Roland Shen Reflections

README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,197 @@
+# reflections
+# Roland Shen Reflections Oct 26, 2013  
+## Horizontal Groups 
+1) 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.
+
+2) 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.
+
+3)  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  
+1) 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.
+
+2) 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.
+
+3)  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
+
+============= 
+## 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.