Reflections Compilations

[chocoho]

Reflections 131201-131207

In-class collaboration:
Some class members created a google doc for the class to compile all of their thoughts
about the class. We decided to create posters for the data science fair for different topics:
reproducibility, class management, and seismology science. We also discussed a video to
produce for the class as part of the science fair.

Final thoughts:
After doing the video interviews and speaking to some of my classmates, the general consensus
was that working in the small verticals was much easier than dealing with the large 10 people
horizontals. I think this class could be improved if we stayed in smaller groups, because it is much
easier to speak to each other and meet with each other.
I thought that initial design of the class was to be in the 4 person verticals, and then switch roles
within the group, so that we can help each other learn skills in the new position. This is something
to explore if Aaron decides to teach this course again.
Holding an optional discussion section, instead of many many office hours may also help save Aaron's
time as well. This may end up increasing the number of units this class is assigned, but I think
this would be very helpful for all the students.
I think this class has a lot of potential, but the goals of the course needs to be very explicit in the beginning.
Mention that this course is meant to simulate how real science works -- there may not right answers, but
there are sufficient answers that should be reproducible so that others can work to improve your answers
in the future. The beginning assignments of the course was effective in emphasizing that making reproducible results was more important than getting "correct" results, and this message should carry on in other classes.

The syllabus should mention that this class will not be lecture based, unless the class needs training on certain
tools (such as github) in which it would be useful to go through an in-class tutorial of github. I know many
students in the class speak english as a second language, so going through these tutorials in class would
be helpful.

Despite all the frustrations, this class was rewarding. We were able to see what we could come up
with as a class. As individuals, we have limited knowledge and skills, but by working with others with slightly different skill sets, we are able to be extensions of each other, and work towards something we would never
have been able to accomplish individually. Thank you for an interesting semester!

Reflections 131124-131130

Updated last week's reflections.

Class presentations:
This week is Thanksgiving weekend! In class, we were given two presentations. I was
very impressed with the iPython creator's presentation - he was engaging and informative,
and I learned a lot about the brief history of computation, as well as the problems with
scientific publication and access. This was one of the highlights of this class for me,
so I am thankful that he was able to speak.

I enjoyed the presenter's quip about publication -- that publication can be any form of
sharing your interpretation of data with the community, whether it be via Powerpoint, a
website, a published article. While we may not be able to submit our results into a journal
by the end of the semester, I believe as a class we will definitely be able to publish
something!

Reflections 131117-131123

Group Oragnization and dynamics:
The group evaluation forms has helped our group see what role has not been fulfilled yet.
In addition, we added a couple of members to our group. This has helped a lot in terms of
organization.

We decided to have our group improve other group's graphs, and each member in our group
had roles to fulfill. This worked well until Thursday, until we spoke to Carl in Quakers
who said his group was also improving graphs. We decided to schedule office hours with
Aaron to work through what our role as a group should be, since the Quaker group seems to
also be trying to polish up their own work. Our goal is to be a proofreader and polisher of
other people's final graphs.

We decided to schedule office hours 3-4 Aaron on Saturday (this was set in the beginning
of the week). However, he hasn't showed up yet :( This is the second time Aaron hasn't
showed up to office hours (The first time being Monday Nov 4 :( ). We realize Aaron is very
busy, but I hope next time we can find a time that he will be free! We planned on giving a
brief presentation about our role as a group to the class on Tuesday, showing some graphs
that we've seen and improvements to be made, etc, but since we still haven't completely
sorted

Reflections 131110-131116

Evaluations:
Because I have been getting a huge list of github emails that I have been sorting with
the Stats 157 bspace emails, I did not see the email sent out Tuesday night annoucing that the
individual responses were due Thursday morning. I sent out the evaluation out today.
To avoid this problem in the future, I have reorganized my filterig system in my emails,
so now the bspace announcements will stand out and have a tag associated with it.

Part 1: CONFUSION + RANT
I did not completely finish last week's reflection, so I have updated it.
I think a good suggstion would be to ask each of the groups to keep a group
notebook, so that we can track what the other groups have done, are currently
doing, and what they are planning on doing. After last week's lecture, our group's
SMART goals got forcibly reassigned. Right now, I am personally confused if our
group should be working on visualizing ETAS, because right now the other group working
on understanding the ETAS model has already visualized for it. The other portion of our
SMART goal was to create visualizations for the Alarm Data, which I believe another
group is doing as well. I was hoping to ask our presenter about the details, but I have
not been able to get in contact with him.

This week, it has been a bit difficult to recoordinate a meeting time with my group. We were
finally able to meet this Saturday 11/16/13, but not all the group members have arrived
yet, but I was able to meet with Jinsoo Lee and Sung Hoon Choi.
By the end of the day, I expect to at least contact some other groups to
see what still needs to be done, because currently it seems that our job is overlapping
with other ones. I planned on having our group meet with Aaron today, but someone
mentioned that Aaron was not having office hours today, so we decided to meet elsewhere.
My goal for the end of the day is to meet or at least have contacted
all of my own group members, and then ask my group members to contact some of the other
visualizers about

1. What they have done, and
2. What they think needs to be done still

I'm starting to come to the conclusion that my group would probably be best served if we
all split up and join other groups. Evidently, the main issue we are dealing with in my group
is understanding what we need to do and what other people are doing. We feel pretty dead
in the water. It doesn't help that I'm not usually the Operational Lead in my groups
outside of Stats class, and I'm afraid I'm unsure of how to coordinate things better.

PART 2: SOME CLARITY! At last!
The curaters (Alisha A + Jie Zhang) from another group showed up to our meeting,
and it has been helpful! Now we realized that part of the problem is that the visualizers
(us!) are supposed to be getting our data from the analyzers. But it seems that some analyzer
groups have been visualizing the data without the visualizers? Which basically leaves the
groups that are only visualizers useless. But in light of this, part of our goal will be
trying to understand the transition from curator to analyzer to visualizers. It would be our
hope to have the presenter coordinate across the horizontals.

I created a list of useful links in both the public Facebook visuazliers group and our
specific <3 Facebook group to help members find useful links more quickly.

Reflections 131103-131110

Last week was an interesting week. While my groupmmates assembled fairly late
into the week, we were still able to be productive by coordinating with other
groups to understand where the project was leading. Sunday and Monday was spent
getting to know some of those in my horizontals, and coordinating with my
own group members to see if they knew what was going on in their own horizontals.
Eventually we were able to crank out some SMART goals, and more importantly,
get on the same page with the rest of the class. One of the most helpful things
to our group was having our presenter meet with the other presenters in the class.

This was reflected in Tuesday's class, in which the presenters did a nice job
summarizing what had went on in the past week, and what our future goals were.

Early last weekend, I was able to help organize all the visualizers on a
Stats 157 Visualizers facebook page. We were able to better coordinate and
contact each other. After realizing that we had many overlapping goals and that
we did not know what other groups were doing, I posted a summary of what our group
goals were on the page. I also asked one girl, Ashley Sia, to create a repo of all the
visualizers groups on the the github page, which she did. This helped us gain some
more coordination.

Honestly speaking though, I was less productive this week due to a heavier workload
from my other classes. However, I look forward to picking up the pace next week!

Reflections 131027-131102

Last week I have forgotten to submit my reflections, so I'm posting both last
weeks and this weeks reflections today.

This week, the horizontal groups met together to talk about roadblocks, as well
as intermediate goals. We were able to brainstorm some good ideas, and I
appreciated this exercise because it gave us a more tangible goal to aim for.
I was also able to create a Facebook group to organize all of the visualizers
together, since all of us use and check Facebook.

Groups: I was going to be in my original group with the presenter, anazlyer, and
curator, but plans fell through and I was left groupless. I had posted in the
visualizer group about needing a group, and though people saw my message, no
one had responded. Today, I posted in github about needing a group, but I don't
think people check the github website very often unless they are submitting
something in for class. Although it is Saturday and I still have time to find
a group, this is leaving me a little stressed out. Hopefully someone will
respond and I will be able to join a group by Sunday.

Suggestions:
Again, it would be useful if a list of all the useful links were posted onto
one page. I find myself unable to find the link to the earthquake papers easily
because to me, github is messy.

Reflections 131020-131026

On Saturday, my group was able to finish our project relatively smoothly.
However, on Tuesday, we discussed reproducibility on other people's code and some
people found an error in our code. I was able to reproduce the error, though my
teammate was not. This was surprising to me, because I thought the code had
worked on Saturday. The difficulty of reproducibility became clearer to me
through these exercises.
In class on Tuesday, we also talked about clock skew, and how different
computers have different local times stored. I had not even thought of this
being an issue. In Tuesday, attendance was fairly poor, and Aaron mentioned this
being an issue. I agreed, because I was unable to meet up with half of my
groupmates during class.

Ironically however, on Thursday, I had overslept but I spoke to my groupmates about
what we had done in class. We had talked about ideas for the final project.

Questions and Suggestions:
I have been unable to see the google documents where people have been posting
their notes on Professor Stark's lectures. It would be helpful if there was either
a github page just for this, or if it was linked in bspace. It's difficult to sort
through all the github issue pages -- the layout is fairly messy and disorganized.

Reflections 131012-131019

Tuesday we talked about a bunch of tools we could use for our next project, such
as HTML5 presentations, dexy it, bibserver, JSON, and basemap. Thursday we had
Professor Stark come in and give a lecture. To be honest, I was rather lost with
the lecture. It would have been more clear if at the beginning, he would have
concisely explain the purpose of the lecture, so that we would have something to
focus on when he lectured. Instead, I felt as if I was bombarded with all these
facts and data, and was unable to focus on any given thing.

Most of my notes consisted of what was just written on the lecture slides, which
is not really useful, but I didnt realize that we would have the lecture notes
posted online. Next time I'll try to focus more on what he is saying.

Set up for the homework assignment went more smoothly than last week. We were
all able to meet on time, everything installed seamlessly. I look forward to
working with my group members and learning JSON.

Reflections 131005-131011

--Group Improvements--
After looking over all the presentations, I made a list of some things
that both our group and other groups could do better in future projects:

• explain why we did certain things (ie eliminate data)
• make sure to mention how many points we took out
  (either in code or in visuals)
• make captions for visuals
• keep a log of problems, and the steps + tools used to fix it
• keep a log of resources used
• keep a log of skills we learned

--Group Comments--
I also made a short commentary on some of the group projects. Here were
the groups that stood out to me:
Group 5: I liked seeing how their graphs evolved, and it was interesting
to see that people who were kinesthetic learners tended to know more programs.
Group 10: I liked the word cloud because it was immediately understandable.
A suggestion I had would be better axes labels, and that their learning
style graphs should have a 3rd dimension to the points (density), so we
could see how many people answered for each point.

--Other Thoughts--
I enjoyed working with my group. Everyone is supportive, and when things
failed, we all worked together to help each other. It's an encouraging
environment, which is helped by the encouraging atmosphere of the class
in general.

--Aaron's questions/comments to groups that I will keep in mind--

1. Reasoning for decisions

• WHY did you remove certain data?
  1. Clarity
• What does this plot mean? (should add captions for their visuals)
  1. Roadblocks
• I liked how you focused on your roadblocks
• Can you focus on the PROBLEMS you encountered and the STEPS you took to fix that?
  1. Tools
• What TOOLS worked well for getting over roadblocks?
• What RESOURCES helped you the most?
  • How much did you rely on horizontal groups, github trackers, etc
• What were the CS skills that you LEANED ON OTHERS for
  • troubleshooting
  • what did you pick up BY YOURSELF?
  • Collaboration/Reproducibility
• BEFORE you started, what were your ideas on collab/reproducibility?
• NOW, what are your thoughts?

Reflections 130926-131004

--Issues--
This week we began our first homework assignment, and our first role
assignments. The biggest issue that immediately cropped up in our group
was finding a suitable meeting date that worked for everyone.
Unfortunately, none of us were able to meet in person until Saturday,
and then someone changed their plans and now we have to meet up last minute
on Sunday night. This has caused me some degree of anxiety
because I cannot do my work as the Visualizer until the curator has completed his.

Perhaps for our next group assignments, we can assign groups based on
another survey of when people are most free to meet up with each other,
and those that overlap can be assigned to the same group.

--Suggestions--
It would be useful if the powerpoint slides of the guest lectures could
become available, as well as our previous in-class lecture notes.
While I have been taking notes during the guest lectures, I find it
distracting trying to copy down all the lecture slides verbatim while also
trying to take real notes (which for me include commentary that I have about
the lecture itself, as well as specific phrases the lecturer uses that
helps clarify the images at hand). It's also virtually impossible to understand
some of what the lecturer is saying without seeing the graphs the lecturer
was using at the time.

--Positives--
It's great that we finally started the ball rolling with our first project!

Reflections 130922-130925

I was gone for my sister's wedding starting from Sept 120925, so my
reflections will cover mostly just Tuesday's class. We were able to get
resources for python learning (the safari textbooks in the UC lib system)
which I thought was helpful because I did not know about it before.

In class, I learned a useful command for quitting a program while in the Virtual
Box terminal (control z), and then you can still run the program in
the backgroun (bg)! I thank my tech lead for this useful tidbit.

I agree that having feedback about reflections would be nice. I am still
not 100% if my reflections have been submitted, so having a quick confirmation
either via bspace or github would be nice.

I agree that having a google calendar would be a good idea.

This week involved guest lecturer speakers, and did wnot involve new
installations. I did struggle some more this week dealing with ipython
in the Virtual Machine, but after talking to some classmates about it,
I believe everything has been sorted out.

Reflections 13/09/14 - 13/09/21

This week involved guest lecturer speakers, and did not involve new
installations. I did struggle some more this week dealing with ipython
in the Virtual Machine, but after talking to some classmates about it,
I believe everything has been sorted out.

All the other installations I had completed last week. I look forward to
using our installed programs this upcoming week!

Reflections 13/09/08 - 13/09/13

--Improvement Suggestions--
The class this week seemed more disorganized than last week because the lack of
homework posts and in-class summaries. The professor did explain in class that
it was because he was busier this week, but it would have been nice to have sent
a quick announcement via space telling us about the delay.

--Classroom praises--
This week we discussed how to improve the classroom dynamics as well as seeing
what the strengths of the class were. I liked this because it established
further than the instructors cared about creating an effective work environment
and we were able to create a conversation between the instructors and the groups.

--Personal Challenges--
I realized that I did not submit my reflections homework in correctly last week.
I was confused on how to do a pull request and the purpose of it. I realized
that I should have gone to the IRC and asked my fellow classmates for help if
I was confused on how to do this. I also realized that I needed to spend more
time on the github help section.

--Personal Improvements--
This week, I've begun a journal documenting what we've done in class and what
I've been doing outside of class. This helps me look back at what we've done
before in class more easily, and allows me to remember the questions that I've had.

Questions:
I'm confused about what we are going to do with ipython, how to check if it
works for us, and the purpose of all the other programs we have been downloading.

Reflections 13/09/01 - 13/09/07

This week involved mostly installing new programs into our computers. I've
had experience with most of the programs installed, so there wasn't too much
of an issue with installation for me. I struggled a little bit with accessing
the IRC group chats because I have had no experience with that before, and
Google was not very helpful. I messed around with some variations of the
join command until I realized that Adium only needs a "#group_chat_name"
input to join a chat room. Clearer instructions on that would have been helpful.

I did have a question about the specific set-ups for Virtual Box (such as
how big should the hard drive be, did the professors want us to set up the
virtual hard drive, etc), but this was eventually answered in class.

The final struggle I had was understanding the concept of forking and pull
requests. I have been reading github sections on the respective topics to
make the concepts clearer in my mind.

Filling out the peer evaluations helped me realize who in our groups is struggling to
participate, and what I could do to help them with that. I appreciated the feedback
for my own contributions as well. Thank you for the feedback!