Needing Sleep

A little listless from lack of sleep and a three-day gym binge. Looking at less than 10 minutes left in the 6th Balloon Fight for CS 175. I thought the problems were distinctly easier. I guess I thought wrong.

To Slide or Not to Slide?

I am averse to using slides, mostly because of inexperience, but partly because I think they're boring. However, I almost bored myself in today's morning lecture, and I know that Dr. Tungol's slides are more organized. Will I take the acetate plunge?

Divide and Conquer

aka You-Take-the-Left-I'll-Take-the-Right-Let's-Meet-in-the-Middle. MO Has a strongly organized bureaucratic force willing to take apart any problem and handle it at the lowest level, using only idiots and brainless buck-passers at the lowest level. Shrewd tactician, uses knowledge of the mark to correctly work out the problems as they are passed up along the hierarchy. Very forgetful, approaches each smaller similar problem in exactly the same way, not accounting for memory or experience, thus making him vulnerable to virtually DDoS attacks.

Diophantine Equations of the Form $ax + by = c$ and Euclid's Algorithm

Tried google: got this amongst others. That should clarify things.

Brute Force

aka Exhaustive Search. MO Leaves no stone unturned. Methodical, if a bit anal retentive. Has poor time management. Can be made to work for conditional output.

The Wheels on the Bus Go Round-and-Round...

... as the gears of history grind onward, squishing everything that comes between its teeth. I could make parallels between the political climate and the classroom climate, but there's less of an inevitability in the air for CS 135 than there was for CS 130, and the air of CS 175 is still relaxed but competitive. It's the culmination of things that results in lightning, and not just the hot and unsettled airs. Lightning strikes best and brightest in the most agitated situation, but lightning can only be controlled under tight supervision, lest it go awry.

Skipping Out

Left school at 10, went to the gym, and basically avoided the investiture. Am thankful my MTh class is early, so that I won't lose two classes in a row to the investiture of UP President Roman, and the sure-to-be-delicate State of the Nation address on Monday. I hear they'll probably close Quezon Circle by 9. Oh well.

Boom

... as disaster struck. Or did it? Well, for me, a bit, since I still gave an exam with a flaw. Apparently, I forgot what the index was for the recursive implementation of acquiring the nth term in the Fibonacci sequence. Just changing a 0 to a 2 or a 1 to an n would make it work. Oh well. I wonder when I'll have time to check.

Doom

... for me or for my CS 135 students? The have little confidence, dubious skills, and bewildered expressions. Will they make it tomorrow, or will it be a repeat of last sem's CS 130 exam?

PSHS University Fair 2005

In line with the Philippine Science High School Diliman Campus Guidance Office's career consultation agenda, during the end of this school year's Humanities Week festivities, several colleges and universities are invited to set up booths in the classrooms and the exhibition area in the Advanced Science and Technology Building for a University Fair, setting up from the afternoon of Thursday, September 1, and opening for all students from first to fourth year (although the efficacy of the exercise on the seniors may be minimal, considering the UPCAT would have passed a month prior) for the whole of Friday, September 2.

Considering this, it seems best to highlight, for the UP Diliman Department of Computer Science, the activities of the CompSci orgs, as they have been particularly active in activities in line with the Department's mission, and the student projects, to showcase talent and skills honed through the tutelege of the aegis of the Department. Highly interactive demo software will be best for these purposes.

In addition, it was noted that students had difficulty differentiating between Computer Science and the Computer Engineering course offered by the EEE Department. This may be addressed.

Ideally, the booth should be manned by PSHS alumni, who could best identify with the target audience, both from the students and the faculty, although this need not be the case, especially if none can be found to represent a particular org or project. Also, minimizing the personnel required would be ideal, e.g. having student representing both an org and a project, although there should be sufficient numbers to handle each project or each org simultaneously. Also, a brochure highlighting the mission, vision and curriculum of the Department, bundled with profiles of the Computer Science organizations should be made available to the students.

Preferable to have the demo software in a laptop, so that it could be brought on Friday, and that a minimal amount of setup be needed.

My Time Has Come

Finally, the purely mathematical problems will be highlighted in the next three weeks of CS 175, starting with the Algebra and Arithmetic problems. I feel fairly confident about this portion - though discussions of the problems in the book makes me believe that there is a lot more to cover than is actually in the book.

Meeting later, class even later. Later.

Confidence Building

Hmmm... it seems like a larger part of my job currently is building confidence in using techniques, especially for proving and such. I hope to focus on that in the next meeting.

Gotta remember to upload the prospective schedule.

Whoops

Hmmm... either the seatwork was harder than it looked, or I botched teaching this part. Will find out more tomorrow.

Rushing Again

Hmmm... I really don't like sweating in this shirt - it sticks to you. Have yet to do the test data for tomorrow's set of CS 175 problems. Been playing around with Yahoo! and Google toolbars (both official and fanmade), but I don't like the way that they're exclusive to their lines, eating up precious browser room. Oh, well, must think about it when I have time. I like the fact that I can have buttons for Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Briefcase and Gmail, but don't like the way that you can't remove the search bars of either (and can't resize the Yahoo! one) and that I can't put them on the same row. Grrr. Also feel foolish for having two Google search bars. Maybe I'll change the Firefox Google bar to Dictionary permanently or something. Haven't done a Yahoo! search in a while, though, so that feels pointless.

Mustn't Forget

Clarify all the stat involved in getting the average case. Clarify that $F_n = \phi^n - \hat{\phi}^n$, and $0 < \hat{\phi} < 1$, so $\hat{\phi}^n \rightarrow 0$ as $n \rightarrow 0$.

\TeX ownz me. :P

Edit: Foolish, too. Can prove this: $\displaystyle F_0 = F_1 = 1\qquad F_n = \frac{\phi^n - \hat{\phi}^n}{\sqrt{5}}.

Sorting and Searching

So... you sort and search. Although not searching so much, 'cause that's covered in other topics. And the sorting involved noodles. And pancakes.

Right.

Poor, Poor MHR

I promise to try harder to read the topics ahead of time, so that my Monday class does not suffer. I hate having to try and catch up so much on Thursday. On the other hand, I'm nearly polished on Tuesday afternoons.

Is It Too Late?

Finally, after a month of putting it off, a schedule for CS 135 has been drafted. And it may be too late already. The three exams will barely have a month in between each, and I'm planning to dedicate a week of review for each of the exams, leaves me less than 4 weeks for each set of lectures. I was sort of playing around with the idea of letting the third part be reporting to match the last two problem sets, but there may not be enough time for that.

At least I know there's enough time for everything. Not much leeway for anything else - like goofing off.

Stat!

I need to brush up on my statistics for the probabilistic analysis involved in getting the average-case analysis of algorithms. I still think that the GCF worst-case of two consecutive Fibonacci numbers is a nice touch, but I have to to tighten the arguments.

Struggling Against the Clock

With the amount of struggling going on, I'll end up being a protest leader.