Out of the slough and back on track

Hopefully. I did oversleep again this morning- but as before, I'd been planning to do some work and I wasn't actually late for my lecture. I then spent about five and a half hours, with a break for late lunch/ early supper, working on the group project with 2 of the 3 others- the third is the same one who wasn't there last time (when we arranged to meet this time) and I don't know whether he didn't get the email telling him about this time or whether he was busy- I did think he might be.

We got on fairly well. One group member has researched and written a piece about the historical statistician assigned to our group (that's a component of the project as well as the programming), so that's done. And the other member, the one who did almost a whole question in his own time, said at the beginning of the session that he did think my way of doing it was better. But I said that although I still thought my way would give the expected value of the payoff and his wouldn't, I'd looked at the question again and it didn't actually mention the expected value, it just said to investigate the payoff, and the results produced by his method did look more interesting. The other group member was keeping quiet, which was probably wise. The consensus in the end was to include both methods with a discussion of what each told us- and to try and work out what exactly it was that his method was calculating and what the results meant therefore.

In terms of programming, we finally managed to rewrite one of the functions without a loop (R does loops very slowly so it's best to write things in vector form if you can). So that was very good. While we ran it to test that it did indeed work, I started converting the biography of the statistician into the right form for LaTeX to work on- it still took quite a while even without the loop. We then proceeded to the final part of the first question- generalising one of the numbers that was fixed in the first part to a range of values. Only we didn't get that far- we needed to write two functions and the first one was taking ages to get right. It was one of those situations where you stare and stare at what you've written and can't understand what could possibly be wrong about it, untill eventually you start to conclude that the only possible explaination is that instead of a rational machine, your computer is in fact a box with a demon inside pretending to be a computer and it's decided it doesn't like your face. Then you suddenly see the really stupid mistake*, and correct it. Then you try the function again and are back to staring at it wondering how it can possibly not work when everything you've written makes such perfect sense...

We managed to get rid of a lot of problems caused by trivial slips- embarrassingly quite a few of them were due to my sloppy programming- but in the end we got to a point where we were back to the staring stage and it was getting late, so we decided to leave it till Thursday. In between fixing errors or trying reduced versions of the function to try and narrow down where the problem was, though, we had plenty of time to chat because it was taking about 10 minutes each time to run (better than the half hour version with the loop at least). And I became conscious of what I'd only been vaguely aware of before- contrary to my first impression when I found out that's who I'd be working with, they're actually pretty nice people. Not that I thought they were horrible to begin with or anything, just so-so. One of them, K (the one who went away and did the question) has a strangely appealing trait of laughing at me- when I put it like that it sounds bad, but it's more like I'm being too serious, and he laughs and I see the funny side, or I say something that's intentionally gently humorous, but not everyone would pick up on it, and he gets it and laughs along. The other, M, showed us his website where he's calculated statistics, rankings and relative abilities of, not only the UK football divisions, but pretty much every football league in the world. I have 0, in fact probably less than 0 interest in football, but it was nice to get to see a side of my fellow group-projecters that didn't involve functions and bias and Y21 hat. We also had an interesting discussion about Japan, and travelling to various places. K, incidentally, is from Cyprus, and M from the US.

It just occurred to me that mathematically I've come full circle. GCSE projects involved being given a situation and calculating the value of something for various sizes (or values of some variable n)- for example, given an n by m grid, how many squares of all sizes can you find in it?- and then trying to find a formula from what was essentially experimental data (though experimental data with no errors), and explain why it had to be correct. Then projects stopped involving the experimental stage and were just about proving things mathematically. Now we're back to experimenting again- only this time we have a computer to do all the work. In theory, this should mean that I already know how to do this kind of project. But sadly, I think that getting into a GCSE mindset and going for it that way will not get us that many marks...

I wanted to go and see the talk by Sir David King, Chief Government Scientific Advisor about Global Warming which was held in the Old Theatre at 6.30- especially after having come across his name while researching quotations for the Quiz (I feel an almost personal attatchment). But we were getting along nicely and I didn't want to interrupt the flow. I found out as we were finishing for the day that K had missed hearing the Prime Minister of Greece speaking in the Peacock Theatre. We all have to make sacrifices... :-)

*using the wrong variable name, for example, or calling another function which takes variables as arguments that you thought you'd written into the function as variables, but on inspection find that you've actually used constant values (the most commonly used values) instead