16 months (give or take) of the Math blog: a FAQ

So my goal of this post will be to try to answer questions people have asked me in the past and see if I can help people in absentia in the future (questions are paraphrased):

Q1: “Japan 101 is so hard to get into! How do I do it?!”
A1: To be honest, I advise against taking Japan 101. If anyone in the East Asian Studies department at Renison is reading this, they’re probably going to be really pissed at that, but I have a reason, and it’s not a negative one. The class is great. The profs (Fumie-sensei is back again so she’s once again the tutorial prof for 101) are awesome, the course is interesting (for those interested), and the material moves at a good pace (a bit slow for my liking, to be honest, but I can see the reasoning behind the structure). The problem is that the enrollment is so high and the course is so slow that you probably don’t lose much by simply buying the book yourself and studying from it on your own. The difference is that you don’t get credit for the course, but my position is that if you’re taking Japan 101 for the credit, you should be doing the East Asian Studies diploma. I find it hard to believe (but have no hard facts to back up my opinion) that 70+ people per term (200+ per year) are doing the East Asian Studies diploma and using Japanese as their language of choice (Korean and Chinese are also eligible languages). If you’re not planning on doing the East Asian Studies diploma, leave the room in the class for the people who are, because they need it for their degree. Instead, contact Maruoka-sensei (useful websites at end of post) and ask her to buy the textbook. The book is custom-written by Maruoka-sensei and can be purchased for about $35 from her at Renison. In fact, the same can be done with Japan 102 and 201 as well. The Japanese profs are nice people, and if you are having trouble studying on your own, it’s unlikely that they’ll deny helping you if you ask nicely.

Q2: “I’ve heard UW is really picky with the people they take and I’m scared about my marks! What should I do?”
A2: Don’t worry about it. I know people who got into UW CS (rumoured, at least where I’m from, to require a 95+% average in high school) with a mid-80s average. Most of the rumours are overhyped. Just do your best, and if it works it works, but stressing out won’t get you anywhere.

Q3: “I heard you took the advanced math courses. Are they really that hard?”
A3: Yes. I didn’t lie when I said I would have failed Math 147 if I hadn’t dropped it. The courses are a lot of work and they are quite difficult. However, if you feel you are up to the challenge and want the higher understanding, they are definitely more interesting than the regular counterparts in that sense. Also, I find the people in those classes are more closely knit due to the difficulty of the work; that is, you’re more likely to meet people and make friends in the advanced classes, and when I was frosh, I found this aspect quite refreshing. After taking the regular math courses, I found that this close-knit camaraderie does not exist there (or if it does, it either passed me by or was not as evident).

Q4: “Which CS class should I take in my 1A?” (this was a question I asked when I was frosh, so I feel it needs to be answered)
A4: Unfortunately, I can’t really give you a good, straight answer. The structure of the 1A CS courses are changing as of September, and the Java courses (125, 133, and 134) are being completely eradicated (or so I understand) in favour of a language called Python. I have no experience in Python, so I can’t speak to its difficulty, and definitely can’t speak to the difficulty of the courses themselves. I’m also not completely sure of the structure of how the courses will be done (i.e. I’ve heard certain courses are only open to CS majors, even in 1st year), so I can’t even offer an idea of the options. However, this is what I can say: If I could do my frosh course selection over again, I would have taken CS135 instead of 134, as the prof is better (saying nothing against Professor Case, she’s an incredible professor too, but I think it would have been more interesting with Professor Ragde, plus the material in that course is more interesting, and even if Prof. Ragde isn’t teaching it, the course has a reputation for very high-caliber profs). Take that as you will. If you’d like more information, Professor Ragde would probably be the best person to contact.

That pretty much covers the FAQ. Here are some important information you might want to check out, as they help with that all-important administrative stuff:

http://ego.uwaterloo.ca/~uwdir/Search.html – UWDIR. It has a listing of contact information of pretty much everyone at UW, sorted by name (including both Maruoka-sensei and Prof. Ragde). If you want to look up a prof’s name, or if you want to contact your classmates for homework help, this website is essential.

mathuo@uwaterloo.ca (e-mail) – Math Undergrad Office (MUO) e-mail. It’s generally better to get administrative stuff done in person at the MUO, but if you just need to get some information confirmed or have trouble with QUEST and want to see if something can be done by e-mail, that’s who to contact. Unless you have an open issue with them, though, it’s generally better to go in person (MC 4th floor).

Anyway, that’s all folks. Signing off (and I mean it this time),

Lyle Waldman

A Crossroads

So I’m standing at a crossroads right now, and I’ve been thinking about this all weekend, and I think I’ve come to a conclusion. I was originally planning on walking away from this blog at the end of April for good, as I will be in 2B in September, and the likelihood of anyone taking any of the same courses I’m taking then who will actually care enough to read this blog will be almost 0, as my degree plan is somewhat niched (of the 5 courses I’m taking in fall, 1 will be a 2B CS, 1 a 2B Stats, 1 a 3rd or 4th-year CS (I haven’t actually decided what course it will be yet), one a 2nd year East Asian Studies non-language course, and I have yet to decide the 5th). However, I’ve decided to end the blog early. This will be my second-last post; my last post will be a short FAQ on questions I’ve recieved over the course of my term as UW Math Blogger for future reference. I have a few last comments, but first I’ll explain my reasoning:

My reasoning is threefold:

1) Upon deciding I was going to quit the blog in April, I thought about what my courses are this term. I’m taking 1 2A CS, 2 2B CSes, a 2B Japanese course, and a 2A Stats course. Of those, only 1 is open to all Math students (the Japanese course being open only with the right knowledge, which it’s doubtful a significant percentage of people reading this have), so most people reading this are either CS majors or are skipping over 3/4 of every post. I’m not the UW CS Blogger, I’m the UW Math Blogger, and I’d like to keep my content to its purpose, and I feel my content has passed its purpose.

2) Upon editing and reading past posts, I’ve found that my past posts were filled with a lot more humour and were more interesting to read than my later ones. I don’t like writing boring things, as I’m not (or I try not to be) a boring person, and I hate (yes, I used the word “hate”, because I really mean it) coming off as something I’m not, especially when it shows me in a false negativity (if it shows me in a true negativity, then whatever, I’m not perfect, and I know it).

3) I’ve recently been receiving quite insulting comments on my blog from a particular source. I’d go so far as to say these comments were harassing, but so far there have only been 2, and 2 is hardly reason to call harassment. I received a comment (I before E, except after C, Lyle… ) on a post I wrote a couple weeks ago that essentially said “you suck, go kill yourself”. Not in those words; it used synonyms. Not euphemisms, synonyms. The meaning was not blanketed in any way. I received a similar comment this morning from the same source on a post I made last night. What was troubling wasn’t that these comments existed – I know there are fools on the internet who have nothing better to do with their lives than troll random blogs – but that these comments were from a source I knew.

The source of these comments was taurine.csclub.uwaterloo.ca (I don’t know if it’s WordPress that told me this or GMail that tracks it, but it was included in the e-mail notification I got when this message was posted); that is, these comments came from somebody on a Computer Science Club machine. The CSC is very picky about who gets on their machines; only members are allowed logon privileges. This means that someone from within the CSC wrote these comments, and since I know pretty much everyone in the CSC (I know the more active members anyway), I probably know this person. I don’t know who this person is, and frankly I don’t care; what bugs me is that such things are allowed to go on in the CSC (the members either know or have cause to know), and that people who treat me well (or at least decently…usually…) in person can be so underhanded and insulting when they’re anonymous. I know it’s a basic trait of the internet – anonymity brings out the worst in people – but I’d like to think that people I consider my friends, or at least positively-minded acquaintances, are as such. Just a warning to people who come to UW, that such people do exist here, and they do exist within the CSC (although, to be honest, there are not nearly as many here as in other places, and most of the CSC members are nice, at least to your face; since I don’t know who wrote this comment I can’t be guaranteed that one of the people who’s nice to my face isn’t a troll behind my back, but as far as I know they’re mostly good guys most of the time). Personally, I don’t want to be even tangentially associated with mean-spirited people though, so I won’t be renewing my membership after it expires at the end of this term (although this unfortunately means I’ll have to find another convenient room with a whiteboard when I need to study for a test, or I might have to *gasp* study in my room), but I feel that people should know all sides of a story before making a decision on how to spend their money and time at UW. The CSC is a useful academic resource for CS and opensource software help, but as a general social hangout, my opinion of them has unfortunately deteriorated substantially over the past couple months.

In general, when someone tells me to stop doing something, if I see no immediate reason to stop, I generally don’t, but given both this and the other 2 reasons and the fact that I have too much else on my mind at the moment to deal with it all, I’ve decided to just get it over with; it would have been done in a month and a half anyway.

So basically I figure that my travels here at UW are best told to people who I know will care and who I know I can talk to rationally and will respond in kind. I must confess that part of my reason for continuing the blog as long as I have (aside from the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed doing it until I started being harassed by the CSC) was to keep my parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and other relatives and important people to me, updated on how I’m doing without having to call them all individually. That’s largely why I wrote so much and went so in-depth into everything. I suppose I’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way from now on. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. Perhaps sometime in the future I’ll start another blog on a different topic. If you see my name on anything in the future, I encourage you to post and ask questions or make comments. Just keep in mind my rule of thumb:

“If you have nothing good to say, don’t say anything at all”.

(and yes, the post I made about a week ago made me look like a hypocrite in that sense. I was. I’m sorry. I’ll try not to do it again.)

Also, as of now, the e-mail box will remain unmonitored, so comments will go unchecked and unanswered. I apologize if anyone has questions. I’ll try to cover everything in the following FAQ. To all reading this (including the anonymous CSCer), my best wishes to you for all your future endeavors, whether a current UW student, a prospective UW student, or just someone who’s curious about what this windbag is talking about. On to the FAQ.

My Blog: How to read

So, from comments that have been left here and from talking to people in person who read my blog (yes, people really do recognize me), I’ve noticed there’s a general miscommunication between what I want to say and what gets read. Let me set the record straight: 

1) No news is good news. I’ve been told my blog is excessively negative. It probably is. However, there is a saying that goes “no news is good news”. I tend not to talk about the good things that happen academically, because I’m more focused on telling people about the mistakes I make and how not to do what I do. It’s easy to lead by example, but teach by counterexample, I’ve found. This is why my blog is so negative all the time and focuses on my mistakes. 

2) I do not spend all my time goofing off. Yes, I do goof off on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis. It is true, I will not lie. However, I learned an important lesson early in high school: It’s not worth studying material you know. If you study too much, you lose time better spent enjoying yourself (life is short, University is shorter!), and, more importantly, you lose concentration. Staring at a book for hours on end reading material you already knew doesn’t help anything, plus it makes you tired and not concentrate on the stuff you *do* need to learn. When I study, I review what’s been gone over in class and bone up on what I feel I need to bone up on. I do my homework when I need to do it, and it almost always gets done (except for that one CS240 assignment I’m still kicking myself over). That method got me an A+ average in high school and is so far working in University.

3) I’m not failing all my courses. I’m not a 100% student, but my cumulative average to date, including the C- I got in Math 145, is an A. I have more A+es than marks below A- (in fact, with the exception of the Circuits course I failed, which, due to some administrative magic, is counted (both towards my average and my credit count, although not towards my transcript) as never having been taken, Math 145 is my only mark to date below an A-). The reason I write as if I’m failing everything is because I’m used to having really good marks. To me, a B+ and a D- are equivalent in stature. It’s a pass, but it’s a pass I’m not happy with. This is especially why when I get an assignment or test back that has a mark below an A on it when I feel (rightly or wrongly) that the marking scheme cheated me, I get really mad, more mad than I probably should get. It’s my standards. They’re probably too high. I know.

So how should you read my blog?

1) If I enumerate things that went wrong on a test without outwardly saying “it was a bad test”, it wasn’t a bad test. I’m simply saying “if you take this course, watch out for these things”. If I do badly on a test, I’ll say “I did badly on that test”. Otherwise, the test was fine and I’m OK with what I got, but I didn’t get 100%. Similarly for assignments.

2) If I say “I need to work harder”, that’s an indication that I need to work harder and that it’s a problem with something I’m doing, and I plan to work on it. It’s my acknowledgement of my own faults, and a memo to myself to improve myself. I’m not perfect, I know I’m not perfect, and there are things I need to work on. This blog is me thinking to myself about things I don’t mind the rest of the world hearing about. I’m OK with the fact that I’m not perfect, but I do my best and I always try to learn whenever possible.

3) If I write about a problem that’s going on, if it’s in my power to deal with it, I’m in the process of dealing with it. I’ve learned many of the channels to go through to resolve administrative issues, and I’ve become decent at dealing with them. Just because I say something’s a problem doesn’t mean it’s going to be that way forever. Again, it’s the whole “these are things to watch out for at UW” thing.

I’ll try to change my writing style to make my blog seem more positive and upbeat from now on, as I intend it to be, but in case I don’t, this is a short guide of how to read.

Lyle Waldman

Lesson learned

This is gonna be a short one:

I said some things in my last post about some people that I probably shouldn’t have said the way I said it. I changed my last post to reflect what I wanted to say without being insulting. Writing when angry is never a good thing. Lesson learned, sorry if I insulted anyone.

That is all.

Lyle Waldman

My CS245 Midterm and other stuff

I got my CS245 midterm back today. Holy crap, what the heck. Not even kidding. I got a B+ on it. I should have gotten an A+ if Prof. Trefler didn’t decide to be such a stickler for detail when he was instructing the markers on what to do (I did legitimately make one mistake). So basically he told us that there are these 2 things called soundness and completeness which equate 2 methods of proof (i.e. if you prove something a certain way, you can say “by soundness” or “by completeness” and you can state the proof a different way). He then proceeded to make us use soundness and/or completeness on pretty much every question on the exam, and every time we did the proof (correctly or incorrectly) but neglected to say “by soundness” or “by completeness” (using those words; leaving them out doesn’t count), he took off somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the weight of the question and did so for every question on the exam. Of course, since we were taught that it’s an equivalence statement and that the equivalence exists, myself, along with a good chunk of the class, lost a good chunk of our mark on this midterm because we forgot to put this in. Basically it’s equivalent to saying that since we’re given that a = b, then therefore a = b. It’s a dumb reason to lose so many marks, in my opinion. I can understand losing the marks once or twice, or losing a mark each time, but I lost a good chunk of marks EVERY TIME. I lost 10% on the midterm because of this. I talked to the TA in tutorial, and he said flat out that if I’d put that one sentence in, I would have gotten all those marks.

Then there was another question where part b followed almost directly from part a. I got full marks on part a and then said “by part a, part b is correct” (or something to that effect), which I asked the TA in the exam and he said was a valid answer, yet somehow I lost 3 marks. Prof. Trefler spent about 5 minutes staring blankly at my paper before saying “come to my office hour and we’ll discuss it”, which, to me, given his tone of voice, sounded more like “come to my office hour and I’ll spend another half hour staring at it before telling you to come to my next office hour”. I talked to the TA in tutorial, and he couldn’t figure it out either. He told me to see the TA who marked it, which I can’t do, because I have a CS240 midterm tomorrow during that time slot. I had no problems in CS241 when everything was automarked…

Of course, there was also the obligatory “I’ll make you memorize a definition you were never taught” question on the midterm which dropped my mark, along with the mark of one of my friends, by 4. This seems to be a trend in CS classes as it was done on both the CS134 midterm (in the multiple choice section, although the question was dropped after marking) and the CS241 midterm (a somewhat narrow and counterintuitive UNIX question).

OK, enough ranting. On to other things:

CS240: So the CS240 midterm is tomorrow. I have yet to study, and there’s really only 1 or 2 topics I need to study. Unfortunately, my notes on these 2 topics are awful, so I have to wait till class tomorrow when Prof. Cormack said he’d try to go over them. Once I get these 2 concepts, I think I’ll be ready for the midterm.

In other CS240 news, apparently the TAs are a bit disorganized. In the tutorial yesterday (yes, tutorial on Sunday), the TA went over a few topics. The tutorial itself wasn’t too bad, although some topics weren’t covered in as much detail as I would have liked. After the tutorial, I asked the tutor where I could pick up my written assignments (240 has a written and programming component to about half the assignments so far). He told me where to pick them up. I went there, but they weren’t there. Apparently the other TA either hadn’t put them out, or had lost mine. I hope he hasn’t lost mine, especially since one of the assignments was on one of the topics I don’t understand well. I’m waiting for an e-mail reply.

In other OTHER 240 news, I asked the TA about one of the topics I was confused about, to make sure I had my definitions right. He told me I had them slightly wrong and corrected me. When I proceeded to use the definitions he had given me to help out someone else, I was told by Profs. Cormack and Ragde (why Prof. Ragde is on the CS240 newsgroup so much escapes me, but nevertheless…) that my definitions were wrong. The TA told me so, though… :S *sigh* I just hope everything works out come April.

The CS251 midterm was last Thursday. I thought it was a good midterm. The first 6 (of 8 ) questions were pretty easy; simple binary math and boolean expressions. Nothing too serious. The last 2 questions were harder. The last question took me a good 1/2 hour because the solution was a bit counterintuitive. I got it in the end (or I think I did, although given how my 245 midterm worked out, I could have been completely off the mark), and the solution was really cool. I actually had to chuckle to myself when I got it. The second-last question was really wordy. I had to read it 3 or 4 times to make sure I understood what the question was asking. It dealt with 251’s Finite State Machines (similar to the DFAs from 241, but not the same, and it’s this difference that throws me off every time I see them). As usually happens when dealing with 251’s FSMs, I got thrown off for about 5 minutes before realizing how to do it, but I think I got, if not full marks, then part marks for sure. We’ll see, though. Hopefully Prof. Morton has them tomorrow, although I wouldn’t be surprised to not get them back till next week or so.

My JAPAN 202 midterm was also last Thursday. The midterm wasn’t bad, although I did well on the first test so I didn’t study a lot of stuff I should have studied (note to those taking Japanese courses: when the prof says “the test will focus on…”, just ignore the rest of the sentence; it’s usually not true. I should have learned this already, but haven’t). I can’t complain though, except the last question, which was 4 sentences on free composition, and I can’t do free composition even in English, especially not under pressure.

I’m a bit worried about Stat 230, since I think I screwed up the last test. I think the problem is that I’m trying to sort problems into subsets of solutions, instead of solving the problem as it is, which is how I got 99% in Data Management in high school. The material is the same as in Data. I’m going to try to get back into that state of mind for the next test and see how it goes. Unfortunately, since there’s no textbook for Stat230, finding practise questions is a bit difficult. I should probably ask Diana about this.

That’s about it for the academic stuff.

This weekend’s going to be pretty busy for me. Luckily I don’t have any urgent assignments for next week, since Super Smash Brawl is coming out on Sunday, and I, like all Wii-owners, have been looking forward to it for about 1 1/2 years since the Wii’s launch (and even before that). I’ve made plans with a friend in residence to stay up all night playing Brawl on release. I, luckily, don’t have class till 12:30 on Mondays, so I can stay up till 4 am and still get a good night’s sleep before class. I don’t know about him. But oh well, it’s Brawl ^_^

This Saturday is KonJa’s Karaoke trip to Toronto, which I’m planning on going on. It was a blast last time. Hopefully it’ll be the same this time. There’s also the Japanese Speech Contest at UofT that I want to go see (a friend of mine from JAPAN 102 is in it), although I may not be able to due to trip timing to Toronto. We’ll see.

Anyway, I have a KonJa meeting in 5 minutes. Until next time,

Lyle Waldman