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I believe that having a sign-in sheet would be beneficial in increasing class attendance. Although I feel like I learn more from office hours than in lecture, attending lecture gives the class a structure to base our work around. Attributing signing in for attendance to grades also gives students an added incentive. Not all students are here to grade grub but knowing that you stand somewhere gradewise also helps.
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A'ha moments: Knowing the presenter's role within writing the paper. Presenters need to research articles related to the earthquake models and share these findings with their vertical groups.
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If I were to change anything from this week, I would have attended office hours. I couldn't this weekend because I lost my phone and had to go home for the weekend to get a new one. Hopefully I didn't miss anything important. I also could have spent more time learning python.
#Roland Shen Reflections Oct 19, 2013
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I liked how we learned about new forms of programming in JSON and HTML 5, and how we can incorporate these into our learning of python. Stark's lecture also provided us with knowledge on what we are actually doing for this project. The facts about earthquake prediction helped a lot during our discussion and visualization of earthquake data for our group project. Also, sudo apt-get install python-dev is needed to install pandas and is a useful line of code.
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I had many "a-ha!" moments this week, especially during office hours. I helped my group members and classmates in other groups pull request their reflections and by teaching them how to maneuver through github, I had a better understanding of how to go through github myself. My groupmate Khoa also found a nice python package called folium and we used that in our project to show earthquake positions (longitude, latitude) on a world map. Teresa made a great point about collecting Stark notes on a github page as opposed to a google doc. Just create a stat157 repository for Stark notes and then have everyone fork and pull request individual notes onto the repository so that everyone can have easy access without having to click on a google doc link.
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If I were to change anything from this week, it would be to focus more at the beginning of the Stark lecture. I learned a lot from his presentation but more towards the end when he started to bust out all the models in formula form. Paying attention at the beginning of the lecture would probably provide more insight into the "why" instead of the "how."
Stark Notes below: poisson, gamma renewal models dont fit stoichastic seismic data bigger events have smaller windows, shorter event times
automatic alarm: after every event with M > mu start an alarm of duration tau no free parameters
magnitude-dependent automatic alarm (MDA) afte every event with M > mu start an alarm of duration tau*u^M 1 free parameter ^none of this stuff is physics based
For both adjust fraction of time covered by alarms through tau
ETAS model in Luen PhD Dissertation
project in a nutshell, get a model that is better than ETAS at all points
Gutenberg-Richter law for magnitudes Omori-Utsu law for aftershocks
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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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.
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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.