Medium Sea Green

you are mediumseagreen #3CB371

Your dominant hues are cyan and green. Although you definately strive to be logical you care about people and know there's a time and place for thinking emotionally. Your head rules most things but your heart rules others, and getting them to meet in the middle takes a lot of your energy some days. Your saturation level is medium - You're not the most decisive go-getter, but you can get a job done when it's required of you. You probably don't think the world can change for you and don't want to spend too much effort trying to force it. Your outlook on life is brighter than most people's. You like the idea of influencing things for the better and find hope in situations where others might give up. You're not exactly a bouncy sunshine but things in your world generally look up.

the spacefem.com html color quiz

Reciprocative Communication

Its a new communication strategy. Its simple in concept - Person A keeps in touch with Person B to the amount that Person B keeps in touch with Person A.

It works because it requires that both people put in the same amount (or lack of) effort to stay in touch. If the one person doesn't put in an equivalent effort in keeping in touch, why should the other person have to carry the load ?

Perhaps I should try this out. There are some people I know who never seem to be interested in keeping in touch from an 'initiate a conversation' angle.

So lets see how this goes shall we?

Computers cannot score essays (yet!)

Computers cannot and should not be used to score/grade an essay. At least for the current state of art, this is a fact. 10 years from now this post of mine might be ridiculous.

With the current state of art, if you depend on a computer algorithm to grade people's writing skills, you are making a big mistake.

Here's [yarnsoftheheart.com] one person's account of her experiences with an 'online essay scoring system'.

Read the 'essay' that was scored and the score that the system assigned to it. If you were the teacher grading that essay, would you give it the same score ? If you have a child going to a school that uses something like this to grade essays, you may want to have a talk with the teacher.

[via Kem's Utterly Merciless Guide to Essay Writing]

Busy tuesdays

With the new semester is fully underway, my Tuesday schedule seems to be the most solid booked of the lot.

Here's what it looks like at the moment:
Group Meeting : T 1200p-0200p
TA.Lab : T 0200p-0350p
Advisor Meeting : T 0400p-0500p

Without anything else, I'm booked solid every Tuesday from 12-5.

Add in the fact that I'm the department representative to the Graduate Student Council this year, and every 1st and3rd Tuesday of the month, my Tuesday stretches to 6:15pm. [The GSC meets 5:15p-6:15p ]

Should be interesting to see how this works out.

Random Win

Last night, I randomly decided to go to a graduate student mix-and-mingle event organized by the nice people at AGOSS (Adult, Graduate & Off Campus Student Services - part of the Offices of the Dean of Student Life)

There was a game of bingo in it, and believe it or not, but I won!
This is probably the first time I won something at one of these 'for-fun' events! :)

So what did I win? well, if you are reading this blog - you should have already heard about it from me. :)

If you haven't heard about it, then that should be an indication that you don't keep in touch enough.

Bugs

I stumbled across some interesting definitions of bugs on catb.org
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schroedinbug: /shrohdinbuhg/, n.

[MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in quantum physics] A design or implementation bug in a program that doesn't manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed. Though (like bit rot) this sounds impossible, it happens; some programs have harbored latent schroedinbugs for years.

mandelbug: /man�del�buhg/, n.

[from the Mandelbrot set] A bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic. This term implies that the speaker thinks it is a Bohr bug, rather than a heisenbug.

Bohr bug: /bohr buhg/, n.

[from quantum physics] A repeatable bug; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym of heisenbug;

heisenbug: /hi:�zen�buhg/, n.

[from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. (This usage is not even particularly fanciful; the use of a debugger sometimes alters a program's operating environment significantly enough that buggy code, such as that which relies on the values of uninitialized memory, behaves quite differently.) Antonym of Bohr bug;
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See more at The Jargon File at http://www.catb.org/jargon/