Roland Shen Reflections Oct 12, 2013

Group Project 1

1. The group project was a good change of pace from all that we have done so
   far. We were thrown into the fire and had to collaborate with our team of four
   to survive on such short notice. This forced us as students to focus on this
   class and put it as a priority over other classes and I learned more about
   iPython Notebook through this exercise than through any lecture beforehand.

2. My "aha!" moment of the week was when I figured out how to run iPython
   Notebook from my VM. I also learned about background and foreground processes
   from my technical lead (who also happened to be in my group) so that I could run
   iPython Notebook in the background while working on other things in the
   foreground. I never knew such a thing existed and I hope to learn more as the
   class progresses.

3. If I were to take a different approach this week, it would be to start on the
   group project sooner. We talked over email a little bit after Thursday but we
   did not meet up as a group until Sunday at Aaron's office hours, which was
   poorly planned. Starting sooner would have allowed for us to sooner encounter
   the setbacks we had and we could have produced a better end product. I know
   perfection is the enemy but seeing the other groups' projects made me feel that
   ours was a bit lackluster.

Roland Shen Reflections Oct 4, 2013

Stark Notes Included

Measure earthquake as a stochastic process using poisson process and memoryless
properties to predice earthquakes estimate how big earthquakes are using moments
in physics earthquake probability is a metaphor claims that events occur as if
in a casino game, why not like terrorism instead?
La quila earthquake in italy 2010
Urn model is just an assumption, just because there is a rate that there is a
probability

Analogy of earthquake prediction to weather prediction obviously you would
predict differently based on past events like if it rains today, it is more
likely to rain tomorrow than it would in a summer. If an earthquake happens,
aftershocks will be more likely to happen.

**Assuming that something is random is a big assumption to make

I think that this week was a vast improvement from last week.
I had a hard time setting up virtual machine because I forgot my password on the
VM that I had already downloaded. That was easily fixed though, along with the
local port.

An aha moment that I had this week was when Professor Stark talked about how we
should treat earthquake occurances. Now that we know how earthquake prediction
works and the consequences of those who try to predict earthquakes and fail
really puts this class into perspective when it comes to reproducibility and
statistical analysis.

We have a goal that we can work toward in our groups and we also now have a
schedule that we can follow. I am looking forward to next week's presentations
on Tuesday and working with my group over the weekend.

Roland Shen Reflections Sept 28, 2013

What are your thoughts on reproducibility?

I think reproducibility is a great idea for people who are interested in
research and making an impact within the academic community. It allows for
others to understand your work step by step and to be able to create the same
results from your findings. Although I might not be interested in doing
research, I believe that reproduceability is important even within the
workplace. If I had to complete a project within a company, I would like to be
able to reproduce the same quality work later if a similar project shows up
again. I wouldn't want my first successful project to be a product of luck and I
would want to be absolutely sure that if I followed the same steps from the
previous project, then the current project would yield the same results. The
strongest justification for the opposite view is that some measurements in data
are variable based, that even though all the steps are carefully recorded and
followed, different results can appear. For such experiments or processes, it is
important to say at the beginning of a process that there will be variations in
findings but only because that is the nature of the research at hand.

Roland Shen Reflections Sept 21, 2013

We only had two classes with guest lecturers this week. I don't know if there
are any assignments related to these lectures.

I still have not felt an "A-ha!" moment in this course but hopefully when the
class starts to pick up next Tuesday there will be more opportunities to learn
new material.

Again there was no new material this week and as such I wouldn't have done
anything different. I'm glad that there were guest speakers this week.

Roland Shen Reflections Sept 17, 2013

I was unaware that there would be a second reflection this week. I feel that our
class discussion in Thursday's section covered the main points that the course
should improve on. As far as communication between staff and student goes, I was
unsure whether we should submit anything if we did not do anything programming
related in class for the week. I also did not know if we should attach the
second reflection to the first or to create a new repository. Again, not having
a set assignment schedule can be confusing but we went over this in class.

I still have not felt an "A-ha!" moment in this course but hopefully when the
class starts to pick up next Tuesday there will be more opportunities to learn
new material.

Again there was no new material this week and as such I wouldn't have done
anything different. I'm glad that the GSIs are hosting office hours from 9am-
noon on Friday so that everyone can be on the same page.

Roland Shen Reflections Sept 7, 2013

1. I had a hard time setting up my virtual machine until group leaders in class
   helped me out. Following instructions for downloading ipython and IRC was also
   confusing. I understand what I should have done now that I have everything set
   up, but I feel that the instructions could have been clearer. There was a lot of
   computer lingo that I couldn't process espectially after I had installed the VM
   VirtualBox. I didn't know how to do anything in homework-1 after the
   installation.

I am also trying to understand how to use github through the octocat tutorial
since github still feels foreign to me. I need to get used to knowing what
pulling a repository means or pushing something to someone else, as well as how
to navigate through the website efficiently.

2. I have not yet had an "aha!" moment but maybe that is because I haven't spent
   enough time learning github. I have tried to use Git Shell for this assignment
   but that hasn't gone well so far.

3. If I were to take a different approach to this past week, I would have spent
   more time in becoming acquainted with github. I am not a very fast learner,
   especially when it comes to programming, so spending more time definitely would
   have helped. For other students, I suggest using IRC a lot. Whenever you have a
   problem, someone else would probably also have the same problem and maybe
   figured out a way to solve it by the time you ask. I didn't know what to do for
   this week's reflection so I went onto IRC and asked. Someone told me
   instructions to come to this page and post.

I was added to the class, however, for some reason, I was not able to see bspace for Stat 157 on my bspace page. I assumed that we only had a github page for this course, resulting missing several announcement and information that was only posted on bspace.

The speakers came to the class to do their presentation regarding toad conservation research. It showed their so much effort on their research, and the way they carry out their field studies and research to reach their objective.

It was quite well-organized and explained bit about reproducibility of the data in the experiment and research. Professor Stark also had a presentation about the statistical tests regarding earthquake data.

2nd Week

I was still on the waitlist, and the class was still full. I was a graduating senior majoring statistics, yet I was very behind on the waitlist. I had to go to other statistics class that had time-conflict with this class. Though I intended to take this class if it was available, I had go back and forth between these two classes.

I also had trouble following the instruction on homework 1, and installing python notebook. The instruction was missing steps, and the picture description of step by step would have been very helpful. It was also challenging to get ssh access to the Ubuntu server running on my Virtual box.

1st Week

I have my own reflection repository, yet, I am not sure whether I was supposed to do reflection here? or fork? pull request? I am not quite sure I had done correctly. So, I am moving my reflections here.

So for the first week of the instruction, we were introduced into the course description, syllabus, and first homework. I thought I would learn programming skills such as python, SQL, and so on as described on the course description.

We were given with several color papers to express levels of understanding, questions, and all but I do not think it is effective. People would just find it troublesome to do so. Course did not have a tentative schedule yet, so we did not really know what to expect.