#I have to present it in April. I have to write and submit an abstract in March | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

faces-in-unexpected-places · 4 years

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Do You Have the Time? Episode 017: Under Pressure

Synopsis: While Leopold and Leslie work to ease their newfound professional discomfort, Jeremy has the unique opportunity to experience both professional and personal discomfort.

[To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] …]

[From: [email protected]] [Received: 9:54 (1 hour ago)] [Subject: CVU Research Symposium]

Hi all,

I’d like to address the rumors that have been circulating in our building for the past few weeks. After a lot of deliberation with my peers in the CVU Board of Research, it has been decided that our yearly conference – which is often hosted here in Curiesville – will be relocated this year. Proposed by B.S. Dexter Hyde and Dr. Blythe Moreno of the CRISPR-Cas-9 molecular biology lab, we will be hosting our research symposium in San Diego California this year at the San Diego Convention Center. This change in venue was made in hopes of generating more interest in us as a research-driven university. The goal is to expand on the population that will attend the conference for better name recognition and to open us up to more potential sources for grant money. To be economically sound, we are combining our conference with the interests of numerous other universities in California that will also be presenting at the symposium. Thus, the symposium will not only last one day as it has in the past.

The symposium will start on Friday, August 17th at 9:00am, and will officially end on Sunday, August 19th at 5:00pm. Presentations will end each day at 5:00pm. We are currently working to have a portion of the Mission Beach reserved in the evenings for the participants to relax, network with one another other, and discuss research in a casual environment along with some fun activities.

As for transportation, there are a few options. Most of you who planned on participating anyway will likely be able to afford your own airline tickets with the grant money that you already have. If you are short, then you may apply for the numerous grants that will become available to the university over the upcoming months. I will send a separate email listing the institutions that are likely to be the most helpful.

Lastly, if the grants do not work out, then your lab may write a proposal that explains your research topic, how it is beneficial, and why it is important for you to present at the symposium. Send these proposals to Dexter Hyde, and he will review them. Calculate your projected expenses for your trip, and the Board of Research will cover up to half of your expected costs if your proposal is sufficient.

In order to participate in the symposium, your lab must email your abstracts to me by June 15th. Your completed papers should be submitted by July 30th along with an appropriate slideshow presentation.

If you plan to participate, then please email your general topic and a list of all the members of your lab that will be involved in the presentation to me by the end of this week at 5:00pm. I will be able to keep track of everything much more efficiently this way, when I start getting everyone’s abstracts and papers down the road.

Expect more emails during the week for more detailed instructions on the upcoming deadlines. I look forward to reading your papers over the subsequent months. Have a good week.

Best Regards,

Xuan “Sophia” Nguyen CVU Board of Research Secretary Center for Advancement in Technology and Science (219)-555-6295

[April 24th, 2018, 10:57]

Leopold’s eyes frantically jumped through the email from paragraph to paragraph. Down, down, up, down, up again. He took an anxious drag from his cigarette, then crushed the half-used remaining butt beneath his foot. He blew the smoke out, tucked his phone away in his pocket and burst back through the doors to the Center of the Advancement in Technology and Science. Martha waved to him, and he gave a forced smile and nod as he maneuvered through the sea of lab technicians that were scurrying back and forth between their labs, cluttering up the lobby. Normally he’d feel reassured if he wasn’t the only one rushing last minute to finish before the deadline. But he knew how much further behind his lab was compared to everyone else’s. This meant that he needed to accomplish years of research in a couple of months.

[04-24-2018; 11:00_Research_Video_Log_007_Start]

He plunged through the front double doors to his lab to check in with Jeremy and Leslie who were hard at work on experiment one, still.

“Sand in place to block excess heat transfer?” Jeremy said.

“Check,” Leslie replied, “heat resistant gloves?”

Jeremy’s hands were bare. He rifled through the pockets of his lab coat, pulled out the gloves and donned them.

“Yeah…” he said hesitantly as he slipped his fingers into place.

“How’s the piston doing?” Leopold asked.

Over the last few days, Leopold managed to construct the final piece to their microscale time machine prototype from the parts that Jeremy gathered. It was a singular piston with the crankshaft that allowed it to go up and down secured to a rotating, circular platform on the table. The battery was built into the base of the platform that powered both the spinning and up-and-down motions. It looked like a record player. Very simplistic, but effective. Flip one switch, begin rotating the platform. The piston spins and eventually wraps the cosmic string around it to form a loop. Flip the other switch, the piston pumps up and down, thereby pushing the newly made cosmic loop toward the object intended for time travel.

“It’s all intact! We’re going to try again right now,” Leslie said.

Leslie lit the fuse on the thermite reaction. Just like the previous time, brilliant light and sparks erupted from the powders in the ceramic pot. She jumped back and Jeremy strenuously turned the crank to spin the metal pipe just above the fiery pot. The glowing redness of the reaction snaked its way along the pipe towards Jeremy’s hand. Leslie watched cautiously. He gave her a subtle nod to indicate that the gloves were still working. There were popping and clanging sounds in the metal bucket as the ceramic pot blew to bits inside.

Wearing oven mitts, Leslie pushed the metal bucket out of the way and replaced it with Leopold’s piston-platform. The first switch was flipped, and the platform whirled around almost too fast for comfort. Jeremy clenched his teeth as his arm and hand began to cramp from rotating the crank so vigorously. He let go and jumped back next to Leslie to watch. Their motions were like clockwork from repeating the experiment so many times. The pipe rattled in its ring stand supports as it compacted the string of heat together.

The redness at the far end of the pipe began to fade in exchange for a bright, golden thread-shaped mass that lazily slid out the other end towards the spinning piston. Leslie’s jaw dropped and Jeremy pointed forcefully at it.

“There it is!” Jeremy shouted.

“It’s working!” Leslie joined.

They eventually had to shield their eyes; the energy made from the reaction was so great and so compact that some of the heat energy had to be converted into light-emitting energy. As more of the thread came out, the heat became more apparent. It felt like standing in front of an industrial oven. The string glared like a shimmering sunset reflecting off a body of water. The end of the thread reached out towards the spinning piston. The concentrated heat and light immediately dissipated upon contact. For a split second, the world went quiet with only a low hum to be heard followed by a resonating bass drop.

The room’s lighting promptly shifted from glistening and golden to shadowy and moody as the light scattered to the corners of the room before completely vanishing. Simultaneously, a forceful gust of hot wind burst forth from the pipe in all directions. All of the papers, folders, books, and the pack of orange sticky notes on the meeting table went flying along with Leslie’s half-empty coffee cup. The shear force and surprise knocked her off balance into Jeremy, which knocked him into Leopold standing behind both of them. Jeremy caught and held Leslie just as Leo had done for him. Leopold helped them both back to their feet.

“That was great!” Jeremy exclaimed, “We have to do it again. Leslie let’s make another pot of reagents,” he said with determination. Jeremy took his first step and the world began to spin around him. He tipped forward, but was caught by the forearm by Leopold whose reflexes kicked in. Feeling dazed himself, Leopold led the two of them to the recently cleared meeting table to sit down.

“We should wait a minute, Jeremy,” Leslie suggested, sluggishly, “the lab isn’t going anywhere,” she weakly chuckled while holding her head on discomfort.

“The more progress we make, the more unexpected things we’ll find. We’ve got to be careful from here on out, boy,” Leopold said with a smirk.

“We need to be focused from here on out,” he said, “Leslie and I saw this email that Sophia sent out with all the deadlines—”

“I know, I read it before I came in,” Leo assured, “We do need to be focused. But we can still do that while resting a minute.”

“We can still talk about it while we rest,” Jeremy suggested.

Leopold laughed wryly.

“Why do we think the string dissipated?” he continued, “Is the temperature difference between the piston and the string too small? Since energy flows from hot to cold, maybe the string doesn’t want to flow towards an already hot piston?”

“I actually don’t think so,” Leslie interjected, lightly smiling at Jeremy’s determination to analyze the experiment, “The strings are very hot and condensed into an extremely small space for the amount of energy it holds. Even if the piston were on fire, the string would still be magnitudes hotter, so the piston would still appear ‘cold’ to the string.”

Jeremy spotted a pen and notepad on the floor that had been blown off the table. He held up his finger while Leslie was talking and slipped out of his chair to retrieve them.

“Boy, be careful!” Leopold urged.

“It’s fine,” he said, limply falling to his knees from the vertigo. He landed near the notepad and pen. Keeping his head still to stop the world from spinning again, Jeremy made himself comfortable on the floor.

He cleared his throat.

“I’ll just work from here,” he said and began taking notes on what Leslie had said already.

“Okay, come on, boy,” Leopold said, raising himself out of his seat and approaching Jeremy, “The only one who actually likes working on the floor is me, so— whoaa-a-a-oh.” he stumbled and cautiously lowered himself to the floor after becoming light-headed, himself. He sighed as he plopped himself down next to Jeremy who looked at Leo with a faintly smug grin.

“I’m not sure that I see the appeal of working down here, but I can make do with it,” Jeremy poked fun.

Leopold laughed.

“We make one little break in our research and suddenly he’s a wise-ass,” he commented to Leslie who pulled her chair over to them, away from the table. Jeremy chuckled and continued writing with part of his tongue sticking out as he concentrated.

“I think I have an idea of what it is, actually,” Leslie said. The boys looked up to her to continue, “It’s like what we saw in GraviTime, Jeremy, remember?”

“Mmm, can you be more specific?”

“When we made the cosmic strings, and we saw them dissipate! What did we do that made them dissipate?”

“Oh, we stopped spinning them!”

“Exactly!”

“So, if we keep spinning the pipe, then it should… ohh… aww, that’s not going to be easy,” he said, realizing that he would have to be the one spinning the pipe.

“Okay, so, we’ll automate it,” Leopold said, shrugging.

“Really?” Jeremy said.

“Of course! If that’s what we need to do, then that’s what we’ll do to begin the next phase of the experiment. We’ll make a jig for the pipe like I did for the piston. It’ll be easy. I just need another motor and a few other parts.”

“Are we up for a trip to Home Depot?” Leslie asked.

Jeremy’s phone abrasively rang, scaring him to his feet. He looked at his messages to find another graduate student who TAs the same class as him. He’d just been reminded of the class he taught at noon. There wasn’t much time before then. He sighed in disappointment and gathered his things; the world had finally stopped spinning.

“I actually have to go TA today and it looks like there might be a problem with the class, so…” he let out a frustrated exhale, “I can’t go today,” he said hesitantly.

“That’s okay! It’s just a run to the store, anyway. You were here for the important part!” Leslie consoled.

“We’ll be just fine, boy,” Leopold said with a relaxed grin, “Those students need you, too. Just come back when you’re able. We’ll hold down the fort while you’re gone.”

Jeremy relaxed with their assurance.

“Thanks, you guys,” he said softly. “I should be back between 3:30 and 4:00. I’ll see you both then.”

They said goodbye and carried on their plans as he left the lab. As he wandered through to the exit of the building, he opened up the messages he’d received.

[JEREMY_RANDALL_CONVERSATION_START_11:29]

RD: hey bud i’ve got a student who overslept and missed my 8:00am lab RD: they said they wanna attend a different lab section so they don't get marked absent and yours is the only one that works with their schedule RD: you mind if they sit in? i’ll still grade their assignments B)

JB: Hi, Randall. JB: I’m heading over to campus right now. JB: Unfortunately, all the seats in my class are filled; I can’t let anyone new come in without going over the capacity. Are you sure there’s nobody else who can take them?

RD: yea :/ RD: we could just steal an extra chair from another lab that doesnt need it RD: tbh i don't think the boss would mind too much RD: its the end of the semester, i know he doesnt really keep track of that kinda stuff too much RD: if she misses this class and gets a zero on the last two assignments, shell probably fail the class

JB: Could she get at least a D if she does the assignments?

RD: yea i think

JB: Okay. I guess that’s fine. We’ll find a place for her to work so she can attend. What’s her name? I’ll make a space on my attendance sheet for her.

RD: her name is madison brilliant

JB: It is?

RD: yea RD: why you kno her or somethin? RD: … RD: dude you there? RD: hellooooo

JB: Yes, she’s my younger sister.

RD: omg no way! RD: lmao thats hilarious RD: tbh didn't know your last name so i didn't make the connection lol

JB: Well, now you know. JB: Thanks for the heads up. JB: I’ll get her assignment to you as soon as I can.

RD: shaka B)

[JEREMY_RANDALL_CONVERSATION_END_11:37]

[April 24th, 2018, 11:49]

Jeremy approached the classroom in which that taught every week. The remaining few students from the previous class finished leaving just as he walked in. The TA that taught before him had seemingly left already, despite still having students in the class. Didn’t seem to be the most responsible move, in Jeremy’s eyes. He made his way to his desk in the front of the room, facing all of the laboratory tables. There was a large cart in the front of the room containing piles of electronics for circuits like batteries, lightbulbs, resistors, and the like.

He placed the attendance sheet at the end of his desk and wrote the instructions for the class on the board. Students began filing in, and quietly going through the motions that he had ingrained in them from the beginning of the semester. Come in, sign the attendance sheet, turn in the homework, pick up the graded assignments, and repeat. It was a well-oiled machine, likely out of indifference on the students’ part. And also their tendency to comply with the way Jeremy structured the class at the risk of losing points. But Jeremy liked to think that at least some of them appreciated the system.

He faintly smiled and greeted each student who approached his desk to sign in. Some responded to him, others didn’t. Some only replied with zombie-like grunts of acknowledgement when he’d asked how they were. An odd one or two students replied audibly with a smile and asked how he was in return. He appreciated those students the most. They also tended to be the ones to turn in their assignments on time and get the most consistently good grades.

Madison walked in, unassumingly, if a bit drowsy looking. She registered that she was attending Jeremy’s class and perked up on her way over to his desk. Jeremy felt a sinking feeling in his chest. His shoulders felt like they weighed a ton.

“Well, well, well, look at what the cat dragged in!” she said in her goofiest tone.

“I walked in of my own volition, Madison; cats are not allowed in the lab.”

“Oh, that’s right, you don’t understand metaphors, I forgot,” she sighed.

“Please sign in and turn in your assignments,” Jeremy changed the subject.

“Oh. Uh, sure. You make your students write their names down?”

“Yes.”

“Randall just calls our names,” she said.

“I prefer it this way,” Jeremy countered.

Madison reached into her backpack and slapped her assignment down on Jeremy’s desk.

“Bam! Turned in!”

“Great. I got an extra chair for you for this class,” he said.

“Gucci,” she said, “You gonna give your favorite sister an A today?”

One of Jeremy’s other students walked in and recognized Madison. She squealed when she saw her.

“Mads! What’re you doing, you in my class now?”

“Hey girl! Nah, just for the day since I missed my class. Just shootin’ the shit with Jay, the TA who is also my fam!”

Jeremy rolled his eyes and sighed.

“Oh my god, no wayyyy! That’s definitely going on my story. Hit me up after class, let’s get lunch!”

“Okay, good afternoon everybody, we’re going to get started with class, now,” Jeremy announced, walking to the front-center of the room and ushering students to their seats, “Hopefully all of you did the assigned reading because you needed it to complete the assignment you just turned in, and you’ll need it again for the activity today. We’re going to be building electrical circuits today, both series and parallel. If you flip to page 150 in your workbooks, you’ll find the procedure for the activity. I’ve listed a few modifications on the board, so make sure you take note of my changes while you’re working,” he paused to read the room, “Does anybody have any questions?”

Silence.

“Okay. Get to work. You can work in pairs or by yourself,” he projected his voice through the room.

The students began talking and working as soon as he finished. He wondered if the lab would go faster because it was the last of the semester and they likely wanted to be done as soon as possible. He sat himself back down at his desk for only a brief moment before multiple students formed a line at his desk. It always perplexed him that he can ask the class if there are any questions and nobody speaks up, but the minute it’s time to work, suddenly there is a pile of students with questions.

“Hi,” the first student said.

“What can I do for you?” Jeremy asked politely.

“So… I forgot to do the assignment for today, I was wondering if I could work on it in class while we do the lab and turn it in at the end of class?”

“No, our class time is meant to be spent on the activities we had planned, sorry.”

“It won’t take that long; I can do both!”

“The syllabus outlines that assignments have to be turned in at the beginning of class. I can’t accept it if it’s late,” he explained.

“So, there’s nothing I can do?” the student asked anxiously.

“No, there isn’t,” Jeremy said bluntly.

“Okay. Well, thanks anyway,” they said and returned to their seat.

The next student froze a moment and began walking back, as well.

“I had the same question as them,” the student said.

“Okay,” Jeremy nodded.

The third and final person was Madison. Her hands were locked together by her fingers and she meekly drew closer to Jeremy.

“Hey, friendo, sooo… I forgot my workbook,” she said quickly, “What’s the, uh, the dealio? What should I do if I can’t do the activity?”

Jeremy took a deep, stressed out, breath and thought about it.

“Umm… why don’t you just partner up with someone who has their book. Just write down the answers on some loose paper. Make sure you number it so Randall will be able to tell which answers go to which questions.”

“Gotcha. Alright, thanks, bud,” she said and returned to her desk.

#do you have the time?#howdyhowdyhowdy everybody #this is a BIG arc #hope you like it #what more to say about this other than i went through hell and back to get this shit finished #time travel #jeremy #madison #leslie #leopold #sophia #also i started putting synopsiseseses at the beginning #inspired by steven universe bc they were very short and had some interpretive value and weren't really just a neutral tone #and i liked that #get ready for some very interestingly portrayed summaries of the episodes #more to come soon!

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girlgrandpa · 4 years

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don’t really know what’s going on. i think i need to write something, anything. it’s going to sound introspective and probably self-centred, or at least self-concerned. ever since i shared something i’d written (an internal musing, more than anything) with a close friend/tutor/mentor of mine, and he told me it was strange, because the words i’d written seemed self-centred and narcissistic self-obsessed when in reality i am so concerned with other people and think about myself so infrequently, i haven’t been able to write in the same way. it hurt my feelings! a lot of what he said that day did, actually....but anyway. it’s 4pm, on a saturday, the third saturday of this month. monday was good, i went to soho and sat for hours in the most beautiful coffee shop before going to a strike solidarity assembly and discussing with other students some of the best things we can do over the coming weeks. my university is one of 74 on strike, i’ve done some really exciting things and have been involved in some meetings, demonstrations, etc etc, to show student support and solidarity which feels exciting and productive and meaningful. i submitted an essay to my department’s sociology zine for the upcoming issue, and it got accepted with no revisions or edits. i got grades back for all of last term’s assignments, and i am very happy with all of them. the conference i submitted the abstract to got back to me and invited me to present my research in april. things on the whole, are good. i’m happy and genuinely thriving, doing well and i’m proud of myself.

but something feels off, nonetheless. it feels self-righteous and ridiculous and naive and entitled to say it, but it’s true! i feel frustrated by institutions and structures and the disregard for people’s lives. i feel lonely, a lot of the time. my friends are beautiful and wonderful people and i wouldn’t change them for the world, but the presence of friends can’t always resolve this feeling. i think it’s an internal loneliness, a reminder, a pang of flatness to remind myself to go and do something for me, to spend time with me, to take care of me. i’m yearning! and i don’t know what for! and i feel drained. i fell asleep at 9.30pm last night, and the night before. i’m trying to read for my assignments for my next deadlines, to finish what i can for now with my dissertation, but struggling to focus. feeling restless and guilty when i do nothing, feeling lethargic and demotivated when i do something. haven’t spoken to my mum for a while. i tried to call her 2 weeks ago whilst i was walking back from uni, she answered and dove straight into telling me everything that’s going on in her life. 20 mins later she asked me what i was doing, but then told me she was driving anyway, and couldn’t hear me properly, and hung up. she texted me a few days ago, asking how i am because she hasn’t heard from me for a while. i tried to ring her back on thursday morning, but she didn’t answer. i feel very disconnected, from most things and most people. haven’t seen some of the important people in my life for a while, and missing their presence immensely. i just feel completely drained, unsalted crisp back at it again. i miss the warmth in the air, leaves on the trees, the sound of birds, cigarettes out my window (i can’t afford to buy any more tobacco). the things i love feel muted, dimmed, as if i’m looking at them through a piece of mottled glass, fuzzy and out of focus. and i don’t like it...i love the life i have made for myself, and i love the places and people i have the absolute privilege of calling my home. but everything else in my life at the moment feels so cyclical and mundane and monotonous. maybe this is the reality of life for everyone, but i’m sure this isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

#god i just want to scream and yell in the welsh mountains....and then dip my toes into cold estuary water....#maybe sit on the bench atop the rocks for a while...walk the cobbled path to the tide house...#find the sheep that wander the grass behind the fence in the distance..wait patiently whilst they tell me it'll be ok

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eponymous-rose · 5 years

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Weird question, but you seem really productive despite seeming to have a constantly fluctuating routine, with both your work and your hobbies. Most people think having a solid routine is the only way to increase your productivity but I've pretty much given up on having a routine since my life seems similar to yours--a lot of travel, weird and always changing work hours. Do you have any advice on how you deal with routine and productivity in spite of that?

Oh gosh, this is definitely something I struggle with a LOT, and I’m not sure I’ve found a coping strategy that works for me yet. But the small things that have been helping have been (1) keeping a routine in my planning even if the stuff I do changes dramatically (even if I’m traveling, I have a notebook where, every Sunday, I list all the stuff that has specific dates/times for the following week, I list the stuff where I still have to come up with a date/time, and I list the stuff I’ve gotta do that week for sure), and (2) finding multiple ways to approach the same goals that I can tailor to my level of energy/spare time on any given week (so this week I’m just not in a super exercisey mindset and can’t rely on having the motivation to run every day, but instead I’m making an extra effort not to eat out this week—lower-effort for my current state of mind, but all toward the same goal of feeling a bit healthier overall).

I’m also very cognizant of how little time at work is actually spent working, so I try not to feel guilty if the total number of hours worked is low as long as the work’s getting done. I’m an incredibly routine-oriented person, but it’s been a bit freeing to slowly and steadily teach myself that stuff just has to get finished one way or another, and the easiest way to do that is to just focus on specific goals and let the rest be flexible.

Anyway, yesterday I was thinking of this ask and was like, “You know, I’ll just write up what I do on Monday as an example, and I bet things will go hilariously awry.” And so they did.

So here’s what my weekly planning list looked like last night:

Dated Events:

Call with paper coauthor at 9AM Monday

Call with leadership academy planning committee at 10AM Monday

Call with peer mentoring group at 9AM Tuesday

Sit in on class at 11:30AM Tuesday and Thursday

Seminars Wednesday at 3PM, Thursday at 4PM, and Friday at 3PM

D&D Saturday at 6PM

Undated Events:

Coordinating abstract submission for an upcoming conference (early week)

Setting up Skype calls with a couple friends I haven’t talked to in a while (late week)

Assorted Priorities:

Book hotel for work travel in July

Accept journal article review request and scope out how long that’ll take

Review some materials sent out for my peer mentoring call

Revise my paper and submit the revisions before the Monday deadline

Get my driver’s license renewed (the joys of yearly visa renewal… your license has to be renewed yearly as well)

Put together a schedule for a biweekly Twitter feature highlighting new publications for the account I run for a subcommittee in my field

Respond to an e-mail about a conference in January about some weird deadline that popped up for next week

Come up with conference abstract ideas before the as-yet-unscheduled meeting

Fill out some action items in advance of my 10AM Monday call

And some more specific checklists for four research projects I’m focusing on this week

I purposely try to group conference calls together, because I currently share my office and feel weird doing video calls when she’s stuck in frame five feet away from me while she tries to work. So Monday seems like a good day to work from home, and I can squeeze in Tuesday’s call before heading to the office that morning. I’ll be in the office Tuesday-Friday, which means I’ll be able to attend those seminars and classes with no problem. I have most of my D&D prep done already because we ended early last game, so I can leave that until Saturday. The only thing I might have to shuffle to next week is the driver’s license thing, because it’ll take three hours and I have to account for finding a Lyft there and back. Okay. Aces.

Wake up this morning to find my internet’s out, and I also somehow left the hard drive with all my research on it at work. Hoo boy. But staring over my to-do list, I think I can set today up as a “big picture” day and not have to do any actual coding, so I’m still okay to work from home. I can also phone in to the conference calls instead of using the video call software. All good.

Luckily, the internet comes back right before my first call of the day. Said call is with someone who also happens to be a dean, so she has a tendency to get held up at meetings, so I take that delay to look at the action items for my second call (I mean… if you send me action items at 8PM on a Sunday I am not gonna touch them until Monday morning).

When she did make it online, we chatted about the new paper, and she strongly encouraged me to send it to our other coauthors in case they have suggestions. We’re submitting on Monday, which is way too short-notice to read a 20-page research paper, but they already read the pre-revision version in great detail, so I shot them an e-mail that included a summary of the substantial changes and a note to the effect that if any of them want more time to look at this stuff, I can beg the editor for an extension on their behalf. Minor crisis averted.

Second meeting is very intense and structured. Everyone has to volunteer to organize and lead two webinars in the next three months, so I go ahead and volunteer for the two April ones so I’ll get it out of the way early. Aaand the first webinar is at 1PM this Friday. Okay. I’ll work from home that morning so I can do last-minute prep, then head into the office in time for the 3PM seminar. No biggie. One organizer puts together a draft schedule, and I send a quick e-mail suggesting a different use of one of the ten-minute time slots. One of the other organizers requests another conference call tomorrow instead of e-mails. I tell them I can only do after 4PM, if I leave work early. Eh. We’ll see how that works out.

After the call, I get through a bunch of small tasks in maybe 20 minutes: hotel booked, Twitter posts prepped, review request accepted (not due until May 20, so plenty of time on that), conference deadline e-mail chain started. I spend the rest of the time before noon getting sucked into an article someone sent me about the myths surrounding undergraduate grade inflation and then reading up on the peer mentoring materials for our call tomorrow. A couple other minor e-mails pop up (scheduling the precise date of a conference mixer in January, that kind of thing) and I manage to deal with them right away.

Lunch! Clearly working from home means I should take the opportunity to indulge in some fine cuisine, some leisurely cooking that highlights—

I heat up a microwave meal (chicken couscous) and watch YouTube videos for an hour.

Back in it! I write up some abstract submission ideas and make a valiant attempt at setting up a time to talk about them, but it looks like that might have to wait until next week. We’re still a ways before the deadline, so that’s okay.

Mmmmmmm someone on Twitter mentions a conference in Germany in September and a workshop in Colorado in July that both look like a good fit for my research. I’m in a situation where I have a big chunk of travel funding that’s going to disappear unless it gets spent in the next year. Oh no. But also oh yes.

Just in case, I put together a couple point-form ideas for stuff to propose that I can bring to the people holding the purse strings.

The rest of the afternoon is spent putting together weekly goals for four of my research projects: each one involves a collaboration with a different person, so I’d like to be able to send each of them an e-mail with at least one new thing to share about that project this week. Just in case that doesn’t happen, though, I rank them from most to least important. Worst-case scenario, I don’t have to send any of them this week, but it’ll make next week tougher if I don’t.

It’s only about 3:30 at this point, but honestly, I’m feeling a bit exhausted and overwhelmed (some of the e-mail chains have gone through five or six replies at this point and keeping it all straight is giving me a headache), so I opt to get some groceries and call it a day.

I may have added some stuff, but I got a lot crossed off today! Here’s how that last checklist looks at the end of the day:

Assorted Priorities:

Revise my paper and submit the revisions before the Monday deadline

Project #1: come up with a new exploratory figure and send to Person A.

Project #2: summarize the early results I started last week and send to Person B, along with an ask to see whether he’d be up for me presenting this stuff in Europe in November.

Project #3: improve on figures I showed last month and send to Person C.

Project #4: prepare a rough outline of the next paper to send to Person D.

Not having my work hard drive means I was able to just focus on the stuff that wasn’t specific to research today. In all the chaos of today, I’ve set myself up well for a research-heavy rest of the week where I (hopefully) won’t have to worry about non-research stuff or big changes to the schedule and can just burrow into research, emerging for occasional seminar/webinar breaks. A good Monday, all around.

#eponymous academia tag #karionwriting

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ladylynse · 5 years

Note

List!list!

(relating to this post)

*cracks knuckles* Okay. Context first, then reasoning.

Anyone who’s looked at my profile on FFnet can tell I’ve been writing fic for about ten years, which will right away tell you I am well past the high school stage, because even if I started writing fanfic at twelve, I’d be in my early twenties. Considering I’ve seen some posts going around the DP fandom celebrating the newer, younger members of that phandom (and welcome to them all!), I can safely say that I have about ten years on most of them. In those ten years’ worth of extra educational time, I have gotten my own masters degree. I have multiple friends with masters degrees–or multiple masters degrees or a PhD or even a post-doc–and I just met with one of them the other day who was telling me about her new job in admin, where she’s actively recruiting international students for graduate programs. Admittedly, I know more people with an M.Sc. than an M.A. because I have an M.Sc., but some basics are applied across programs.

Bearing all that in mind,

1) You don’t start a masters degree in the middle of a term. Maybe a few weeks in if you’re moving from a different country (I shared an office with someone from Ghana who missed about three weeks at the start of term; this actually gave my former office mate from India a bit more time to move out and me and my other office mate from Taiwan more time to rearrange stuff before our new office mate moved in), but not two months and then thrown into it. As with undergrad, you still have to pay tuition, and you may have to take classes, depending on the type of degree you’re doing, when the classes you need are offered, and how far along you are in your particular program. This is the middle of the winter term. The next term in the spring term. That’s May (or, at best, April).

2) Their English comprehension isn’t good enough to be anything more than conditionally accepted right now. I’m not just talking their spelling or their sentence structure; I’m talking about how well they understand what they’re reading. I asked them a question; they came back with a completely unrelated answer that we’ll call A. I clarified that I wasn’t asking about A or even B, I was asking about C. They told me about B. Even if they’re an ESL student–and while their country is set to the US on FFnet, they might be–ESL students need to prove their English literacy in order to study at an English-speaking university. I know people (from different countries) who had to do English classes or pass a TOEFL test before they were officially accepted into their program. I also know people (again, from different countries and with different native tongues) who spent less than one year in Canada and had better English comprehension than this person does, and I know native English speakers who had to convince their potential supervisors that they could write well enough to be accepted into their programs in the first place. (I also knew exchange students in high school with better English comprehension than this person.) This person has two fanfics in English, dating back to 2013 and 2014, and no mention of any other languages in their profile. Even if they are ESL, they have been exposed to English for long enough that, given that they claim to be pursuing a masters, I would expect them to have a higher level of comprehension.

3) “Film University”? No. Just no. Maybe a good program for that at the school, maybe what it’s known for, but there is much more to the industry than just film, and masters programs are more specific than ‘film’. It would be more believable if they claimed they were getting an M.A. in film production.

4) If this were true, they would not have sent me a message in the first place asking for ‘help’, asking about my writing skills despite claiming to read some of my fics, or telling me to watch various tv shows, because they would know that they had a time commitment coming up that would keep them busy enough that they couldn’t/wouldn’t commit any time to their little pet project anyway. Things don’t happen out of the blue. I mean, machines might break down out of the blue, but you know of conference dates well in advance because if you’re applying to present, you have to submit an abstract long before. If you’re in classes, you still have a syllabus and know what the major projects are. If you’re working in a lab, you might need to book a time to use a busy machine–and you would not get the good times, because you’re a student and less important than the actual research going on around you, and if you miss the time you booked, or if the machine breaks down, then you will have to wait again–because even if you were next on the list when said machine broke, the people doing more important research than whatever your project is need to do more of theirs first so they can get all their research done by their deadlines.5) I know for a fact they were asking someone else for ‘help’ yesterday. Said new victim messaged me to confirm their suspicion that it was the same person. If their claim of not having time were true, they would have no reason to ask someone else to help them.

6) They lied about not having time. It is extremely likely that they are lying about this as well in an attempt to impress me–ooh, masters degree–and are banking on the fact that I do not have any knowledge of the application or acceptance processes into graduate programs or, apparently, the general timelines relative to the rest of the university schedule. (I feel like they went this extra step because while a lot of writers will cut back or stop writing when they get to undergrad to focus on their classes, it wouldn’t be a sudden, middle-of-the-term thing like they’re trying to claim.)

#fanfic writer problems #ladylynse #asks #Anonymous #rant #vent

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petshrink · 5 years

Text

I have been out of vet school for almost 3 years now (dang, that was fast). But today I realized I am having serious flash backs because my list of projects right now feels so much like that halfway through the semester when you realize there’s no way in heck you can “seafood platter” it anymore and you enter a never-ending cycle of cramming for the exam that is in 2 days, taking the exam, then starting to cram for the next one. SO MUCH CRAMMING.

And I feel like I am physically running out of time in the day to get things done. I wasn’t sleeping much this week so I was getting 3 or so hours, then waking up at 4 or 5am worrying about the stuff I need to do and getting up to work on it. Now that is improving (my life is just better with propranolol and sertraline in it, ok).

Today I submitted my first case report to my mentor. The first one we are allowed to have someone review and provide feedback, but the other 2 we cannot. This paper freaked me out so much that I was paralyzed and it took me months to write. It’s not even difficult, just tedious.

So I will be getting that back to revise soon. It’s supposed to be submitted by April 1. I have a presentation to give the interns next Thursday on basic cat behavior stuff that I haven’t even started yet. I had a meeting with my statistician today and my first draft/abstract is due to my mentor by 2/8. I need to get that submitted so I can present at the AAFP conference in September. Every Wed we have rounds and right now we are doing a review of neurotransmitters so every week I have at least 10 articles to review, and I take turns with my resident mate on who is presenting. Every 2 weeks we have teleconference rounds with the other behavior residents, and I am SO behind on listening to those recordings. We were just informed that the college is now scheduling teleconference grand rounds where we present a case to our peers with a few diplomates moderating, with 30 minutes of questions after. I will be presenting in July. I am checking in daily with a colleague’s practice to help her tech care care of med questions, etc. while she is on maternity leave. I really need to start taking some of the courses I need to take but when??

Anyway, it’s all good and I know it will get done. Things are not bad right now, for me anyway. Our staff is in a really tough place right now and that means the doctors have more on their to do lists to take the pressure off everyone else, which I am happy to do but man does it ever slow down the process of day to day work. We need another tech and CCR like you would not believe.

Just needed to put this down on ‘paper.’

#resident life #baby behaviorist #year 2 #to do list

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moggieblanket-blog · 5 years

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My Autism Evaluation

I wanted to write this for a number of reasons. First, I wanted to provide an explanation of the process I went through in order to help those who are currently seeking a diagnosis, to give them a better idea of what they might reasonably expect to experience. Secondly, I see many posts on this site which dismiss official diagnoses with statements like, “All they do is give you a list of traits to fill out!” or, “Doctors sometimes don’t have enough experience in X disorder to know what they’re talking about!”

I cannot speak for other diagnoses, but I can tell you now that as far as autism is concerned (and also ADHD; I will add a post about my diagnostic experience with that condition once I receive my assessment results), the number of tests which rely on quantitative data (e.g hard numbers that leave no room for interpretation), external family input, and the observations of both a primary and secondary diagnostician, both in the room at the same time, and who later compare notes, mean that a single doctor’s interpretation or idea of what autism does or doesn’t look like is largely irrelevant to the diagnosis.

For the way in which I was assessed, if you met the numeric cutoff for the various tests, you got the diagnosis, if you didn’t, you didn’t. There was really no room for doctor bias or opinion. I was 21 years old at the time of testing.

My diagnostic evaluation took place in increments over a period of five days that spanned a three-month period between February and April. The eval was administered by a graduate student who was being filmed and mentored by a doctor in psychology. The student met with the psychologist after each of my sessions, and the footage and test results were reviewed and discussed.

My initial appointment was two hours long. It consisted of a detailed intake evaluation which included questions about my current and childhood histories; my family and relationships; the symptoms I experienced both past and present; questions about physical illnesses, any substance abuse, trauma, and all other meaningful life events (family deaths, divorce, etc.). I was given basic one-page screenings for symptoms of depression and anxiety (neither of which I had in sufficient quantities at that time to warrant diagnosis; those would come later). I was also given two different multi-page forms for my parents to fill out (my mother completed mine.) They asked detailed open-ended questions about my early childhood and development, any anomolies or missed milestones, my medical history, etc. They also included at least 50 likert-scale questions (questions whose responses are chosen from a multi-point scale; e.g 1-5 with 1 being mildest and 5 being most severe) about traits I exhibited throughout my childhood which would be specific indicators of ASD. My mother filled these out independently with zero input from me.

My second appointment occurred two weeks later. I submitted all of the paperwork I and my parents had been given to complete, and was given an IQ test, specifically the WAIS-IV (Welscher Adult Intelligence Scale edition 4). This test took two hours to complete, and consisted of spatial reasoning and pattern-recognition tasks (creating patterns from blocks, visually constructing complex illustrated shapes by selecting a specific quantity of smaller illustrated components, the trail test, etc.). Following that were tests of short-term memory and memorization; auditory processing; abstract language abilities (e.g similarities between given words, word definitions, etc.); mental arithmetic and number manipulation; and general knowledge assessment (e.g who was X famous dead person? What does this formula mean? etc.)

The second appointment also included a self-test to pinpoint features of psychotic or personality disorders such as Schizophrenia, Antisocial personality disorder, Bipolar disorder, etc. This was not a basic test in which answers could be fabricated to achieve a specific result. It had a built-in failsafe which allowed the examiner to determine if the answers were genuine or being manipulated during scoring.

Appointment number three took another two hours, during which I was given the WIAT-II (Welscher Individual Achievement Test, edition 2). This was a test of academic achievement which screened for academic ability, particularly as it related to the overall intelligence scores attained on the IQ test. It was used to determine the presence of any learning disabilities, and examined everything from oral reading ability to reading and writing comprehension; spelling; basic and advanced mathematics and processing speed.

The final appointment before sitting down to discuss test results took just under an hour. The grad student who had been examining me performed the ADOS-2 (Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule edition 2, module 4 for fully verbal adults). Sitting to the side to observe our interactions and score the test, was a second grad student.

This test was a semi-structured interaction between the examiner and myself, during which time the examiner presented a multitude of activities which were designed to elicit specific responses, the nature of which could indicate the presence or absence of autism. It “pressed” for responses to social reciprocity; attempts at social overtures; nonverbal body language; idiosyncradic language or behaviours; odd or extremely narrow interests; complex body movements; theory of mind; and the understanding of complex social behaviours such as friendship, marriage, and emotional expression.

The fifth appointment was when I finally received the results of my evaluation. The grad student who had tested me gave me an 18-page document detailing every aspect of the assessment, from the details of our conversations about my childhood and experiences, to breakdowns of the scores on all of my various tests and explanations of their meanings, and a multi-paragraph examination of my ADOS results, along with a quantitative chart denoting my scores relative to each social press.

Page 14 noted that I officially met the necessary criteria for an autism spectrum diagnosis, and that I had no learning disabilities or depression, but that my anxiety, while not severe enough to warrant a diagnosis, was high enough to be in need of monitoring.

The four pages after that contained a number of recommendations for future treatment, including individual therapy, social skills group, medication, and continued self-education.

And there you have it. As you can see, an autism evaluation, when conducted properly, is so much more than just a doctor giving you a checklist of symptoms, or of you describing your symptoms to a psychologist and their saying, “Yep, sounds like autism!” It is very detailed and complex, and takes a lot of time and energy, both on the part of the person being evaluated, and on that of the diagnostician. It is not a simple thing, but, at the end of the day, you can rest assured that the testing was thorough and in earnest, not something that was cobbled together halfheartedly.

This is why I get so frustrated when I read things like, “I know myself better than a doctor does!” or, “Doctors make mistakes too!” Of course doctors make mistakes, they are human too. The difference is, doctors are far, far less likely to make a mistake than a layman reading information on the internet, because they’ve studied their specific field for years, and taken very specific, very difficult licensing exams to be able to conduct testing. Doctors also have the ability to use objective, quantitative evaluations of your strengths and weaknesses to reach conclusions about you that you didn’t know about yourself. For example, I suspected that my atrocious math skills were a result of dyscalculia. They’re not. They’re the result of a severely diminished processing speed (as in 13th percentile severe, meaning that 87% of the adult population has a processing speed that is faster than mine). If I had just rattled off a list of symptoms to my psychologist and said, “I really suck at math,” and she took that at face value, I could easily have been misdiagnosed with dyscalculia and given inappropriate treatment. I don’t need to be taught math differently, I just need to be taught it more slowly. Please remember this post the next time you see someone say, “Professional diagnosis is no more valid than self-diagnosis because professionals just listen to you talk about symptoms and give you a checklist off the internet!” Thank you.

TLDR: My autism eval was very long, very time and energy-intensive, used a variety of different standardized testing measures, and was generally a lot more complex than being given a questionnaire by my therapist or reeling off my symptoms and being told, “Yep, it’s autism!”

#actuallyautistic #evaluation #self-diagnosis #self-dx #ados #iq test #prof dx

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livingbutamireally · 4 years

Text

AY2019/2020 Y1S2 Module Reviews

AY2019/2020 year 1 semester 2 review

Wew this semester was more of a honeymoon period for me still since I cant advance past CS1010S - this is only the first CS mod i have to take big oof. First half of the sem was spent mostly on (re)doing CS1010S AFAST and the rest went to catching up on other modules that are of relatively lower intensities compared to modules i imagine i will have to take next semester? The most challenging mods this sem goes to CS1010S, EC1301 and also.. ST2334? About half of the semester was done at home though due to the COVID-19 pandemic and so the never-ending heap of online lectures to review (for which i am always behind on unfortunately). I have no need to S/U any module this sem fortunately but that also means I might have effectively wasted my last COVID S/Us. I’m also the kind that is happy enough just to pass.

Modules taken this semester:

CS1010S (AFAST)

GEH1031

GES1041

EC1301

ST2334

MKT1705X

CS1010S Programming Methodology (Python) – AFAST

School of Computing

Prof: Ben Leong

Exam Dates: 16 Jan (Midterm Mock - not graded) / 24 Feb (Practical Exam) / 28 Feb (Finals)

Weightage:

Coursemology – 25%

Participation – 5%

Midterm test – NA

Practical exam – 20%

Final assessment – 50%

Since i took the alternative finals i have updated the final weightage for this module (last sems CS1010S had different weightages).

As we already know, this module (or any CS modules in general) easily has the highest workload compared to other modules, except this time without needing to complete missions every week? Also since its a re-module, there were no lectures/tutorials/recitations for this module and the prof spent lesser time than the first module with us. There is just one consultation slot per week that lasts about 1.5-2h, where the TAs/ prof Ben goes through exam questions over the past years and where students get to voice any doubts they might have. Hence, a lot of self-discipline is required on our part to grind past year papers consistently and drill our brains. Not sure if i’ve mentioned this before, but it’s nice of them to provide comprehensive worked solutions for about 50 exam papers (or maybe more) the profs claimed it was the only module in NUS to be doing this. Prof mentioned he was a bit disappointed in our batch as many werent putting in considerable effort right from the start aka ponning consultation slots arranged over the holidays (in December) - which is a lot of effort coming from the professor to arrange this just for our batch (first batch of CS1010S AFAST). Just name me any prof who does this for their students, coming back over the holidays to teach unpaid. Those who were not at level 50 in Coursemology had more time now to finish the missions/side-quests needed to achieve level 50 and get the full points for Coursemology (as we were expected to in Sem 1). Things were a bit rusty after the holidays at the start but it became better with practice. Was a bit disappointed at not being able to get question 2 right during the written paper (finals) it was a bit of an IQ-ish problem solving question. Anyways winged the 4m what-did-you-learn essay question (as usual) at the end as a saving grace and passed albeit by a very bit. I improved by 2 marks ?? compared to the last semester for finals, not the nicest thing to see after so much effort being put in but still. I think I’m just better at writing essays than coding....

Results for the PE

Mean is 14. Median is also 14. Standard Deviation is 7.6. Highest grades was 30/30 Question 1 turned out to be harder than we had intended, but Q2 was quite easy and most of Q3 was doable by most, as you can see in the results. Passing mark for PE is roughly 10/30.

Mean is 51/10, median is 53/100 and standard deviation is 14.4. Highest was 81/100. Generally, the performance was much worse than we had expected. Pass grade for Finals is roughly 40/100.

Basically, if got 10/30 for PE and 40/100 for Finals and you have done your Coursemology assignments you can expect a C grade. If not, then prepare to SU. CS1010S is not graded on a curve. We set question to test that you have mastered certain concepts and your final grade is a reflection of what you seem to have mastered as reflected by your exam performance.

This whole module was done by recess week so we have more time to focus on other mods. Honestly will be happy enough just to pass. Now, how do i survive CS23030 and CS2040 rip.

GEH1031 Understanding the Universe

Faculty of Science (Physics)

Prof: Cindy Ng

Weightage:

Term Test 1 (3 Mar) – 25%

Term Test 2 (16 Apr) – 25%

Video presentation 5 Apr – 25%

Video critiques 17 Apr – 10%

Astrophotograph 17 Apr – 10%

Quizzes – 10%

Ng is relatively a slower-paced lecturer, which is good for someone like me who cant keep up with faster-paced profs. 2x on her elearning lecture videos makes the best pace imo. Her lecture slides are concise and simple, and will suffice in revision. While she does explain more in depth especially for concepts that are harder to grasp (not many) during the lecture i love that she keeps her lecture slides straight forward to the point. Everything was in point form, short and sweet much appreciated. Also if you pay attention to her lectures, you will do well for the quizzes at the end of each chapter for sure. Though i think you get the marks for quizzes as long as you did them before each deadline like participation marks kinda (?) rather than being graded on whether you answered them correctly. I didn’t do too well for term test 2 unfortunately and I also only just found out you can display the statistics of where you place among the cohort in LUMINUS and needless to say I didn’t place too well. It’s a relatively manageable module though there’s still a lot of content. Term test 1 consisted of MCQs and about 3 2m questions which she call “essay questions” which can be misleading for some (like me!). The MCQs are very tricky and most come in the format of these options: is A/ is not A/ is B/ is not B and you have to pick the right combination (2) out of these 4 options to score 1 point, which of course means less chances of getting them correct compared to the usual 25% in a typical MCQ. Term test 2 was held on LUMINUS at home, and this time since its an e-exam there was only 10mins to do about 25 MCQ, leaving only 0.4 minutes = 24s for 1 MCQ, which proved to be really stressful for many as voiced out by other cohort mates in the forum section (so very valid). The e-exam also had an essay component, 2m per question with 4 questions under 10 minutes. The implementation of this time constraint was to prevent cheating but the duration given was (I feel) unreasonable. As for the video presentation, we had to come up with a 7 min (at most) video most of which lasts 5/6mins on a news article in 2020 regarding astronomy. We had to form groups of 3 at the start of the semester, and were told to look for members on the forums if we did not have enough members. It is not necessary to show your face so you can be creative! For my group, we had a Germany graduate exchange student to work with us which was really cool. Our group’s theme was NASA’s discovery of exoplanets with the use of TESS which was wrapped up in March, before the deadline in April. Really thankful for him to prompt us each week for progress and have it done and over with instead of rushing it last minute when things get busy during reading week. (I think the guy was really done with us im so sorry Philipp if you are reading this.) Also since term test 2 was done by mid-April we had more time allocated for other modules to prepare for finals (swee). Video critiques were supposedly 50 words long if i remembered correctly but i didnt find out until i hit the submit button and :_D i left 1/2-liners for each. One of the criteria of this video critique was showing that you have watched the videos of other groups well but i dont rmb my critiques proving that ive watched the videos carefully though i really did. I think our group did the best in our cluster though! (based on the critiques). For the astrophotograph, we could take part in the astronomy sessions held on a Friday of every month to use the telescopes but there wasn’t any this semester sadly due to the pandemic.

GES1041 Everyday Ethics in Singapore

Faculty of Arts and Sciences (Philosophy)

Prof: Chin Chuan Fei

Weightage:

4 Journal Entries – 20%

4 Reading Quizzes – 20%

Group Report – 10%

Group Presentation – 20%

Finals – 40%

Chin’s lectures are pretty enjoyable, his voice/tone really suits lectures. He is a very approachable person too and willing to share a lot of experiences relevant to the topic at hand. He includes snippets of related videos in his slides many of which are insightful that made me share with my friends too. There is a total of 4 main themes in the module which are namely inequality, meritocracy, multiculturalism and migration and he also introduced the use of an ethical toolbox to helps us reach a more definitive thought process especially for an abstract topic like philosophy. I didn’t realise this was a philo mod when bidding for it so I was really surprised when i went for the first lecture (like bro it clearly says ETHICS what was i thinking). I also thought it would be something similar to Social Studies but was proven wrong. There are compulsory readings to do each week, about 20 pages long usually per reading and they are all chapters from books written by other Singaporean philosophers regarding the themes gone through which helped to widen my perspectives and broadened my horizons, those were some really good selection of readings. I have learned more things than I previously knew about the foreign domestic workers, migrant workers, racism in Singapore among the many topics we have dealt with.

This module is for those who are :

Comfortable with reading a lot every week (i put a lot here because i dont usually read)

Comfortable with writing essays (journal entry) 500 words each

Proficient in English (some of the expressions used can be quite complex and may take you a much longer time to process and understand especially with the reading quizzes that tests your comprehension of the readings - really just comprehension in true GP fashion)

Have a lot of experience in this field, those under social work would have many and will be able to share relevant experiences in the journal entry

Interested about the aforementioned themes

Reading quizzes are like comprehension style questions: do your readings and the questions tests you on what you have read so you just have to look for evidence of each option, the questions will refer you to the specific page/reading that will guide you (nice of them to do so). Journal entries and reading quizzes occur on an alternative week basis so reading quizzes followed by journal then reading quiz again and so forth. Nearing the end, you will be grouped according to who you sit close with and you will work together with your group members to work on a project that will have 2 overlapping themes about any policies/ observations of Singapore. It is advisable for the scope to not be too broad. e.g. we chose to talk about offering Muslim food in school canteens vs non-Muslim food (fewer food options for Muslims) and this encompasses both the multiculturalism and inequality themes. The group report will be due before the presentation and it helps identify some main points you will then talk about later during the presentation. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the group presentation this semester was done on Microsoft Powerpoint through voice-over slides. God bless, and there goes the need to memorise scripts especially with the finals season so near. The professor was really accommodating and gave us more time to prepare the voice-over slides when he announced that it will be held on powerpoint too. Finals was 20 MCQs in 1 hour on LUMINUS, the questions were similar to the reading quizzes (5 MCQs per quiz).

EC1301 Principles of Economics

Faculty of Arts and Sciences (Economics)

Prof: Ong Ee Cheng

Tutor: Devika

Weightage:

Pre/post-lecture Quizzes

Class Participation

Midterms 7 Mar

Finals 29 Apr

Can’t find the actual breakdown of scores sorry!

Bell-curve is really really steep for this one since its purely MCQ. Divided into micro and macroeconomics so first half of the sem was micro then the other half was macro. Finals was about 70% macro and 30% micro since micro was already tested for midterms. Every week, there’s a pre-lecture quiz to be done before the lecture and a post-lecture quiz due before the next lecture to reinforce your learning. There’s also supplementary readings that were given but i gave up on it by the third week. The way it is taught is a bit different from what I was used to in JC the things they focus on is also a bit different. There’s more calculations than JC whereas JC economics was more conceptual? I took only H1 economics so a lot of concepts were fresh for me like monopolism, comparative/absolute advantages, income elasticity etc. Both midterms and finals was held on Examplify with a lockdown on everything including wifi. The lecturer also provides additional practice questions in the form of quizzes nearing the exams instead of exam papers. To be honest, I felt this module was hard?? Not sure if anyone else felt the same way, it was a struggle.. I thought it was a fluff mod and boy was i very wrong about this. Also important thing to note is though this mod has MCQ-only exam, the MCQs are not 4 options but 6 options long with many tricky options and of course time constraint. Finals was 70/80 questions long in 1h iirc. Midterms was 40 questions. After the 3rd (?) tutorial, there was no more physical tutorials held just zoom tutorial sessions which only 3 ppl in my slot regularly attended. Towards the finals, a lot more zoom sessions were opened up and we could attend other TA’s zoom sessions this was a godsend thank you. My tutor wasn’t really clear in her explanations or maybe it is just me her accent came off a bit strong. I emailed her some questions but even now I have not receive any answers from her, she told me next week, and the next week became next next week and so on. I guess she must have had a lot on her plate. I didn’t think she was a good tutor. I flunked my midterms (5% percentile) so I was a bit dejected.

ST2334 Probability and Statistics

Faculty of Science (Statistics and Applied Probability)

Prof: Chan Yiu Man

Tutor: Li Shang

Weightage:

1. Quiz 1,2,3 (CA1) – 30% (?)

2. Finals – 60% (?)

Prof was really funny and friendly. Although his tutorials left me confused (my friends would care to disagree), his lectures were still pretty good. He always emphasised knowing what we are doing rather than doing the math blindly. The tutor was fast in his replies whenever I asked him questions by email. This module is an extension of statistics in JC, probability and many more probability distribution (F, chi-square, t test, z test) with terms we have never encountered before too (unless you took BT1101 but this mod focuses more on deriving the values than having a program-R calculate it for you). Ever since the outbreak, the lectures were converted to e-lecture slide style but each lesson would take 4 lectures (4h), instead of the 2 lecture per week so we had to spend more time watching the videos than usual. It is easy to be behind on videos when there is only e-lecture videos so much discipline is required to stay on task.

Finals was proctored with zoom and held on Luminus in the form of a quiz. We were expected to scan and submit a pdf with our workings after the exam. I did not have time to finish about 8 questions (a lot of marks gone) there were a total of 30 questions, spent too much time in front on the easier questions. I did study for the later questions but had no chance to utilize what I have revised (sad). I am really dead for this module i hope i dont fail this.

Update. God bless, thought i was really doomed for because i lost so many marks from not being able to finish 8/30 questions that have the most marks rewarded. Guess i really took time to make less mistakes on the previous questions.

MKT1705X Principles of Marketing

Business School (Marketing)

Prof: Regina Yeo

Tutor: Ms Canley

Weightage:

Individual Assignment – 15%

Group Assignment – 25% due in tutorials 4/5

Subject Pool – 10% *

Class Participation – 10% *

Final Exam 30 Apr – 40% *

* not too sure, checked from other reviewers

Individual assignment questions (total of 5) for tutorials 1-3 are given at the start for which the tutor will go through in the allocated weeks. We get to choose the question we want to do and if that week, the question will be discussed that week will be the deadline for our IAs. The other questions in the IA do not have to be submitted but will be discussed in class. There’s class participation for this module so people were more eager than I was used to, to answer questions in class. I had no opportunity to though in this module (halfway into the semester it became elearning), the tutor had too many hands to pick. The tutor was very accommodating and knew our difficulties and was willing to work out compromise. However, her classes were centered mainly on her experiences (which can be a bit boring) it could have been better if she went through the content. Understand that it is a fluff module that requires many examples, but would be good to relate them back to the content we are expected to master. Tutorials are held every alternate week and we are expected to do the individual questions even if we do not need to submit so that we have something at least to share in class. Subject pool was giveaway marks basically do 6 research surveys and u will get the full marks for that. Final exam comprises of 3 essay questions (40m, 30m, 30m) that you have to submit in 1.5h (i thought it was 2h during the paper rip mad rush for the end), no references/research needed but there’s a plagiarism checker by TurnItIn on luminus basically testing the application of concepts to examples.

I got a B+ for group assignment, and A- for individual assignment. I think i can only do essay styled questions, is this a sign to do arts.....

Oh the presentation was changed to a one-shot video recording (no stitching of individual videos together) instead of an actual presentation in front of your tutorial mates. I think a lot of other groups also read off their scripts but ours was really obvious. The tutor grades (structures her own bell-curve) based on those who attempted the same question to be more fair rather than comparing among all the different questions so in a way, the difficulty of the questions won’t affect your grade.

Epilogue. this is probably the last and only time i could do this well.... even if it does not fit the conventional definition of doing well......

#y1s2

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serenbayraktarcomd482-blog · 4 years

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The Revision of the Milestones

I have continued to study on my research project which is “How do citizen journalists approach the topic of the murder of Emine Bulut in Turkey? According to my timetable, I have timely fulfilled my duties in the schedule. Therefore, I believe that I have prepared a successful program for my progress. However, I have revised the gannt chart again in order to be able to sustain my research article studies much more successfully. My tasks are the same as the previous gannt charts but, I have changed the dates of the tasks. In this direction, I believe that I will continue to fulfill my duties which are written in the new gannt chart timely and systematically.

I have submitted my first milestone on 19 February 2020. I have started to implement my duties according to the gannt chart. And then, I found some tweets and Twitter accounts which are related to ‘Emine Bulut’ issue on 16 February. “Haluk Levent”, “@AysenEceKavas”, “@kadindavaları” and “@kadinmeclisleri” are the some Twitter accounts that have mentioned about the murder of Emine Bulut on Twitter. I have consulted these accounts to my advisor and instructors, and according to their feedback, I have decided to use some of them as a reference in my research article. However, I have continued to search for new Twitter accounts while I was writing the article. In addition to this, I did my research planning with my advisor to a great extent on 23 February, and I completed the introduction part of the research on 1 March. The introduction part of the research was revised, and searching for the new tweets and Twitter accounts is done until 8 March 2020. “@avumuryildirim” was decided as one of the references which I analyze later. Moreover, I sent the written parts of the article to my advisor and instructors to get feedback. At the same time, I finished the second part of the research article which is “What is the concept of Citizen Journalism?” completely on 15 March 2020. In addition to this, I sustained to search tweets and revise the written parts. I met with my advisor on 4 March, and I got feedback about my studies and progress. I also met my other instructor about the research studies on 6 March. Milestone#2 was submitted on 5 March 2020. The third part of the research which is the murder of women and the issue of ‘Emine Bulut’ in Turkey was written and revised on 22 March 2020. Citizen journalists and their approaches to the murder of ‘Emine Bulut’ in Turkey which is the fourth part of the article was completed on 30 March 2020. Abstract, conclusion and references of the article was finished on 6 April 2020.

According to my gannt chart, I am preparing for the Midterm Review I and Midterm Review II. I completed the first draft of the research article completely for the midterm. In addition to this, I am preparing a revised milestone and a revised proposal document. At the same time, I am revising my blog page. Furthermore, I will create a 10 minutes video that tells my project and the project development with a presentation file until 8 April 2020.

Phase 3 will start on 6 April with the submission of Milestone #3, and it will be submitted until 12 April 2020. On 8 April, there is a midterm submission. I am planning to revise the first draft of the article in detail considering the feedbacks from 8 April 2020 to 25 April 2020. References of the research article and revising the whole paper in detail will be done on 27 April 2020. Between the 27 and 29 April, I will submit milestone #4. I am planning to revise the research article until 9 May 2020 lastly, and I will submit the final version of the paper.

In conclusion, I strongly believe that I have successfully fulfilled my duties which are in the gannt chart until that time. Therefore, I think that it is a very helpful schedule in order to be able to develop my research article day by day. If I can continue to study like previous weeks, I can finish the research article timely and systematically.

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dipulb3 · 4 years

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Science by press release: When the story gets ahead of the science | Appradab

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/science-by-press-release-when-the-story-gets-ahead-of-the-science-appradab-4/

Science by press release: When the story gets ahead of the science | Appradab

The media’s protection of those developments has additionally been at “breakneck velocity” — as a result of discovering any solution to stall the unfold of this illness is so crucial. For instance, a number of scientists lately known as me each on and off the document to relay their optimism that a vaccine might be accessible by the start of subsequent 12 months. It could be a remarkably quick course of, on condition that vaccine improvement is usually measured in years or many years, not months. So this previous week, I took a step again to dig deeper into the research and look into the supply of this optimism. I used to be shocked at how skinny the accessible information really is in peer-reviewed medical journals.

There isn’t any query that on this atmosphere, velocity is of the essence. Scientists are scrambling to be taught in regards to the virus, the illness and methods to preserve individuals from dying. Well being officers are working onerous to place sound public well being measures in place that do not overburden society or shut down the economic system. And journalists are working ragged making an attempt to cowl all of it.

However there are additionally rising considerations — on the a part of scientists and journalists — that the research being supplied up and showcased aren’t prepared for “prime time.” Actually, many aren’t research in any respect, however subjective conclusions primarily based on information, and strategies that stay hidden and thus troublesome to validate. By no means earlier than has full and speedy transparency been so essential, and by no means earlier than has the scientific image round Covid-19 been so opaque.

What distinction does the supply make?

Press releases, pre-print papers and revealed papers all serve totally different functions, and carry totally different weight for each scientists and journalists.

A press release “is there to make your establishment, your shopper, your large identify researcher, your product, your drug firm and its merchandise, look pretty much as good as may be, hoping that that press launch will persuade journalists to put in writing about it,” Gary Schwitzer defined to Appradab. Schwitzer is a longtime well being journalist and writer, and the founding father of HealthNewsReview.org. As a result of it is written by whoever is selling the product, it is virtually by no means adverse, Schwitzer stated.

Historically, pre-print papers have been articles that researchers and lecturers put out on pre-print servers to get suggestions from their friends earlier than they submit their examine to a journal. Throughout this pandemic, the profiles of a minimum of two of them — medRxiv (pronounced med-archive), for well being sciences, and bioRxiv (pronounced bio-archive), for biology — have been tremendously elevated. “Pre-print servers are a lot, way more essential than they ever have been in Covid-related areas — in different phrases, in life sciences, in scientific medication. They simply weren’t a participant earlier than this,” Dr. Ivan Oransky instructed us. Oransky is the co-founder of RetractionWatch.org, Vice President of Editorial at Medscape, and a medical journalism professor at New York College.

A examine revealed in a reputable scientific journal is — in principle — the ultimate, full model. To get revealed right here, a examine has to bear a course of known as peer assessment. Kate Grabowski, an assistant professor within the division of pathology at Johns Hopkins College, calls the peer-review course of “a number of, unbiased units of eyes” on a paper. Whereas peer assessment is in no way fool-proof, it usually displays the experience of many individuals in a specific subject who do not essentially have a “canine within the race.”

“I believe it is simply so invaluable to selecting up potential errors which are largely unintentional, and in addition simply making the science higher. Normally once we submit papers, they’re like tough drafts, after which might get refined [several times] till they are much higher,” Grabowski stated. She described the method, to us, as “iterative.”

However the previous few months have highlighted that the highway to strong science may be stuffed with potholes, velocity bumps, blind spots and hairpin turns. If you’re not cautious, typically that highway can lead you straight off a cliff.

Listed here are a number of latest examples of the story getting forward of the science:

HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE: By now, you may have absolutely heard of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine. However, it’s possible you’ll not have recognized that on the time President Trump touted its advantages, there was a pre-print report from French researchers initially posted on-line on March 20. That study was of simply 42 sufferers, and it has been criticized for complicated information, poor protocols and never clearly accounting for all of the sufferers’ outcomes, in keeping with Oransky’s Retraction Watch web site. On April 3, the Worldwide Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy — the society that publishes the journal the paper was alleged to publish in — issued a discover saying, “the article doesn’t meet the Society’s anticipated customary.”

On Could 11, one other examine on hydroxychloroquine appeared on medRxiv. 9 days later, the examine was withdrawn. In the abstract is now a press release saying: “The authors have withdrawn this manuscript and don’t want it to be cited. Due to controversy about hydroxychloroquine and the retrospective nature of their examine, they intend to revise the manuscript after peer assessment.”

Sadly, none of this stopped the hype across the drug, resulting in critical shortages for patients utilizing it for the efficient therapy of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. As extra thorough revealed analysis on the drug lastly began to emerge, it was proven to work neither prophylactically nor as a treatment for Covid-19, and its uncomfortable side effects had been discovered to be doubtlessly harmful to certain patients. The US authorities now has a stockpile of 63 million doses.

DEXAMETHASONE: Extra lately, examine outcomes on the generally used steroid treatment dexamethasone had been launched via press conference first, irritating researchers who wished to see the onerous information upon which these good-news findings had been primarily based. Harvard well being knowledgeable Dr. Ashish Jha tweeted: “First — it’s now a function of this pandemic that the majority findings made public by way of press launch with little information to supply context. Second — that is REALLY excellent news if it seems to be true.” The issue is that on the time we hear about these leads to the general public, we should always have the arrogance to say it’s true. Not like with hydroxychloroquine, the examine outcomes of dexamethasone seem to carry up. In sufferers on ventilators, mortality was decreased by one third, in keeping with the pre-printed, early study, which was launched the next week. However, as soon as once more, we nonetheless must see if it’s going to maintain as much as the trials of peer assessment.

MODERNA: Moderna, one of many firms within the very aggressive race to provide a vaccine in opposition to the coronavirus, set off a frenzy on Wall Street after sending out a press launch on what some thought-about hyped-up partial outcomes from Section 1 of its trial. On the time, Dr. Peter Hotez, a number one knowledgeable on infectious illness and vaccine improvement at Baylor School of Medication, instructed Appradab he discovered the outcomes of Moderna’s press launch “uninterpretable.” “It did not include any information,” he stated. “So principally — it is opinion. It was spin and opinion.” When requested by Appradab to reply, Moderna issued a press release saying: “The Firm labored cooperatively with NIAID to correctly characterize the interim information supplied by NIAID. Moderna additionally stated on its subsequent investor name that we count on NIAID and its scientific companions to publish full information from the trial at a future date.”

The Moderna vaccine has been developed in partnership with the Nationwide Institutes of Well being’s Nationwide Institute of Allergy and Infectious Illnesses, headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci has usually cited the velocity at which the vaccine was dropped at Section 1 trials. “That’s overwhelmingly the quickest that has ever been achieved,” he said. He additional added, “Given the truth that we would have liked to do that as rapidly as doable with out sacrificing security or scientific integrity, the federal authorities partnered with a number of of those firms and stated, ‘Guess what? We’ll transfer quick and we’ll assume we’ll achieve success. And if we’re, we have saved a number of months. And if we’re not, the one factor we have misplaced is cash.’ However higher lose cash than lose lives by delaying the vaccine.”

Fauci is optimistic in regards to the potential vaccine however was additionally disenchanted by the early launch of outcomes. “I did not like that,” he told STAT News. “What we might have most popular to do, fairly frankly, is to attend till we had the info from your entire Section 1 — which I hear is sort of just like the info that they confirmed — and publish it in a good journal and present all the info. However the firm, after they seemed on the information, as all firms do, they stated, ‘Wow, that is thrilling. Let’s put out a press launch.’”

Actually, in relation to the vaccine race, regardless of all of the speak you’ll have heard from Moderna or Oxford College or “Operation Warp Pace,” or having billions of doses by the top of the 12 months, bear in mind: We have solely seen that one examine revealed in The Lancet. That is it. We have to bear in mind to mood our hopes and enthusiasm with the info we have now.

I embody these examples as a result of they present how totally different components of the method can break down.

“Attempting to do science by press launch, with out backing it up, both with a standard journal or a preprint … has universally led to misunderstanding and has no place in science. The biotechs are doing it as a result of they’re writing for his or her shareholders, they’re writing for his or her buyers, however it’s being achieved in a manner that is oblivious to its public well being impression and must cease,” Hotez stated.

Put one other manner by pissed off analysis scientist James Heathers in a tweet: “Science by press launch is simply guarantees with numbers sprinkled on it. GIVE. US. THE. GODDAMN. PAPER.”

Whiplash for shoppers of well being information

When this occurs — and particularly when errors are revealed or papers are retracted — public belief is eroded and folks start to doubt science.

“It is like whiplash,” Oransky stated. “I would be actually confused.”

However these days that whiplash has turn into virtually inevitable as a result of that forwards and backwards is how science strikes ahead on this Covid lifestyle.

Including to the whiplash and confusion is simply the sheer variety of research popping out. In keeping with Grabowski, who primarily based her estimate on the NIH’s iSearch COVID-19 Portfolio, roughly 35,000 articles have been amassed so far on the subject — and so they preserve coming.

To get a deal with on all of them, Grabowski heads up a workforce of about 50 Johns Hopkins College researchers on the Novel Coronavirus Analysis Compendium, which curates and evaluations rising analysis. She estimates they display between 1,500 and a pair of,000 articles per week, and have checked out greater than 10,000 of them complete. As you would possibly count on, some are rubbish and a few are gems.

“I might say there’s positively some wonderful research which are being carried out beneath a extremely speedy timeframe,” Grabowski stated. “It is actually superb to see science shifting at this tempo. I do not suppose we have ever seen something like this earlier than.”

Purchaser and vendor beware

All of the consultants stated it’s nice information that a lot analysis is being achieved, even though a lot of the work is rising by way of press releases and pre-prints.

“The truth that scientists are getting work on the market earlier in order that different scientists can pore over it and we are able to possibly be taught issues extra rapidly — that is a superb factor,” Oransky stated. “The truth that we’re treating all of it equally as if it is all been … topic to the identical stage of scrutiny — that is the issue.”

Schwitzer cautions journalists and those that disseminate data to take the time to do it proper. “Simply reminding individuals to decelerate. A lot of what we’re doing, reporting breathlessly at breakneck velocity, does not have to be reported restlessly at breakneck velocity,” he stated, including, “Phrases matter and the info matter.”

So, what does this all imply for you? “I believe that somebody studying, viewing, watching, listening ought to by no means make any choices primarily based on a single report they learn, whether or not it is a examine or a information report on a examine,” Oransky stated. “Significantly if that information report does not put into context every part that is come earlier than and does not clarify what we nonetheless do not know.”

Appradab’s Andrea Kane and Nadia Kounang contributed to this report.

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anthonykrierion · 4 years

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A Well-Formed Query Helps Search Engines Understand User Intent in the Query

A Well-Formed Query Helps a Search Engine understand User Intent Behind the Query

To start this post, I wanted to include a couple of whitepapers that include authors from Google. The authors of the first paper are the inventors of a patent application that was just published on April 28, 2020, and it is very good seeing a white paper from the inventors of a recent patent published by Google. Both papers are worth reading to get a sense of how Google is trying to rewrite queries into “Well-Formed Natural Language Questions.

August 28, 2018 – Identifying Well-formed Natural Language Questions

The abstract for that paper:

Understanding search queries is a hard problem as it involves dealing with “word salad” text ubiquitously issued by users. However, if a query resembles a well-formed question, a natural language processing pipeline is able to perform more accurate interpretation, thus reducing downstream compounding errors. Hence, identifying whether or not a query is well-formed can enhance query understanding. Here, we introduce a new task of identifying a well-formed natural language question. We construct and release a dataset of 25,100 publicly available questions classified into well-formed and non-wellformed categories and report an accuracy of 70.7% on the test set. We also show that our classifier can be used to improve the performance of neural sequence-to-sequence models for generating questions for reading comprehension.

The paper provides examples of well-formed queries and ill-formed queries:

November 21, 2019 – How to Ask Better Questions? A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Dataset for Rewriting Ill-Formed Questions

The abstract for that paper:

We present a large-scale dataset for the task of rewriting an ill-formed natural language question to a well-formed one. Our multi-domain question rewriting (MQR) dataset is constructed from human contributed Stack Exchange question edit histories. The dataset contains 427,719 question pairs which come from 303 domains. We provide human annotations for a subset of the dataset as a quality estimate. When moving from ill-formed to well-formed questions, the question quality improves by an average of 45 points across three aspects. We train sequence-to-sequence neural models on the constructed dataset and obtain an improvement of 13.2%in BLEU-4 over baseline methods built from other data resources. We release the MQR dataset to encourage research on the problem of question rewriting.

The patent application I am writing about was filed on January 18, 2019, which puts it around halfway between those two whitepapers, and both of them are recommended to get a good sense of the topic if you are interested in featured snippets, people also ask questions, and queries that Google tries to respond to. The Second Whitepaper refers to the first one, and tells us how it is trying to improve upon it:

Faruqui and Das (2018) introduced the task of identifying well-formed natural language questions. In this paper,we take a step further to investigate methods to rewrite ill-formed questions into well-formed ones without changing their semantics. We create a multi-domain question rewriting dataset (MQR) from human contributed StackExchange question edit histories.

Rewriting Ill-Formed Search Queries into Well-Formed Queries

Interestingly, the patent is also about rewriting search Queries.

It starts by telling us that “Rules-based rewrites of search queries have been utilized in query processing components of search systems.”

Sometimes this happens by removing certain stop-words from queries, such as “the”, “a”, etc.

After Rewriting a Query

Once a query is rewritten, it many be “submitted to the search system and search results returned that are responsive to the rewritten query.”

The patent also tells us about “people also search for X” queries (first patent I have seen them mentioned in.)

We are told that these similar queries are used to recommend additional queries that are related to a submitted query (e.g., “people also search for X”).

These “similar queries to a given query are often determined by navigational clustering.”

As an example, we are told that for the query “funny cat pictures”, a similar query of “funny cat pictures with captions” may be determined because that similar query is frequently submitted by searchers following submission of the query “funny cat pictures”.

Determining if a Query is a Well Formed Query

The patent tells us about a process that can be used to determine if a natural language search query is well-formed, and if it is not, to use a trained canonicalization model to create a well-formed variant of that natural language search query.

First, we are given a definition of “Well-formedness” We are told that it is “an indication of how well a word, a phrase, and/or another additional linguistic element (s) conform to the grammar rules of a particular language.”

These are three steps to tell whether something is a well-formed query. It is:

Grammatically correct

Does not contain spelling errors

Asks an explicit question

The first paper from the authors of this patent tells us the following about queries:

The lack of regularity in the structure of queries makes it difficult to train models that can optimally process the query to extract information that can help understand the user intent behind the query.

That translates to the most important takeaway for this post:

A Well-Formed Query is structured in a way that allows a search engine to understand the user intent behind the query

The patent gives us an example:

“What are directions to Hypothetical Café?” is an example of a well-formed version of the natural language query “Hypothetical Café directions”.

How the Classification Model Works

It also tells us that the purpose behind the process in the patent is to determine whether a query is well-formed using a trained classification model and/or a well-formed variant of a query and if that well-formed version can be generated using a trained canonicalization model.

It can create that model by using features of the search query as input to the classification model and deciding whether the search query is well-formed.

Those features of the search query can include, for example:

Character(s)

Word(s)

Part(s) of speech

Entities included in the search query

And/or other linguistic representation(s) of the search query (such as word n-grams, character bag of words, etc.)

And the patent tells us more about the nature of the classification model:

The classification model is a machine learning model, such as a neural network model that contains one or more layers such as one or more feed-forward layers, softmax layer(s), and/or additional neural network layers. For example, the classification model can include several feed-forward layers utilized to generate feed-forward output. The resulting feed-forward output can be applied to softmax layer(s) to generate a measure (e.g., a probability) that indicates whether the search query is well-formed.

A Canonicalization Model May Be Used

If the Classification model determines that the search query is not a well-formed query, the query is turned over to a trained canonicalization model to generate a well-formed version of the search query.

The search query may have some of its features extracted from the search query, and/or additional input processed using the canonicalization model to generate a well-formed version that correlates with the search query.

The canonicalization model may be a neural network model. The patent provides more details on the nature of the neural network used.

The neural network can indicate a well-formed query version of the original query.

We are also told that in addition to identifying a well-formed query, it may also determine “one or more related queries for a given search query.”

A related query can be determined based on the related query being frequently submitted by users following the submission of the given search query.

The query canonicalization system can also determine if the related query is a well-formed query. If it isn’t, then it can determine a well-formed variant of the related query.

For example, in response to the submission of the given search query, a selectable version of the well-formed variant can be presented along with search results for the given query and, if selected, the well-formed variant (or the related query itself in some implementations) can be submitted as a search query and results for the well-formed variant (or the related query) then presented.

Again, the idea of “intent” surfaces in the patent regarding related queries (people also search for queries)

The value of showing a well-formed variant of a related query, instead of the related query itself, is to let a searcher more easily and/or more quickly understand the intent of the related query.

The patent tells us that this has a lot of value by stating:

Such efficient understanding enables the user to quickly submit the well-formed variant to quickly discover additional information (i.e., result(s) for the related query or well-formed variant) in performing a task and/or enables the user to only submit such query when the intent indicates likely relevant additional information in performing the task.

We are given an example of a related well-formed query in the patent:

As one example, the system can determine the phrase “hypothetical router configuration” is related to the query “reset hypothetical router” based on historical data indicating the two queries are submitted proximate (in time and/or order) to one another by a large number of users of a search system.

In some such implementations, the query canonicalization system can determine the related query “reset hypothetical router” is not a well-formed query, and can determine a well-formed variant of the related query, such as: “how to reset hypothetical router”.

The well-formed variant “how to reset hypothetical router” can then be associated, in a database, as a related query for “hypothetical router configuration”—and can optionally supplant any related query association between “reset hypothetical router” and “hypothetical router configuration”.

The patent tells us that sometimes a well-formed related query might be presented as a link to search results.

Again, one of the features of a well-formed query is that it is grammatical, is an explicit question, and contains no spelling errors.

The patent application can be found at:

Canonicalizing Search Queries to Natural language Questions Inventors Manaal Faruqui and Dipanjan Das Applicants Google LLC Publication Number 20200167379 Filed: January 18, 2019 Publication Date May 28, 2020

Abstract

Techniques are described herein for training and/or utilizing a query canonicalization system. In various implementations, a query canonicalization system can include a classification model and a canonicalization model. A classification model can be used to determine if a search query is well-formed. Additionally or alternatively, a canonicalization model can be used to determine a well-formed variant of a search query in response to determining a search query is not well-formed. In various implementations, a canonicalization model portion of a query canonicalization system can be a sequence to sequence model.

Well-Formed Query Takeaways

I have summarized the summary of the patent, and if you want to learn more details, click through and read the detailed description. The two white papers I started the post off with describing databases of well-formed questions that people as Google (including the inventors of this patent) have built and show the effort that Google has put into the idea of rewriting queries so that they are well-formed queries, where the intent behind them can be better understood by the search engine.

A well-formed query is grammatically correct, contains no spelling mistakes, and asks an explicit question. It also makes it clear to the search engine what the intent behind the query may be.

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triplejumprunway · 5 years

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Improving Inclusivity – observations from the UCL Education Conference 2019

I had the opportunity to attend the 2019 UCL Education Conference on Monday 1st April 2019. The conference was themed around:

Widening participation

BME (Black Minority Ethnic) Attainment

Assessment and Feedback

Supporting student success

Digital education and innovations

Although it was April Fool’s day, and Brexit loomed large, the conference was full of sober analysis and creative initiatives.

The opening plenary by Anne-Marie Canning MBE challenged Universities to play a greater role in promoting inclusivity in their internal practices, and in the broader public sphere as powerful and influential institutions capable of bringing about change. A subsequent panel discussion raised plenty of questions over the structural and everyday challenges to inclusivity, including whether inclusivity was a process or an outcome. This set the tone for the workshop sessions for the remainder of the day. I attended three sessions, which were part of the Digital education and innovations stream of the conference. Each session demonstrated a creative and pragmatic way to improve inclusivity in the classroom.

Photo by Kane Reinholdtsen on Unsplash

Multisensory and personalised feedback

Maria Sibiryakova presented her approach to teaching writing in Russian. She highlighted the challenge of teaching to a diverse cohort where students can have different experiences of living in Russia and different interests in learning Russian. In the course, students complete seven mini-essays (500 words each) and Maria provides audio and written feedback to students, which combine to “feedforward” into the next assessment.

Maria presented some of the benefits of using audio feedback, including:

Multisensory feedback – hence more accessible,

Improves teaching presence – students hear you and your voice,

Conversational and personalised feedback, and

Often quicker to produce.

Maria used a tool called VoiceThread, which has some intriguing features. It’s also possible to deliver audio feedback using Turnitin Assignment.

Photo by Adi Chrisworo on Unsplash

Open in class discussion with Moodle Hot Questions

Rebecca Yerworth and one of her students, Xu Zhao, demonstrated how Moodle’s Hot Question activity can facilitate in-class discussions.

The Moodle Hot Question activity allows for students to submit questions and/or answers via Moodle on their phone or laptop. This facilitates class discussion by increasing the participation of students who otherwise wouldn’t speak up in class due to personal or cultural reasons. Rebecca moderates the discussion live in class, answers questions, and draws out connections between different student answers. She also finds the Hot Questions activity flexible to use as it can be enabled in Moodle and switched on with a click of a button when a new discussion is needed.

Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

Welcoming new Chemistry students through a Moodle module

Dr Stephen E. Potts presented on the development of a Moodle module for welcoming new Chemistry students.

The UCL Chemistry Undergraduate Welcome Page introduces students to the Department, their degree programme, a typical timetable, Lab safety, and even how to submit an assignment on Moodle. It also includes some fun stuff like how to join the UCL Chemical and Physical Society and a collection of molecules with silly names. The module is designed to be delivered completely online, so is Baseline+ compliant, and is released to students when they are registered but before they arrive on campus.

I found the module was a great example of making Moodle look good (yes, it’s possible!). It was visually enticing, clearly structured, and combined quiz activities, video, text and image to engage students. The course has received positive feedback so far, and Stephen plans to build on the module, possibly to include multi-lingual content. I was also really impressed by the virtual tour of the Department. Students click through main buildings and labs, in a similar manner to Google maps, and can also click on information points to view location specific information. The tour was created using a 360 camera and Google Poly.

—

These three presentations demonstrated some of the everyday ways that inclusivity can be improved through teaching practice and technology. They also showed that improving inclusivity can often be accomplished as part of improving student engagement overall. There was much more to the conference than can be summarised here, and you can read the conference Abstracts to find out more. A tremendous thank you to all the organisers and presenters!

from Digital Education team blog https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/digital-education/2019/04/09/improving-inclusivity-observations-from-the-ucl-education-conference-2019/ via IFTTT

#triple jump runway #long jump facilities #long jump services #sports track experts

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postolo · 5 years

Text

DSNLU | National Essay Competition on “Regulation of E-commerce – Need of the Hour”

Society for Law and Technology (SOLT) at DSNLU is proud to present its 1st National Essay writing competition on “Regulation of E-commerce Need of the Hour.”

About SOLT:

The Society for Law and Technology seeks to provide a platform for intensive research and debate over legal issues linked to the emergence of new technologies and thereby aims to stimulate awareness by promoting participation and deliberation of such issues.

Themes of the Essay Competition:

Draft National Policy on e-commerce

FDI in e-commerce

Consumer Protection in e-commerce

Regulation of digital products in e-commerce

Cross border data flow regulations in e-commerce

Online advertisements and e-commerce

Taxation reforms and e-commerce

Legal aspects pertaining to localization of e-commerce data

Intermediary liability protections and e-commerce

Customs and Import aspects relating to e-commerce

IPR protection in e-commerce environment

Above-mentioned subthemes are only illustrative and not exhaustive. Contributors can choose any other subtheme that falls within the ambit of this competition.

Who Can Apply?

Competition is open for college and university students, undergraduates, postgraduates & research scholars of all courses/streams.

Submission Guidelines:

All submissions shall be mailed at [email protected]

A candidate is eligible to submit only one entry.

Co-authorship is not permitted.

Multiple entries from same college is permitted.

The completed Essay along with Abstract, Covering Letter and Declaration Form shall be submitted by the candidate in the form of a soft copy (MS Word Format) to [email protected] with the subject of the email as: “Entry for National Essay Writing Competition” on or before 20th of April 2019 [11:59 pm].

Subject of the email while submitting abstract should be “Abstract Submission” and for final essay, it should be “Entry for National Essay Writing Competition”.

A cover letter shall be made as a separate document in MS Word format and separately attached as a file in the e-mail along with the completed essay which shall consist of details mentioned below:

a) Full name and address of the Candidate

b) Name and full address of the Law school/ university

c) The theme selected for the essay

d) E-mail of the candidate

Submission Guidelines:

The word limit of the abstract is 250 words, and the completed essay must be in the range of 2500-3000 words inclusive of footnotes (explanatory footnotes are not permitted).

All submissions must follow the Bluebook system of citation.

Submissions must be in Times New Roman with font size 12 and line spacing 1.5

Footnotes must be in Times New Roman with font size 10 and line spacing 1.

Submissions may be made in .doc/.docx/.odt formats only.

Only original essays on the given topics that have not been published or have not been accepted for publication should be mailed.

Plagiarism shall result in disqualification.

Registration Guidelines

Candidates shall send a signed copy (scanned) of the declaration form (provided) along with the essay and cover letter.

Registration Fees: 200 INR. The method of payment of the fee would be using bank transfer, the bank details would be given to the participants along with their registration form.

Any entry not adhering to registration rules shall not be entertained.

Registration Link:

Important Dates

Last Date Of Registration: 5th April’ 2019

Last Date Of Submission: 20th April’ 2019

Prizes

First Prize: Rs. 5,000/-

Second Prize: Rs. 3,000/-

Third Prize: Rs. 1,000/-

Certificate of Participation shall be awarded to all participants. Judgment will be based on the following parameters:

Content

Structuration

Uniqueness

Quality of language

*The decisions of the judges will be final and binding.

Contact info:

All communication may kindly be directed to [email protected], or alternatively to:

Abhinav Mishra (Convener) – +91-6305637636

Siva Rama Raju (Co-convener) – +91-8500118765

Declaration of originality

IMPORTANT: The signed declaration of originality is a component of every paper, article, essay and

book review, including the respective electronic versions.

Authors other than law students may also require a declaration of originality for submissions.

_________________________________________________________________________

I hereby confirm that I am the sole author of the written work here enclosed and that I have compiled it in my own words. Parts excepted are corrections of form and content by the supervisor.

Title of work (in block letters):

Authored by (in block letters):

With my signature I confirm that

? I have committed none of the forms of plagiarism described in the ‘Submission brochure’

information sheet.

? I have documented all methods, data and processes truthfully.

? I have not manipulated any data.

? I have mentioned all persons who were significant facilitators of the work.

I am aware that the work may be screened electronically for plagiarism.

Place:

Date:

The post DSNLU | National Essay Competition on “Regulation of E-commerce – Need of the Hour” appeared first on SCC Blog.

DSNLU | National Essay Competition on “Regulation of E-commerce – Need of the Hour” published first on https://sanantoniolegal.tumblr.com/

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topicprinter · 5 years

Link

Hi r/Entrepreneur,My name is Kevin and I design, develop, and market a series of light show apps for iOS and Android under the Light DJ brand. 2 years ago, I made a post about my journey into Entrepreneurship which you can find here. Today I’d like to provide an update on my business and answer any questions that you may have about my methods.From 2017-2018 I had few major projects. My first priority was to update the Android app to match the effects of the iOS version. Previously I had decided to build these as two native apps rather than a hybrid app and that’s resulted in two slightly different feature sets between the apps as they’ve grown at different paces. Now the apps produce the same lighting effects and I intend to maintain effect parity going forward. I still think having two native apps is the right option for my purposes. Using native tools and support makes it easy to integrate third-party libraries and debug on Stack Overflow when things go awry. I develop on iOS first because it’s easier to prototype with Swift, then I port the feature to Android/Java from there. Writing the code the second time isn’t too bad since going from Swift to Java is fairly simple, plus translating it forces you to do a thorough review of your own code. I’ve fixed more than a few bugs this way.Nanoleaf Aurora support was another focus this period. The hardware had just been released and I was excited to branch out from bulb-based effects to panels. Integrating with new third-party hardware is risky and exponentially increases testing time so I have to be selective as to who I integrate with. I chose Nanoleaf because I could see the potential of the product and because they have mass-market availability in Apple Stores and Best Buy. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Nanoleaf's CEO Gimmy Chu and his team a few times. They’ve been great to work with, open to suggestions, and are just really cool people. My latest version includes support for the new square Canvas tiles too and I’ll continue to update the code as new shapes are released.In September 2017 I released a moonshot app called Light DJ Studio which presents a new concept in mobile light shows. Users record a light track guitar-hero style, in sync to any Apple Music track. They can save the track for later playback or (as of Oct 2018) share it with the Light DJ community so that others can enjoy it too. Currently the app is completely free while the library of user-submitted tracks slowly grows (currently ~40) and anyone that submits a track gets free access for life if I ever do monetize it. I designed the light recordings so that they work with any light setup, so even if the creator makes their light recording on Hue it will still work on Nanoleaf or LIFX or vice-versa. There’s a ton of potential in this app and I hope to one day work with DJs and other musicians to release exclusive light shows for the app.In January 2018, Philips Hue announced its Hue Entertainment API, which provided an opportunity for my app to stand out from the other entertainment apps for Hue. Hue Entertainment allows games and other media to stream real-time effects to your living room. For me, this meant high-performance effects like faster strobes and smoother waves that travel across the room. I spent about 2 months redesigning all 40+ effects in my app to work with the new API and Light DJ was one of the first apps to have this support. While the performance improvements were astounding, sales were not. Since my business model was "pay-once, get everything” the power users who really wanted this feature got it for free, but users who were new to Hue or my app didn’t care or know what it was, so it did not add much apparent value. Add to that the traditional spring slump that happens as people start getting outdoors more around April & May and my daily proceeds started to dropping to double-digits. Clearly drastic changes were needed to save my business.I considered creating more in-app purchases for new hardware support, but I really hate nickle-and-diming users for every little thing and it results in a ton of extra code to handle all the extra limitations. If my business is to be successful then consistent recurring revenue is a must and so in the end I decided that the only rational option was to move to a subscription model. This has provided many benefits:Recurring subscription revenue is easier to predict. That makes me more comfortable hiring people to help me grow my business and helps me sleep at night.I can afford to pay for marketing since the average revenue per user is higher.Users are more engaged. Average time-in-app is up, and so are daily/monthly active users. The theory is that users who pay more for an app value it more and are more likely to use it.I can continue to add features and hardware support freely without having to be concerned with things like selling a certain feature then moving/merging it later and having to figure out how to continue to give partial access.50% reduction in Apple fees on subscriptions over 1 year.Ability to support cross-platform subscriptions (coming soon).There were a few downsides to moving to subscriptions, however. The move was not popular with users who were used to the previous freemium model and hadn’t upgraded, resulting in negative reviews. Previous purchasers received free lifetime updates, so they are not a source of revenue. The price of the Android subscription started the same as iOS even though it had fewer features so I lowered the price after a month of dismal sales. Though the subscription includes a 7-day free trial, users were hesitant to sign-up so I introduced a preview period for users to try out the app for a bit before committing. Additionally in order to sell auto-renewable subscriptions on the App Store you need to sell something “of substance”. For me, that means I’m obligated to produce and provide 2 bonus effects per month to users as part of the subscription (abstract promises like “future updates” won’t cut it). I make the effects in batches of a dozen or so and it takes me a few weeks to create and test them for both OSs. While I generally enjoy making these it’s still a task that I’ll be required to do every 6 months or so for as long as the app is producing revenue.Metrics:Ok, so here’s why a lot of you clicked. The truth is that I don’t spend all day staring at my metrics looking for incremental improvements. My focus is always on finding the best way to add value to my service and creating a valuable service is what will drive good numbers. I follow the Valve Manifesto as I believe that it’s a better way to create a quality product.Of note in the sales data: New Years Eve continues to be the biggest day for downloads and sales of the app. Subscriptions were introduced July 1, resulting in 1 week of no sales (there was a last chance sale on June 30). In addition to subscriptions I continue to offer a fully unlocked version of the app in both app stores (at a higher price) for users that don’t want to deal with the subscription.Sales data (viewable for a limited time): https://lightdjapp.com/sales (password: ilovereddit)Daily Active Users: ~1,200Monthly Active Users: ~33,000Subscription conversion: 59%Subscription retention: 74%Outlook:For 2019 my focus is on improving retention by increasing the value of subscriptions through new community features including pattern and sheet sharing, cross-platform subscriptions, cloud-backed settings, and a web portal where users can purchase and manage subscriptions. Nanoleaf Canvas support will be a big help when it comes to marketing content creation since the square panels are easier to work with than the triangles. Aside from that I have a whole laundry list of app features that I’ve been wanting to create and a dozen or so unfulfilled user requests that will keep me busy. I’ll also be on the lookout for any new hardware that could work with the app.I hope this post provides a bit of insight into my business and helps encourage future developers to give it a shot on the App Store. I'd love to answer any questions you have about my business or development practices.Cheers,Kevin

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

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