Calculus III

In the last year or so, I decided to apply for a master's program in applied statistics, but I was missing one of the prerequisite mathematics courses: Calculus III. I had taken calculus courses in high school and college, but those courses were more focused on applications. Furthermore, I hadn't covered any of Calculus II in those courses.

Instead of taking the entire series, which would have taken quite a bit of time and money, I decided to do something rather daunting: I took Calculus III online and used Khan Academy and other sources to catch up on Calculus I and II. I read reviews that the first few weeks were tough even if you had taken Calculus I and II just before III. Undeterred, I started the course earlier this year, and the first few weeks were indeed tough.

The online program I used - NetMath - used an online math tool for running code and submitting homework. Each student is assigned to a mentor who grades assignments, answers questions, and ensures each student is on schedule. Students receive feedback on their homework and are able to re-submit corrections a couple of times. The two midterms and final must be taken in person with a proctor.

My first mentor was not very responsive. On week 2, a critical week in the program, my mentor did not respond to emails or grade my assignments in a timely fashion (within 3 days, as noted in the program handbook). I notified the program administrators and they assigned me a new mentor. She had quite a bit of catching up to do, but she did her best and eventually graded the outstanding assignments and responded to my questions. Honestly, she was amazing, and I'd write her a letter of recommendation if she asked.

Lesson 2 is quite difficult. It's really the first lesson on the topic of the course, where lesson 1 was review of parametric equations and other necessary concepts, and it's there in case anyone missed or forgot these topics. With the combination of difficult content and slow responses from my mentor, it took me 2 weeks to finish lesson 2. In addition, I got sick for a couple of days and there was a death in the family, which put me behind another 2 weeks or so. Fortunately, the program offers a two-month extension, and I planned on using it if needed.

However, there were additional, serious problems with the course. One of the most grievous was incomplete or incorrect content. There were often no terms given to ideas, preventing students who have taken this course from communicating the concepts effectively. For example, vector projection was just called "vector push on another vector". It took me quite some time to find the right term to be able to research this concept online.

The course also neglected saddle points and claimed that whenever a gradient was {0, 0} (or more zeros depending on the number of dimensions), that the point was a minimum or maximum of the function. This is blatantly not true when a saddle point is present, and it would be terrible for students to internalize this falsity since it is profoundly meaningful in calculating predictive models with machine learning, specifically neural networks. You can't assume you've optimized a function when the gradient is {0, 0} without looking around it to see if you've found a saddle point.

All told, I was quite unhappy with this course. Not only was I spending a lot of time catching up, but I was spending time trying to learn the material through other sources since the course material was incomplete or inaccurate. Nearing the end of the course, I was able to catch up to the point where it looked like I could finish the course if I just had another week or two. I emailed the administrators for a course extension, noting the reasons I had for the delay and the issues I had with the course, and they offered a shorter extension so I could finish it without rushing and without taking the full extension. (My schedule to finish without an extension would have been very demanding for my mentor to complete all the grading in time.)

Despite all the delays and issues, I finished all the material within the original time frame, and I just needed to take the final. I studied for a few extra days and took the final about 2 weeks after the course originally ended. Since the final was comprehensive and included the last three lessons, I was very nervous about it. I had aced the midterms, but there was just so much to remember (e.g., the curl of a 3D field is difficult to remember). To my great surprise and delight, I not only aced the final, I got an A+ in the course. I was relieved!

Now I just have to re-take the GRE and apply for the master's program.

Kindle Review from a Newbie

I received a Kindle for my birthday last month, and ever since, I have had it with me quite a bit. I've read a number of books, online articles, downloaded articles/books (hello Gutenberg project!), personal documents, PDFs, and alternate ebook formats (e.g., text, Mobi). I've also viewed images, listened to music, played games, and listened to articles with the text-to-speech feature.

My first impression? AWESOME. This is one of the most useful devices I own, and it has helped me face a mounting task: to read that which I "should" read, including articles for work, research articles, random pages online, Wikipedia entries, classics I should have read in school, and simply books I've been meaning to read for a long time.

Further, the device is extremely useful for work. I don't have to print out long documents for meetings: I simply load them on to the Kindle. (I don't have the 3G version, which is fine by me. I don't want to pay extra fees for content delivery, and the USB cable is easy enough to tote to work where there's no WiFi.) I maintain a project list as a text file with current items on the first page and completed items on the second page. Once it fills up I plan to archive it for review purposes.

The capability to search, easily navigate a document, and have a document anywhere has been immensely useful, especially during critical moments in a meeting when someone says, "I think that's documented in that XYZ document that I've either printed out a 150-page version of and will take me 15 minutes to find or I did not print it or I left it at my desk, so none of us will know the answer until later." Just yesterday we were fumbling around trying to figure out the next date we should meet, when we should run a process, and when we should communicate by email or phone. I opened up a PDF calendar I loaded and it made planning much easier.

Of course, this could be done with just about any e-reader, right? Yes, but the Kindle has that iPod-like cool and ease-of-use. The ease-of-use is really the big advantage. The Kindle loads quickly, turns pages quickly (except in some PDFs, especially those with too many images), has an excellent organization method ("collections", where a book can be located in multiple collections), a "newspaper" feature with auto-archiving of old "editions", and all the other features I mentioned above. It's also comfortable to hold and it has the potential for more capabilities. For example, it has a microphone with no known current use, but I imagine that voice commands (e.g., "turn page") would be an excellent addition, especially for people with disabilities.

Even though people complain that it has a locked-down ebook format, so do the other e-readers, especially the Nook, which claims it doesn't. Barnes and Noble use a more open standard, but they still lock it down with DRM, making it practically inaccessible to other ereaders. And frankly, there are ways around these limitations, as any savvy computer geek can find a way to break DRM. (Hopefully, those people are being honest and not selling or distributing copies.)

Have I had any hiccups? Yes. First and foremost: DO NOT BUY THE NON-LIGHTED COVER BY AMAZON!!! Due to its construction, it causes the Kindle to short and restart, seemingly at random. It is not the Kindle. It is the cover! The lighted cover is fine, in fact, I exchanged the non-lighted cover for the lighted cover, and I haven't had any problems with it restarting since. (Caution: The lighted cover costs a bit more, almost half of the cost of the Kindle!)

Additionally, I've had some odd problems with PDFs. Sometimes viewing PDFs with a lot of images makes the page turns very slow. PDFs maintain the format, so they are often hard to read in the default orientation. Rotating the orientation to landscape helps with that problem. It's possible to load images onto the Kindle, which is a hidden, experimental feature. The images look similar to the screen savers, and are a bit slow to navigate as well. Simply put, it's not a device built for handling images (yet). So really not too many drawbacks directly related to the Kindle!

Overall, it's a great device. Easy to use, flexible, and quite frankly, beautiful. My wife says, "It's not beautiful - it's sexy." Please note: she said that, not me.

AHIP Insurance Course

Last week, I completed an introduction to insurance course, Fundamentals of Health Insurance - Part A (Basics of Health Insurance), offered by AHIP, America's Health Insurance Plans, a coalition of health insurance companies. I had decided to take the course online to save paper and money. To prepare for the exam, I studied for a couple of hours every night last week. I had already read all of the material, but it was quite a bit of information to remember, so I was reviewing it and going through the study guide. I took the test Friday and passed. However, I wasn't offered the opportunity to offer any feedback on the course, so I would like to here.

First, I had a number of problems accessing the presentation online. When I would try to load the presentation in Firefox, I received an error message from Java. I tried it on Internet Explorer and received the same message. I checked my version of Java, and it appeared to be up-to-date. I also check my security settings in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Nothing seemed to be blocking it. I also checked my firewall, but since I was in a hurry, I didn't check it thoroughly. So then I tried my wife's laptop, which is less secure than my desktop PC in terms of browser security and firewall settings, and it worked. I studied using her computer for a few weeks until I had some time to investigate issues on my PC. Finally, I manually updated Java and changed my firewall settings to asked about network connections. It turned out that the Java applet AHIP was using was out-of-date, and I had to allow an exception. I'm not sure if the update or the firewall change resolved the issue, but it worked on my PC.

The presentation itself was also problematic. The data presented was out-of-date by at least 10 years, as the presentation only included data up to the 90s. It appeared that many of the terms, definitions, and trends were also quite out-of-date. The presentation also included a number of "Knowledge Checks" to see if you were understanding the material. About 90% of the time, these questions were completely irrelevant to the material. At first I thought they were from a different chapter, but now that I've finished reading the material, I don't think they were even from the right course. The answers to the questions were not provided in ANY of the material. Fortunately, these questions were only intended to help the student study and did not count toward the final grade. I'm not even sure AHIP even kept track of the answers.

I had contacted AHIP about both problems - with access and the questions - however, they were not much help. The guidance on updating my PC did not help, nor did the tip that "these intermediary quizzes are not graded" - basically saying "skip them". Open the following link to view the email conversation with the AHIP representative:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dff94k46_67gdnxhwhn

At any rate, I was able to overcome these issues, study the material, and pass the test. There were issues with the test, too. The location for accessing the test was oddly placed at the end of the presenation content. If you clicked on it before you were ready or before your test time, that took up 1 of 2 test opportunities, since it would load the official test. I heard a number of people saying they accidentally clicked on it or expected it to be a practice test. This seems to be a bit of poor design.

The test format was a bit odd. It consisted of a number of frames with the browser, with a convenient clock counting down the time left for the test. The questions were multiple choice, but included poorly-written answers like 1) A and B; 2) B and C; 3) A, B, and C; 4) Only A; 5) Only C. These types of questions do not really increase the ability of the test to distinguish between those test-takers who know the material and those who do not. Simpler questions with 3 or 4 clear choices for responses would be adequate.

Some features were actually very convenient, helping the test-taker. One was the "Review" button, which once pressed would flag the question and put it on a list for you to answer later. The other was the button that showed the list of questions to review. The next button, as I heard from a colleague, changed from "Next" to "Submit" on the last question, which is not good if you're not paying attention to the number of questions you've answered. She clicked Submit by accident, without reviewing the questions she had flagged, and as a result, failed the test. Once I completed the test, a list of the questions I answered correctly appeared. Apparently there was a link at the bottom that showed the total percent correct, but I did not see it. I clicked the "Home" button to check to see if I passed the test. When I went back, it did not load the test results. I suppose it was a safety mechanism so that the user does not overwrite a test that was just taken, which would not be good, especially if the taker passes it the first time and fails it the second.

Although all of these problems were present, I did learn quite a bit. The course had a lot of good information about how the insurance industry works and huge number of common terms and definitions. There was some information I did not find as relevant, for example, commissions for agents/brokers, but it would certainly be useful for someone in those fields or working with those fields. I heard feedback from my co-workers that sounded similar to my experiences, but I found that a lot of people order the books. I feel that's a bit wasteful; however, it would have avoided the problems with the online presentation and questions. In the end, the information I learned was very useful, but the presentation could have been better. I hope AHIP reviews the presentation and content and updates the content to include new data and up-to-date definitions.

My Tax Man

Instead of hiring a tax agent or using software, we decided to put our little boy, Luca, to work. Here he is, trying to figure out our deductions:

"You want ME to do your taxes?!"

"How on Earth do you organize your receipts??"

Actually, we used TaxCut Online to do our taxes. I'm sure Luca would have done a great job, though. He did seem awfully interested in my W-2s while I was working on it. Maybe he just wanted to eat them though.

TaxCut Online worked very well. For basic tax needs, it's quick and reliable. I spent about 2 hours working on it, and if there hadn't been a slightly confusing question about the Alternative Minimum Tax in Wisconsin, it probably would have been faster. Oh, and it would have been faster had I not been trying to complete it with my son on my lap, who likes to hit the mouse and keyboard! I also cleared my cookies on accident and had to log back in. Oops!

I used the software last year and it went very smoothly this year with the addition of my wife's tax information and our new deductions for our son. The software remembers data entered from the previous year and restores specific answers from last year's return for review. It does not allow a direct import of last year's data without review as a safety mechanism.

All in all, I could probably have saved a buck and done it on my own for the State and Federal taxes, but having the software to check over your work and the addition of on-demand support and assistance in case of an audit is a definite plus. Last year I did both TaxCut and the free State submission form, and I discovered that there was a difference in the return that was exactly the amount I paid for use of the software. There is a discout for tax preparation that TaxCut submits with you taxes!

Submitting taxes online is also incredibly fast. We received our State return in less than a week and our Federal return will arrive 9 days after I submitted it. Overall, I would definitely recommend this software to anyone willing to submit your tax information on the internet. Of course, if you have a complicated tax return, a professional is always the best and safest bet.

My Home Computer Desk

I have a bit of an unusual work space for my computer at home. On the right of the keyboard, I have a trackball mouse. On the left, I have a regular mouse that is not used for moving the cursor. I also have a wireless mouse on the monitor area of the desk and a video game controller. Here's a photo:

The trackball mouse aids with avoiding carpal tunnel syndrome and it saves space. The small left button is set to the middle button and the small right button is set to "Back" for internet and file browsing. The mouse on the left side serves two purposes: First, this style of mouse has a better scroll device than the trackball mouse, which doesn't really have one. Second, if it's ever necessary to get the precision of a regular mouse (editing images, for example), then it is available for use. The laser is currently covered with a small sticky pad to avoid any cursor movement from it. The wireless mouse is used for viewing the computer desktop on the TV, away from the computer monitor. It's great when watching internet TV shows on an actual TV (hulu.com is great for internet TV).

Also note the USB extension cord, which is useful for any other peripheral devices one would need to plug in temporarily (a camera, for example), and the wireless headphones, which allow for freedom of movement and less cord clutter. The small device under the monitor is a CRYPTOCard, used for accessing remote computers at work. The monitor is on a base that rotates and adjusts vertically, making it perfect for getting just the right position for the user. The combination of the trackball mouse and vertically adjustable monitor have significantly improved the ergonomics of my computer desk, making me a lot more comfortable, especially during long hours of work (or play!).

Here's an older version of the setup with an older left mouse and keyboard and without the wireless mouse.

I (thankfully) upgraded the monitor from the bulky, unadjustable CRT monitor. Since I spilled juice on the keyboard (not recommended!) I had to get a new one of those too, although I went with a cheap keyboard. Actually, the only component I would change about the current setup is the keyboard, which isn't exactly comfortable and the extra buttons on the left and right sides are not prominent enough to be very useful. I liked my old one, but I spilled juice on it...

By the way, all of these devices except the keyboard are from Logitech. I really like their computer input devices. The software isn't completely bug free, but once I got the settings where I like them everything works just fine. I haven't used the wireless mouse as much, but I advise getting a USB extension cord with it, as its range is limited.