Had my results today, and got the first I needed to get onto my PhD scheme, so I’m well chuffed. Even more chuffed by the mark I got this year, so read on if you’re at all interested.
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Continue reading “Results”…
5:10 pm | Posted in Academia, Exams, Maths | 4 Comments » | Show comments »
Well, never thought I’d say this, but all of the exams are now out of the way and completely done! Overall, they’ve gone pretty well although I’m rather hesitant to predict any marks just in case they’re completely wrong and I tempt fate too much.
The rest of the post is pretty much dedicated to my own opinions of them, so I advise not reading unless you’re really interested.
![lightbox[gal]](http://xyloid.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/IMG_5927.jpg "lightbox[gal]")
Well, I haven’t really got around to playing much with the lens but I’ve taken a few test shots: they will be up shortly. But, to give you an idea of the scale of this thing, here’s a picture of it taken next to my old Sigma 70-300mm APO DG - shortly to be for sale if anyone’s interested…
It’s a fabulous bit of kit. The IS is really quite something, and I’m not sure how I’m going to live without it on any future glass I buy. Next on the list is the 24-105mm f/4L - I think I’ve been thoroughly bitten by the L bug. Damnit.
Other than that, I’ve had another exam, Fractal Geometry. It went pretty well: the exam was easier than last year’s paper and I managed to do about 60% of that without too much trouble. I’ll post a full breakdown of the exams after I’ve finished Information Theory on Saturday morning. And then there will be much cheering, for I shall have finally finished my year.
Well, it’s taken me a while to blog it, but I’ve completed the very last part of my fourth year project, which was a simple 20-25 minute presentation with questions at the end. All in all, it went pretty well. Alan kindly stayed on after he completed his own talk and listened to the ones given in my group. They were quite interesting: the first was on some kind of 2D projection technique to model 3D Navier-Stokes equations, and the other on the spread of disease throughout a tree-like structure.
Most surprising was that I didn’t feel nervous at all; having spent so long typing up the project and fiddling around with code, I knew the algorithms pretty well and I think that I did a good job of summarizing the key aspects. The reaction seemed positive enough, and the questions at the end were reasonably managable.
For anybody who’s going to do this sort of presentation, I’ve collated some handy tips that I found useful.
Well, revision is going as well as can be expected (read: not so well) and it’s essentially keeping me off the interwebs at the moment - although CS:Source is also a reason for that. However, I’m hopeful that at least some of the exams will be good.
Within the next few days, I’ll hopefully have the time to post another entry that some people will hopefully find useful. I’ve got a project presentation on May 9th and I have slides that I’ve created using Beamer and LaTeX. So I’ve managed to set everything up so that I can use my phone as a bluetooth remote. It was ace.
Tonight I’m shooting at my aunt’s school production. Hopefully, I’ll get some good photos and also a bit of video recorded. But it’s more of a run-through for the final night more than anything else at the moment.
Also had my first supervision of the final term today, and as it transpires, my new group has not received 6 of their 9 assignments from last term and only had 3 supervision - I’m a little unsure as to precisely why this is the case. However I’ll try to pick up the pieces and help them along for their final exams this year.
Anyway, that’s all for now. Photos may be uploaded tonight, assuming that any of them are decent enough to put on here.
Logged on to the online module registration today, and am really, really glad I did. Had I not done, I would be taking an unexpected exam in the summer. Almost a complete disaster, but not quite.
11:11 pm | Posted in Exams, University | 2 Comments » | Show comments »
Well after much blood, sweat and tears, I finally finished my project. In total, it was 33 pages long (including references), so not an unsubstantial amount of work! After it’s all gone through the system, been marked and I’ve got my marks back, I plan on posting a copy on here. But I want to ensure it goes without a hitch first.
Anyway, that was finished about 2 weeks ago. I took a week off which was quite nice, in which I’ve bought many things, most of which are yet to be delivered.
They include a 160gb laptop hard-drive (for the bargin price of £75 with free shipping, thanks to eBuyer); 512MB of SODIMM RAM for my laptop; an excellent 2gb SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash card; the Canon RC-1 Remote (from eBay, only £11); a 10/100 ethernet switch and a CompactFlash reader.
Unfortunately this spending spree was started by me looking at the Canon 100-400mm f/4-5.6L which, at ~£1000 is a little out of my budget at the moment. However, something had to fill the void, so…
Anyway, revision’s started now. First up is Asymptotic Methods, and it’s going reasonably well at the moment. My plan is to start early and finish early, leaving time for TV and other assorted good things. Hurrah.
In all the excitement of setting the blog up, I completely failed to realise that I hadn’t posted this year’s exam results. I do it every year so that I have a track of what results I got, so if you really can’t bear to look (for whatever reasons) I suggest you turn away now.
I must warn you that this is a very long post, and probably not of interest to most people. Only read onwards if you’re really interested in maths, or possibly want to find out just how crazy I really am.
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8:58 pm | Posted in Academia, Exams, Maths | 5 Comments » | Show comments »
…or not.
I am, of course, talking about that most delightful of subjects, Measure Theory. The examination in question was held this morning, and it is fairly safe to say that, barring moderation, I will be failing that course quite badly.
My major problem with the exam was the style in which it was set. Frankly, it was clear to me that he simply couldn’t be bothered coming up with some decent questions. Pretty much everything on the paper was a 10-mark question, and two questions were split into 5/20 mark parts each.
I did the majority of the first question fairly well, I think. But unfortunately that’s where the limit of my knowledge reached. The second question was basically a lovely “state and prove the Dominated Convergence theorem” – 20 marks. Right, okay. Maybe that’s a reasonable question. But to just say “prove it”, and not break it into any sort of parts or guide you in any way is just lazy and completely unacceptable. Especially when you give the ultimately useless advice of “don’t try to learn large proofs, learn the ideas!!” on your website.
The third question was split into 15/10 mark parts. Yet again – absolutely no guidance at all, so I basically had no clue whatsoever. Question 4 was another lovely 20/5 part. The 20 mark question? “Prove f is in L1(0,1)”. Great. Thanks so much. Not even so much as “using theorem x”, or “Hint: try this…”. Just prove it. Finally, another lovely question on Lp spaces, and another lovely 15/10 mark split. Just amazing.
I don’t usually go off on people and examinations like this, because I do believe that if I do badly in an exam, 99 times out of 100 it’s going to be because I didn’t bother revising something. But giving advice on the website and then setting the exam on stuff that you told us not to revise fully is just a complete waste of my time. I spent a lot of hours sitting and finishing off the assignment questions, and to what end? I could have just sat there twiddling my fingers and I would’ve come out of that exam feeling exactly the same.
I left after about an hour. Quite a few people left after me, and maybe the fact that so many left in an exam that’s supposed to last three hours will give him a gentle hint. Some people came out saying that they didn’t think it was that bad, but to be honest, those guys are going to be very good at every exam they take or just got lucky. If you sit down and take the time to memorize the proof of the Dominated Convergence theorem, then that’s 20 marks, no sweat. If, like me, you didn’t think it was going to come up because everything pointed towards it not coming up then you’re in a lot more trouble.
Sure, I’m not the best student in the world. But I can do some of Measure Theory. The reason that I screwed this up so badly is that unless you knew how to do all of Measure Theory or were lucky enough to know the right bits, then the exam was a disaster.
So, what advice would I give coming out of this exam? (Not that anybody will listen, but hey).
To Dr. Valeriy Slastikov: This exam was unfair, period. I’m not unintelligent, but as a result, the hard work and effort that I put into revision counted towards precisely nothing. That is the most utterly frustrating feeling that one can get out of mathematics. Please take five more minutes to put together questions that aren’t completely impossible for those people who aren’t absolutely brilliant.
To second year students: Don’t take Measure Theory unless the lecture course is altered or the lecturer is changed. Simple as that.
PS: Please don’t bother writing comments if you’re going to say “hah, you deserved it you idiot!!!!oneoneone” because I can’t be bothered dealing with that sort of nonsense. These are my opinions, and if you disagree that’s fine, but please be constructive.
2:14 pm | Posted in Exams, Maths, Warwick Blogs | 3 Comments » | Show comments »
Well, had the old double-whammy yesterday and overall it was a bit disappointing.
Started with Introduction to Topology in the morning. As soon as I turned over the paper and read the first question, I knew that something had been drastically changed. I’ve done the past five years’ worth of papers, and, apart from one year which was done with a different lecturer, the format of the paper hasn’t changed at all. Basically the format is topologies, compactness/connectedness, identification maps/quotient spaces, the fundamental group and finally surfaces.
This year, the overall format was the “same”, but the standard of question was much harder. It came as somewhat of a shock to the system, but I don’t think I’ve done that badly. Amazingly, read the proof of Lebesgue’s lemma, and it came up on the exam. Unfortunately I completely forgot the proof and couldn’t answer in there. Oh well. Somewhat annoying was the lack of any “give without proof examples of…” question which would have been extremely useful. Overall though, I’m hopeful of a mark in the 70–80% region.
Combinatorics was, unfortunately, somewhat of a different story. I (barely) answered 4 questions worth of material, and I think that overall I’ll be quite lucky to get around 50% of the marks, tops. Mostly because I made all of it up. Hopefully there’ll be a certain degree of moderation as I think everybody found the exam quite hard. The annoying thing was the presence of probability stuff in not one, but two of the questions which I found extremely annoying – after all, I have pretty much no knowledge of anything to do with statistics at all.
So we’ll see. One last exam on Monday before three more weeks of revision, and then the second lot starts. But before that, the joy of Measure Theory. That could be very interesting.
