Indiana University's Department of Computer Science has been completely absorbed by the School of Informatics (SoI). I'm not entirely comfortable with this decision, as what we do in Computer Science (theory and algorithms) is very different from Informatics (applications to other areas). Also, Computer Science students are a very different breed from Informatics students - there's a number of differences in the curriculum.
Anyways, the new SoI bulletin has completely revised the BS CS degree program. It is now much more streamlined. Core courses have been reduced from 6 to 4 and upper-level requirements have been reduced from 7 courses divided amongst various first letter and second number distinctions to 5 courses in a simplified concentration. My concentrations will be Artificial Intelligence and Programming Languages.
These changes have dramatically altered the next three years. I was 5 CS courses away from graduation. Under the new requirements I have only 3 more, which can be from a broad list of related courses. Instead of taking every undergrad CS course, I'm now going to be able to take Artificial Life, Bioinspired Computing, The Computer and Natural Language (NLP), and Search Informatics: Google Under the Hood (MapReduce). These have all been on my radar, but since they were in the Informatics program, they did not meet any CS requirements. Now I'm able to shave a semester off my graduation and take some (hopefully) more interesting courses.
There are some issues with the changes - there is a lot less emphasis on theory, which is the hallmark of the IU CS program. Since I'm staying on an extra year for the Professional Masters program I'm not concerned about my education, but it is alarming that people can get away with only 6 CS courses when the old program required 13. (I'll graduate with 10.)
At any rate, I'll be out by Fall 2011 instead of sometime in 2012, and that's awesome.
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Friday, September 4, 2009
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Most Influential
What is your biggest influence?
It's an open question - the {noun} that most influenced your calling/work/studies/career/purpose/etc to date: book, article, movie, paper, film, photo, story, person, relative, musician, artist, website, event, gadget, activity, anything! What's the one thing that got you into what you're into?
For me it's the Towards 2020 Science Report (2.3MB PDF). The buzz I had after reading this report was incredible. We are standing literally on the precipice of scientific revolution - just as the discovery of algebra and calculus prompted the scientific revolutions of ages past, the development of computation is completely changing how we can look at the universe. Everything can be modeled. We can create "artificial scientists". This awesomeness is why I do artificial intelligence.
Right now - what is that thing? What is your biggest influence? What sparks your fire?
Edit: Had to republish and refocus on school/career/interests - in the grand scheme of things there are other influences of greater or equal stature. :)
It's an open question - the {noun} that most influenced your calling/work/studies/career/purpose/etc to date: book, article, movie, paper, film, photo, story, person, relative, musician, artist, website, event, gadget, activity, anything! What's the one thing that got you into what you're into?
For me it's the Towards 2020 Science Report (2.3MB PDF). The buzz I had after reading this report was incredible. We are standing literally on the precipice of scientific revolution - just as the discovery of algebra and calculus prompted the scientific revolutions of ages past, the development of computation is completely changing how we can look at the universe. Everything can be modeled. We can create "artificial scientists". This awesomeness is why I do artificial intelligence.
Right now - what is that thing? What is your biggest influence? What sparks your fire?
Edit: Had to republish and refocus on school/career/interests - in the grand scheme of things there are other influences of greater or equal stature. :)
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Recovery
Just went to Bloomington Bone and Joint for another appointment with the doctor and therapist and they declared my elbow healed, with full motion and no restrictions! I'm extremely ecstatic as this was supposed to be a 6 week process, and I've done it in 3.
deCycles 2009 seems to have gone really well - Patti/Signe, Stacey, and Andrew got back on Sunday. The prevailing sentiment is that the trip brings you to overwhelming highs and lows, but it's a completely different mental state - one of those "you have to experience it" things. They all seem to have grown through the experience, especially in "get-up-and-go"-ness.
Of course I'm bummed that I couldn't finish the trip, and it sucks that I'm in every article as "one of the two who couldn't make it". I still made something out of the past two weeks though:
This year's deCycles is going to nag at me for a long time. There's not much of a silver lining, but dwelling on "might-have-beens" isn't gonna do anything. There's still the Hilly Hundred, a return trip to Wisconsin (potential route - Bike 4 Trails, Great River Road, Wisconsin River Valley, Madison) and maybe deCycles 2010. Things happen, so I'll take solace in only being down for 3 weeks.
deCycles 2009 seems to have gone really well - Patti/Signe, Stacey, and Andrew got back on Sunday. The prevailing sentiment is that the trip brings you to overwhelming highs and lows, but it's a completely different mental state - one of those "you have to experience it" things. They all seem to have grown through the experience, especially in "get-up-and-go"-ness.
Of course I'm bummed that I couldn't finish the trip, and it sucks that I'm in every article as "one of the two who couldn't make it". I still made something out of the past two weeks though:
- Put in over 30 hours, which turns into a lot of money.
- Earnestly started on the InPhO paper.
- Enjoyed some time reflecting and set two (reasonably) ambitious goals for the next year:
- Establish an emergency fund of $1,000 and leave debt behind by January.
- Publish/present at least 3 times by next May.
This year's deCycles is going to nag at me for a long time. There's not much of a silver lining, but dwelling on "might-have-beens" isn't gonna do anything. There's still the Hilly Hundred, a return trip to Wisconsin (potential route - Bike 4 Trails, Great River Road, Wisconsin River Valley, Madison) and maybe deCycles 2010. Things happen, so I'll take solace in only being down for 3 weeks.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Some Thoughts
So this blog is getting updated a little more frequently - hopefully, you are finding some useful tips. At this stage, I'm still a mere squidling (undergraduate), so you're getting a lot of redirects to other awesome things instead of novel ideas, but that's how life works. Hopefully I'm guiding you to the right places.
My elbow is healing up gradually - I can rotate my wrist almost entirely and my arm can almost straighten. Twisting my arm remains difficult. The progress is promising, but I still can't lift more than two pounds. Perhaps in two weeks I can meet up with deCycles in Lexington and finish the last 3 days of the ride.
It's not too bad being back in Bloomington. This weekend I started earnest work on the paper for InPhO. Right now I'm articulating how AI should be used to augment human feedback, without superseding it. I've also been working on some user interfaces and came across a really good Google Tech Talk, "Don't Make Me Click". Aza Raskin does a great job of emphasizing the importance of minimalist design and of doing as much as possible for your users. I found it worth the hour.
My elbow is healing up gradually - I can rotate my wrist almost entirely and my arm can almost straighten. Twisting my arm remains difficult. The progress is promising, but I still can't lift more than two pounds. Perhaps in two weeks I can meet up with deCycles in Lexington and finish the last 3 days of the ride.
It's not too bad being back in Bloomington. This weekend I started earnest work on the paper for InPhO. Right now I'm articulating how AI should be used to augment human feedback, without superseding it. I've also been working on some user interfaces and came across a really good Google Tech Talk, "Don't Make Me Click". Aza Raskin does a great job of emphasizing the importance of minimalist design and of doing as much as possible for your users. I found it worth the hour.
I've also been researching polyphasic sleep. Basically instead of sleeping 8 hours in a row, you have a shorter period of "core sleep" and then take 20 minute naps throughout the day. There are variations ranging from 6 hours of core sleep with a 30 minute nap in the day (Biphasic) to no core sleep and 6 20 minute naps throughout the day (Uberman) and a bunch of middle ground (Everyman). The less extreme versions are more pretentious ways of explaining what people do anyways, but the uberman concept is a fascinating extreme. Steve Pavlina has an interesting journal on adopting the uberman (day 30) (day 120) (going back). My roommate seems to have accidentally adopted the everyman system last year.
This month, I'm going to adopt biphasic sleep as my "thing" (although it seems this is how I naturally react to the school year). My only concern with adopting a true polyphasic sleep schedule is physical activity. No reports seem to have a regular exercise routine, and with 150+ miles of biking per week, I think core sleep may play a larger role in muscle recovery. For more findings on sleep, monitor my sleep tag on Delicious.
Some (public domain) visualizations of sleep patterns from Wikipedia:
This month, I'm going to adopt biphasic sleep as my "thing" (although it seems this is how I naturally react to the school year). My only concern with adopting a true polyphasic sleep schedule is physical activity. No reports seem to have a regular exercise routine, and with 150+ miles of biking per week, I think core sleep may play a larger role in muscle recovery. For more findings on sleep, monitor my sleep tag on Delicious.
Some (public domain) visualizations of sleep patterns from Wikipedia:
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Bike Trip Blues
On June 20th I left for deCycles - 3 weeks, 1600+ miles. no modern comforts. It was going to be my summer... that changed on Monday :(
The group was riding in a tight paceline of about 20mph to get to the last break of the day. The girl in front of me kissed wheels with the person in front of her, lost her balance and went down. I ran over her and flipped onto the pavement. The colonel fishtailed into both of us. Everyone got out of the road as quickly as possible and started washing their wounds.
With my bike out of commission, I hopped in the wussie wagon :( When I got into the van I realized my right arm had no strength and was in serious pain. Norm looked at it during the break, and diagnosed it as the radius. We tried to get me back on the bike but I couldn't stretch into a riding position.
The last 30 miles in the wagon were torture! Monday was the first day I had the right amounts of nutrition, water, and sleep. I also pulled for 10 miles. We were only 3 miles from the last break, and 30 miles from the churh. I had just gotten my second wind and was ready to go.
When I got to Portsmouth, another of the ride leaders dropped me off at the ER. After 3 1/2 hours the diagnosis was a radial head fracture. The hospital was packed, but they noticed I was bonking and got me supper - two sandwiches, a salad and a slice of cherry pie. After 80 miles of riding and no food in 7 hours, I was extremely grateful!
Mom freaked out when she heard about the accident and drove to help me. The next morning we saw a specialist in Portsmouth who said it wasn't fractured, which contradicted the earlier diagnoses. Bloomington Bone & Joint looked at it today and confirmed the radial head fracture and got me set up with physical therapy. No cast, because setting the elbow would freeze the joint and the fracture is stable.
My elbow is going to need six weeks to heal, so I would've spent the rest of the trip in the van. That wasn't going to happen - it's torture when you're well. I'm back in Bloomington for now and would love to see people. If I recover quickly, I will rejoin the ride from Lexington to Bloomington.
As for the others: The girl was bleeding a lot, and now has a really bad case of road rash down her left side. The colonel just toppled and may have done something to his wrist. Both are on their bikes and still riding.
There were 2 other wrecks on Monday. The other people look more roughed up. Cricket got run over and one of the bikes from that wreck now has a pancake wheel. Fortunately, there are two doctors traveling with us and the others seemed to be fine, aside from road rash. Not the best day for cycling...
The group was riding in a tight paceline of about 20mph to get to the last break of the day. The girl in front of me kissed wheels with the person in front of her, lost her balance and went down. I ran over her and flipped onto the pavement. The colonel fishtailed into both of us. Everyone got out of the road as quickly as possible and started washing their wounds.
With my bike out of commission, I hopped in the wussie wagon :( When I got into the van I realized my right arm had no strength and was in serious pain. Norm looked at it during the break, and diagnosed it as the radius. We tried to get me back on the bike but I couldn't stretch into a riding position.
The last 30 miles in the wagon were torture! Monday was the first day I had the right amounts of nutrition, water, and sleep. I also pulled for 10 miles. We were only 3 miles from the last break, and 30 miles from the churh. I had just gotten my second wind and was ready to go.
When I got to Portsmouth, another of the ride leaders dropped me off at the ER. After 3 1/2 hours the diagnosis was a radial head fracture. The hospital was packed, but they noticed I was bonking and got me supper - two sandwiches, a salad and a slice of cherry pie. After 80 miles of riding and no food in 7 hours, I was extremely grateful!
Mom freaked out when she heard about the accident and drove to help me. The next morning we saw a specialist in Portsmouth who said it wasn't fractured, which contradicted the earlier diagnoses. Bloomington Bone & Joint looked at it today and confirmed the radial head fracture and got me set up with physical therapy. No cast, because setting the elbow would freeze the joint and the fracture is stable.
My elbow is going to need six weeks to heal, so I would've spent the rest of the trip in the van. That wasn't going to happen - it's torture when you're well. I'm back in Bloomington for now and would love to see people. If I recover quickly, I will rejoin the ride from Lexington to Bloomington.
As for the others: The girl was bleeding a lot, and now has a really bad case of road rash down her left side. The colonel just toppled and may have done something to his wrist. Both are on their bikes and still riding.
There were 2 other wrecks on Monday. The other people look more roughed up. Cricket got run over and one of the bikes from that wreck now has a pancake wheel. Fortunately, there are two doctors traveling with us and the others seemed to be fine, aside from road rash. Not the best day for cycling...
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Reboot
Hey everyone,
I've decided to restart blogging with the general concept of "anything goes". It's summer now, so I should be able to update regularly.
Sophomore year is over, and it was rather disappointing. Up until now, I've been able to take on more than usual and still do absolutely fine. This year I finally found my limit (or it found me). The scariest thing was discovering that I forgot how to write! Next year I'll be dropping down to a much more manageable 13 hours a semester and begin recovering what's left of my GPA. C'est la vie.
For the first half of the summer I'll be working on three things:
For PoL, I'll be working on some new applets for argument diagramming. I've decided to go with Java for this, since I'm starting to get a decent grasp on the swing libraries and have a general disdain for Flash. You can expect at least one post on swing... I'll also be relearning C for the InPhO parallelization research. Since it's summer and I can code for fun as well, I'll be refining my Python skills too.
This summer is hardly confined to the "great indoors" (thank god). In June I'm leaving for a 1500-mile bike tour from Bloomington, IN to Appalachia. We'll be traveling across the Bluegrass to the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge Parkway. After reaching Asheville, NC, we'll head through Gatlinburg and Great Smoky Mountains National Park, back through Tennessee and Kentucky, and then back home again. It should be an epic time, but it requires a lot of training. I'm aiming for 1200 miles by June 20, and I'll be uploading pics from the road.
I've made an effort to tie this blog with the rest of my "cloud" presence. To the right you'll find streams of my Google Reader shared items, del.icio.us bookmarks and Twitter updates. Hopefully they are useful. I've also added some friends who occasionally blog. They're pretty cool. Please subscribe/follow/bookmark/remember the blog, I'll make it worthwhile.
Peace,
Jaimie Murdock
I've decided to restart blogging with the general concept of "anything goes". It's summer now, so I should be able to update regularly.
Sophomore year is over, and it was rather disappointing. Up until now, I've been able to take on more than usual and still do absolutely fine. This year I finally found my limit (or it found me). The scariest thing was discovering that I forgot how to write! Next year I'll be dropping down to a much more manageable 13 hours a semester and begin recovering what's left of my GPA. C'est la vie.
For the first half of the summer I'll be working on three things:
- Finishing up work on the Power of Logic (PoL) web tutor.
- Doing supercomputing research for the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO).
- Training for deCycles 2009.
For PoL, I'll be working on some new applets for argument diagramming. I've decided to go with Java for this, since I'm starting to get a decent grasp on the swing libraries and have a general disdain for Flash. You can expect at least one post on swing... I'll also be relearning C for the InPhO parallelization research. Since it's summer and I can code for fun as well, I'll be refining my Python skills too.
This summer is hardly confined to the "great indoors" (thank god). In June I'm leaving for a 1500-mile bike tour from Bloomington, IN to Appalachia. We'll be traveling across the Bluegrass to the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge Parkway. After reaching Asheville, NC, we'll head through Gatlinburg and Great Smoky Mountains National Park, back through Tennessee and Kentucky, and then back home again. It should be an epic time, but it requires a lot of training. I'm aiming for 1200 miles by June 20, and I'll be uploading pics from the road.
I've made an effort to tie this blog with the rest of my "cloud" presence. To the right you'll find streams of my Google Reader shared items, del.icio.us bookmarks and Twitter updates. Hopefully they are useful. I've also added some friends who occasionally blog. They're pretty cool. Please subscribe/follow/bookmark/remember the blog, I'll make it worthwhile.
Peace,
Jaimie Murdock
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