Reflections Compilations

Reflections

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+# Reflections compilations
+
+# 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?
+2. Clarity
+   - What does this plot mean? (should add captions for their visuals)
+3. 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?
+4. 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?
+5. 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. 
+