Why I fail at blogging

Partially: I can get super lazy about these things, as anyone who frequents the Reflection forum will probably know. I really don’t mean to be so slow at responding. For my PhD related stuff I try and be quick at responding.

Sometimes I find it hard to concentrate solely on one thing. By this, I mean that I have a project that needs completion and will work at a frenetic pace until it is 98% done. And then I get up the next day, and the final 2% gets ignored because I’m onto the next thing. So I have bunch of stuff that is almost there – but not quite.

Also partially: this term is turning out to be incredibly busy for me – much busier than I had expected – for the following reasons.

• Over Christmas I was asked to lecture MA117: Programming for Scientists, which is a first year programming course run by the Maths department and introduces students to Java.
• I’m also running MA903: C++ for Financial Mathematics to teach C++ to MSc Financial Mathematics students.
• I’m also a TA for the course MA4G7: Computational Linear Algebra and Optimisation, introducing fourth year mathematics students to BLAS and LAPACK.
• Most importantly for the time being, my supervisor and I have a submission deadline for a paper due next Tuesday.

So yeah. Pretty busy all around recently, which has left very little time for blogging, photography, or any of my other hobbies.

Lecturing has been an interesting experience. I actually took MA117 when I was a first year undergraduate many moons ago, and was a TA for the past two years, so I’ve seen it from both sides of the fence. The first lecture, which was today, actually turned out pretty well. But it gets tough real quick, so a better evaluation will be in a couple of weeks.

However I feel like I’m pretty prepared. Lectures and lab session notes are (mostly) prepared all the way through to week 8 of term.

It’s testing my programming out pretty well too. I’m coding Java for MA117 (obviously), C++ for MA903 (duh) and a mixture of C, C++, Fortran and Python for my PhD work. Nice to keep up to date with the languages.

Getting back to it

I feel a great sense of disappointment that I’ve not got much stuff done. On the programming side, there are three things I want to polish up and get published on here.

• Reflection 1.2. This is under development, but I need a final push of about 2 solid days to get it done.
• mjwrapper. This is a new project of mine. Unbeknownst to you guys, I have taken up drumming as an additional hobby (yeah, I didn’t have enough, right?) So I constructed an electronic drum kit, which uses something called MegaDrum to convert drum hits into MIDI notes.MegaDrum is awesome. It has a remote control utility called MegaDrum Config Tool which is written in Java, and uses the Java MIDI API, which I have to admit is pretty good. But it doesn’t work on Macs. Why? Apple is stupid and doesn’t supply an implementation. There are a couple commerical ones; mmj is the most popular. But I’m a big fan of open source, so I wrote my own.

  mjwrapper is perilously close to having a 0.1 release. Just need to finish the last 2%.

• Java to BLAS/LAPACK converter. This is something I knocked together just yesterday for MA4G7. There are a few Java students on the course (no doubt to MA117) and there’s no set method, as far as I can tell, to call BLAS and LAPACK functions through Java. So again, I wrote one.

And then of course, on the photography front, it would be useful if I could get out and actually take photographs. 2009 was a pretty poor year in terms of quantity of photographs taken, but the quality looks better.

Finally the blogs… so much to do on that front, I don’t even want to list it!

Anyway, enough for now. More updates to come. Honest!

I’ve been really busy recently preparing for a conference talk in Manchester, so this blog and my photography has had to take a back seat.

For those waiting for Reflection 1.1, I’ll go out on a limb and say that it should be out by the end of the month. That’s not a promise, but it is coming!

Anyway, my research involves studying pipe flow in long pipes and I regularly run simulations using 64 (or more) processors. If you look at the lovely picture, that’s a figure I recently produced for an abstract – it shows the streamwise vorticity field in a long-ish pipe. And it just takes a lot of time figuring out the rather complicated program that I use (called semtex – great name).

Well, that’s not the only reason for my lack of bloggyness. On Tuesday I got another new toy – a shiny, super-duper 8-core Mac Pro. Hopefully anybody that knows of me understands that I am one of those annoying Apple fanbois. Well, if they don’t, then they will soon because this machine is stupendously fast.

The reason? I need something a bit more beefy. That figure took about a day to come up with because my work computer is pretty slow and my laptop is much faster. Also, 8-cores is not too unreasonable for some shorter pipe length simulations.

Anyhow. The blog has suffered, as has my photoblog and photography in general. The good news however, is that I have a lot more free time now, and with a faster computer Lightroom should run a buttload quicker. So be ready for some updates soon.

So, I started precisely 3 weeks ago. The first couple of weeks were essentially spent organising various times for meeting my supervisor and generally not doing a whole lot of work. It also involved meeting my supervisees for the year: I have four groups of second-year supervision groups, and they seem to be coming along nicely. Besides the rather large pile of marking it’s quite enjoyable, so I’m looking forward to completing all of that.

I’m also attending a couple of courses to patch over areas that I’ve not really touched in a huge amount of detail. The first is a fourth year Pattern Formation course. Currently we haven’t done too much in that besides cover some simple background information on group theory and linear stability analysis. That should change this week when we start to look at some simple PDE problems.

The other course is a third-year fluid dynamics course, which is meant to give a more physics-like overview of simple problems in fluid mechanics — starting with material derivatives and simple boundary-layer problems, and then moving on to waves and some instability theory. Whilst I took the Analytical Fluid Mechanics course last year, that concentrated on a purely theoretical approach to the Navier-Stokes equations and didn’t really go into great depth on any of this sort of stuff.

It’s very difficult to tell what my actual aim should be at the moment. I’ve read a number of papers so far, mostly concentrating on pattern formation and pipe flow. I really started to work at problems this week, and managed to do a successful simulation of some basic Couette and Poiseulle flows in a 2D channel.

Anyway, back to work for now and I shall at least attempt to keep the blog updated on further process.

Here goes: A-levels in Mathematics are getting easier, and if you disagree, you are wrong.

So, I guess I should try to back this up before everyone comes down on me like a ton of bricks. Well, tough – I’m not doing the legwork for you. If you took A-level maths in the last couple of years, go back and look at papers written ten or fifteen years ago. There’s such a chasm in the level of difficulty that it is completely impossible to say that the papers being written are not becoming easier. Mathematics papers from previous decades are almost as hard as current day AEA (Advanced Extension Award) papers, generally taken by the more enthusiastic students.

It’s important to note that the increase in difficulty arises not only from the breadth of knowledge that the student is expected to learn, but also the depth at which they are expected to understand the material presented. For the most part, current day papers ask only for the student to memorize and then regurgitate existing knowledge and basic mathematical techniques.

Of course, the exam boards would have you believe that it’s down to students putting more work in, or simply becoming better at answering the questions in the way they want. Neither of these points detracts from the fact that students simply don’t know as much as they need, and the evidence of this is quite apparent.

There is one simple cause for this: statistics. The government wants 50% of people coming out of college to go to University. How might one accomplish this? Well, there’s the obvious decision by many universities to create loads of pointless degrees (tourism management? what?). But if A-levels are watered down, entry requirements won’t be as hard to attain and even then, they can’t go above asking for 4 A’s, right? Genius!

Unfortunately this drive to achieve meaningless and potentially harmful goals is hurting the universities out there that are offering courses that do actually mean something. The mathematics degree at Warwick has maintained the same standards of difficulty for a number of years now. However, many mathematics departments – Warwick included – are now having to water down their first year because the students simply don’t possess enough knowledge coming in from A-level to understand the more advanced techniques.

As a very big example of this, we don’t teach any group theory in the first year at all now – when I enrolled, there was at least 7-8 weeks of teaching on the subject. But this then causes a very big problem, because whilst the jump from A-level maths to 1st year degree maths is large, the jump from 1st to 2nd year is much larger. So then the entire degree has to become easier, and people who struggled at first find themselves facing a virtual impossibility task to maintain on the degree course.

I’d like to point out that this isn’t meant to be a stab at everybody taking A-levels. It is not the fault of the students that their education system is failing them, and it is good that they are making the best of a bad system. However, something needs to be done quickly, or we’re all going to be screwed over by shoddy degrees.

However, because I like to look a bit swish, I decided to do something to make my shiny Sony Ericsson W950i switch through the slides for me without having to touch the keyboard. Since nothing was apparent from much Google searching, I sat down and figured it all out. After a long time of sitting on this code I’ve finally found the time to sit down and package it all up in a neat bundle.

So, if you have a decent phone with Bluetooth enabled, visit the project page if you’re interested!

The project report and presentation slides will be going up tomorrow, I just need to get around to writing some CSS.

On the PhD front, things are progressing. With a bit of luck there’s a course running in September at Keele University that I’ll be going to, and I have a variety of papers and books to read. Right now, I’m only concentrating on learning general fluid mechanics, with the aim of specializing on a particular topic a little later (although this topic is pretty much determined already).

But now I shall try to motivate myself. Or possibly not.

• High Performance Computing: 87%
  Actually a bit lower than anticipated which is a little strange, but I think there was some moderation in play here due to the number of people scoring high marks.
• Scientific Programming: 77%
  This is pretty much the only mark that I’m disappointed with; put a fair amount of effort into this module and the programming, but it’s a first so that’s all that counts at the end of the day.
• Information Theory: 78%
  Better than expected! This was the last exam, and although there were two days to prepare, I was so washed out by this point that I didn’t do much work. Had I done more, probably could have gotten 90-95%, but this is good enough!
• Fourier Analysis: 96%
  Har har. To any third/fourth years reading this and looking for a fourth year module: do this.
• Fractal Geometry: 78%
  Got a little unlucky with the exam but I’m very pleased with the mark.
• Asymptotic Methods: 87%
  This is a very strange module, but it’s well lectured and interesting. I’m unsure as to why so few people choose to take it, but highly recommended from me at least.
• Analytical Fluid Mechanics: 88%
  Although very hard in terms of content, the exam was really not that bad at all. Did a proof of existence of solutions for Navier-Stokes in finite time.
• History of Mathematics: 73%
  Better than expected! I got 65% on the first essay and 75% on the second, so I’m guessing either 70 or 75% for the third.
• Project: 87%
  I can’t even begin to tell you how chuffed I am with this mark. I didn’t think my project was actually that great, but… apparently I’m wrong. It’ll be going up on the website in a couple of weeks if anyone is interested in reading it.

All in all, I took 148.5 CATS, which gives me a Seymore average of 93% for the year and 81% for the degree. I was honestly shocked by that – it had been my target to get 89%, giving me a degree average of 80%, but to actually get better than that was a complete shock and very nice surprise.

So that’s it, fourth year – and indeed the degree – finished. All a little anti-climactic now, but I suppose it’s onwards and upwards from here!

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.

• MA433: Fourier Analysis
  I had a great time in this exam. Answered everything and, barring a small mistake or two here and there I think most of it’s correct. Highly recommended for third years looking for a fourth year module to take.
• MA4G5: Analytical Fluid Mechanics
  Considering my immense fear of all things linear analysis related, this went pretty well. The course content is tough, has lots of vector analysis combined with linear analysis (especially Sobolov spaces) but is ultimately rewarding – a full proof of the existence of solution to Navier-Stokes for finite time. Had the exam not been so nice, I would definitely not done as well.
• MA4E3: Asymptotic Methods
  I really enjoyed this course! Whilst it didn’t particularly lead to anything, it was somewhat like Combinatorics in that there’s lots of tricks that can be useful for other courses. The exam was pretty good, too – I’m very surprised that more people didn’t take it. Quite a good option for third years, too.
• MA3D4: Fractal Geometry
  Again, the content and organization of the course is excellent – Anthony Manning does an outstanding job with quite tough mathematics, especially when covering topics such as the Hausdorff measure. The exam was good, although I am rather unsure as to the mark I’ll be getting.
• MA4F8: Information Theory
  This was my last exam, held today. It used two questions from the past paper, and the rest were very similar so it should have been possible for me to get close to 100%. Unfortunately, I forgot bits due to lack of time and concentration, so the mark will be closer to 70%. But the course is great – again, another good one for third years.

Now I just have to wait until the 28th and see what I actually get…

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.