it’s safe to say I have a decent amount of knowledge about the company now; it’s been a lot of fun working on their website and trying not to break things. I took the following week off to relax and to visit the Toronto Zoo – pictures to come later (maybe).

Anyway, I’ve finished my final work report last week. It was rather dry – as usual – since I had to conform to academic writing standards set by my faculty. At least the topic itself was rather interesting: I managed to catch up on some of the latest developments in HTML5 and CSS 3.

As for classes this term, I have CS 341 (Algorithms), CS 348 (Databases), CS 350 (Operating Systems), BUS 352W (Marketing) and PSYCH 338 (Organizational Psychology). All of them look to be relatively interesting from what I’ve seen so far. We’ll see if my opinion changes once things get underway.

I suppose it’s about time that I start specializing in topics that I enjoy. After 3A I don’t have any real required courses so I have a multitude of options. Heck, even in 3A I only have 2 courses that I absolutely have to take (CS 341: Algorithms and CS 350: Operating Systems). That pretty much leaves ~18 slots to complete various degree requirements and whatnot. Woot.

From the beginning I knew I was going to lean heavily towards business. I finally formalized my plan change today and added the option in (it’s essentially a minor that isn’t a minor). I don’t know how much it really matters, but eh.

Anyway, for my 3A term I’ll likely be taking CS 348 (Introduction to Database Management), PSYCH 338 (Organizational Psychology) and BUS 352W (Introduction to Marketing Management) along with the two listed above. That looks like a pretty decent selection. I might make some changes depending on various factors of course.

After that… Well, there’s a number of courses that I can take. I guess I’ll break it down for future reference.

• BUS 362W (Building and Managing Products, Services and Brands) will likely be the last business course I’ll enroll in to fulfill a couple of requirements. It’s the successor to BUS 352W (I suppose that’s why the course number was changed) and the topic itself looks pretty interesting.
• ENGL 119 (Communications in Mathematics & Computer Science) and CS 492 (The Social Implications of Computing) are “required” courses for the business option. I don’t really have any further comments at this point.
• CS 370 is a prerequisite for a course I want to take. It appears to be a whole lot of math. I’m just hoping it’s more applied than theoretical.
• CS 488 (Introduction to Computer Graphics) is pretty much the course I’ve been looking forward to since my first term here at UW. Graphics has always been one of the few topics that *really* interest me. Indeed, I’ll probably try to learn a bit of OpenGL over the next few months.
• PHYS 121 and PHYS 122 (Mechanics and Waves 1/2) are pretty much filler courses to satisfy my degree’s breadth & depth requirements. I chose physics in part because I think I can apply a lot of it in, say, animation. My other alternative is to take a couple of astronomy courses, but eh…
• CS 490 (Information Systems Management) links together computer science and business. That’s all I need to say on that matter.
• CS 349 (User Interfaces) also looks to be a very entertaining course (especially since I wrote my last work report on application design…).
• Considering how much I’ve been lashing out at Facebook, Google, RockYou and others over the last couple weeks, it’s no surprise that CS 458 (Computer Security and Privacy) is on this list.
• CS 486 (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence) is pretty obvious. Evil robots ftw!
• I might take CS 448 (Database Systems Implementation) as a follow-up to CS 348 depending on whether I have room. We’ll see.
• Finally, I’ll probably take CS 343 (Concurrent and Parallel Programming) to round out my programming skills and to satiate my curiosity on developing for multiple cores (pretty useful considering the shift in CPU development over the last few years).

That’s a pretty comprehensive set of courses I think. It should give me a pretty solid foundation to build on in the future.

On Thursday I wrote the CS 246 final. It was pretty straightforward – a bunch of short answer questions about C++ and software engineering plus a rather large programming question at the end. Considering the last question was pretty much an extension/adaptation of assignment #6 and a similar question on a previous final, it wasn’t too hard. There was definitely a time crunch there though; my wrist was hurting when I was done.

Next up was STAT 231 and PSYCH 101 both on Saturday. Ugh. I was actually pretty worried about the former (too much formulae to remember), but the exam was pretty easy. I didn’t like the fill-in-the-blank questions though (-1 for every wrong answer vs. +0.5 for every right answer?) – definitely reminded me of certain Asian exams. As for the latter, let’s just say I’m glad it was multiple choice. A lot of questions were just strange and there were plenty of duplicates as well – I don’t think the question generator for the exam was doing too great of a job. Ah well.

What really sucked was that since my last exam was on a Saturday night most of the buses weren’t running anymore. I totally forgot about that fact, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyhow. Bah.

(Oh yeah, so my graph turned out to be relatively accurate. I’d bring up CS 240 / PSYCH 101 a tad and maybe tone down CS 246 / STAT 231. CS 245 gets to shoot through the roof.)

First off was CS 245. Yeah… I’m not going to lie: the final for this course was made of pure suck. It might not have been so bad given a very strong grasp of the concepts, but that wasn’t going to happen. I’ve already mentioned how woefully inadequate the given resources were; throughout the term I was drawing knowledge from various sites, textbooks and similar course offerings at other universities (go Wikipedia!). Don’t get me wrong – I don’t mind having to do extra studying. But when I learn more on my own time than in class (say approximately 75%), why am I paying for tuition? Meh.

Despite my rant, I still did relatively well throughout the rest of the course so I should pass comfortably. *Knocks on wood.* The main thing I’m worried about is how adversely it will affect my performance in the future (for example, when I take databases next term). It hasn’t been too bad thus far, but eh…

CS 240 is on the other extreme. Typically people don’t complain when a course is too easy, but I think there’s a limit. Throughout the term, the class has been relatively quiet and disengaged (in contrast with CS 246 where questions were being thrown around left, right and center). I’ve even heard some comments along the lines of whether this course actually prepares us for CS 341. Guess we’ll know soon enough.

I just wrote CS 240′s final a few hours ago and I’d say it was a pretty fair exam. Approximately half the questions were derived from assignments (so they were kind of trivial in nature as long as a few key facts were memorized), but the other half actually required quite a bit of thought (for example, adapting generic algorithms to solve a given problem). Surprisingly there weren’t any short-answer questions, despite the fact that we covered complexity classes and such.

I kind of wish we were given more time though; I didn’t actually get to finish despite rushing through quite a bit of it. Time has been my adversary on pretty much every exam I’ve taken; very rarely do I get the chance to do things like proofreading and whatnot. I don’t like that – time limits test dexterity, not knowledge. My brain just isn’t wired for short, intense sessions.

Actually, I can go one step further: I have a bone to pick with the notion of writing exams as a whole. I’ll rant about it in another post though, since I would have to delve into different learning styles and whatnot (plus I’ve deviated enough already)…

Anyway, CS 246 is up next! It should be “fun”.

In other news, Facebook changed some privacy features (and in the process ignited a lot of controversy), RockYou gets hacked (exposing some 32 million accounts with passwords stored in plain-text – I didn’t think any company could be so incredibly stupid in 2009) and Google implements personalized search (thus changing SEO completely). Oh, and it started snowing here with temperatures dipping below 0 degrees celsius. Yay. (In contrast, central Alberta dipped below -45 degrees last Sunday. )

First off was CS 240. It was basically an assignment on string manipulation via. the Boyer-Moore and Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithms. Then we had to manually construct a Huffman tree to determine an encoding sequence for compressing text. Pretty simple stuff, I guess.

Next up was STAT 231. This was basically on model checking, p-value computation (hypothesis checking) and finding prediction intervals. Again, relatively straightforward considering most of the stuff could literally be copied and adapted from the notes… I think I feel a little more confident about statistics now.

The two assignments for CS 245 were insane though. I literally spent two days reading through various logic textbooks and notes just trying to understand the material. It actually doesn’t seem that hard, but you wouldn’t think that from attending our lectures. I’ll repeat my quip earlier on Twitter – “University: the place where people make simple things needlessly complicated”. I think I’ll be using that quote for some time to come. The good thing, however, is that I think I have a working grasp of what’s going on; that last tutorial definitely helped a lot (the tutor definitely knows how to communicate concepts at a level most people can grasp). I do have one question though. Why were there two assignments due on a single day? It should have been combined into one (this would save about 100 pages worth of cover pages)…

Finally, I had a massive assignment due for CS 246. It was a two-person programming project modelling a soda concession service (with vending machines, students, soda creation plants and more). I have to say, it was actually a lot of fun writing code for this project; I think this was the first thing involving software engineering concepts that I’ve done in university. Perhaps I’d be singing a different tune if I wasn’t interested in or haven’t done any massive projects previously though. In terms of size, this assignment can’t compare to my content management system and I think that prior experience definitely helped a lot. (Alternatively, it might be because I got to express my evil side writing code that overcharges people and steals their WatCards/money. )

So now that those assignments are done and over with, I have to start studying for exams. Ugh. CS 240 seems pretty straightforward, but I keep wondering whether we’re going to be thrown a curveball on the final (the stuff we’ve done so far seems far too trivial for a second year course). STAT 231 and CS 245 are likely going to be my hardest subjects (with CS 245 coming up this Thursday…). CS 246 will probably be moderately hard, but at least I know what I’m doing in that course. Then there’s PSYCH 101 which I enjoyed but could barely put time into since I was trying not to fail my other courses.

Ah well, we’ll see how it goes.

That’s nice. My question is, does it really matter? How much consideration is even given to those forms? Is there even a third party inspecting them and taking proper action? After all, those evaluations could easily be a facade, an illusion to make us think that our opinions matter.

Sure, there are many good (nay, even great) instructors at UW who strive to improve themselves and their course offerings. On the flip side of the coin, there are those who seemingly couldn’t care less about the class (perhaps they were forced to teach a topic they disliked or something). Now, I won’t question their intelligence; they’re obviously insanely smart to get where they are. It’s just that there are people who are better suited at imparting knowledge upon others.

At TED2009 last February, Bill Gates spoke about education (and malaria, but that’s out of the scope of this post ). While I believe his focus was on primary and secondary education, several of the points he made are still relevant at the college and university level. What kind of process do lecturers undergo to improve their teaching? How are they rewarded for doing well?

Gates mentioned how video can improve quality of education as a whole. It can be used as a feedback mechanism and gives students another resource to learn / study from; an example of this is the OpenCourseWare project at MIT. Funny that technology use at UW seems to be sorely lacking given its reputation in the area. I mean, only recently was video recording equipment added to classrooms (and only a few). Even my high school in a rather small town made use of that particular piece of technology before UW did. Blah.

I figure, given the recent referendums on a new student complex, a health services building and the reinstatement of a radio service fee, we should have one on installing new equipment in existing classrooms. Something like that might actually have a measurable impact on student performance. Heck, it might even get people involved in some decision-making process – kind of important given the amount of student apathy in recent years.

I probably deviated from what I wanted to rant about, but whatever… Something to think about at least.

Last week was largely dominated by CS 240 (Data Structures and Data Management). Assignment #5 was due on Tuesday and the midterm was scheduled two days after. They were worth 12% and 15% of the final grade respectively (yeah, a midterm worth only 3% more than an assignment ). For me, at least, those were the only immediate tasks at hand. Easy, right?

Not so, apparently. The assignment, which was about implementing a B-tree structure, took nearly 30 hours. It definitely didn’t help that I had little experience with Java and completely underestimated the length (my estimate was <10 hours using C++). Anyway, there goes my weekend. I did end up finishing though, albeit with some minor bugs; the program length measured up at over 700 lines (with comments and braces) and the documentation at another 250.

Now, what’s really interesting was the number of people who asked for an extension on the assignment. Fine, there’s nothing wrong with that – indeed, I’m sure most professors wouldn’t mind accommodating their students (given a valid excuse ). However, what really happened was that people essentially pressured the instructor into extending the deadline. It even went as far as implied insults directed towards the course staff (criticizing their lack of foresight in putting a major assignment right before the midterm).

If you ask me, most (if not all) of those arguments in favour of an extension were just BS. There was at least two weeks of notice given in advance (not including the clear weighting on the syllabus). Indeed, both the instructor and the tutor clearly said to start on the assignment early. There was really no real excuse why a mass extension was needed – those arguments were literally a façade to cover up people’s inability to manage time. Now, I’m sure there are those with legitimate reasons (perhaps coming down with the H1N1 flu), but those seem few and far between looking at the posts on the newsgroup.

Anyway, it turns out the extension (’till Friday) was reluctantly granted with a 30% penalty. I think those who needed it should be thankful the course instructor is so lenient; he was well within his rights to refuse (and he did, until an hour before the deadline). The tutor should be given some credit for dealing with this issue too; by trying to accommodate the class (asking the prof. for an extension in lieu of the students), she was essentially adding to her own workload. I later found out that approximately half the class didn’t submit on time; now that’s some statistic right there.

This is coming from someone who literally gets through university procrastinating (I have a pretty good reason for it, but that’s another topic). As I implied earlier, I pretty much rushed through the assignment and could have used some extra time. But I also realized that it was entirely my fault for miscalculating the length of it. It seems like a lot of people have a hard time admitting that.

Bah, whatever. What’s done is done…

As for the midterm? It was a breeze.