Kris Jordan

I walked out of the physics final exam feeling pretty tired. An all night study session spent mostly filling in the single-side of a 3×5 index card with equations which may be needed took longer than expected. Going into the 8am test I felt pretty good about my preparation. Coming out of the test I thought for sure I did not perform well enough.

Turns out, by any reasonable measure of success, I would not have made the mark. I scored a 48% out of 100 on my physics final. The caveat, here, is that this is physics and this is a professor who designs his tests to average around 50%. It just so turns out the average grade on the final was a 44. So I scored better than average by correctly answering less than half of the test. Simply crazy if you ask me. The class size wasn’t small, either, at around 45 students. Most of which are physics and chem majors, and a few of us computer science types thrown in as well.

I guess that’s one way to do it.

So, in the way of fun stuff on the horizon I alluded to last post, here are the two major projects I’ll be working on:

Edneo.com - A little experiment in on-line educational materials. The thought is there are many subjects which would be nice to have audio/visual materials available on-line. Think YouTube meets Wikipedia. The format, I anticipate, will be short segments (10 minutes) on topics I have the capacity to discuss (ie: computer science… not physics!). If it looks like a promising idea perhaps I’ll recruit some Brown folks to do mini-lectures on other subjects.

Personalized News Aggregation - Put this in the experimental/nerd bin. The premise is using some of the text analysis techniques I’ve been learning about and applying it to news as it is published on the internet. Ultimately, by looking at the content of some bit of news the program should be able to infer a general sense of what the piece is about. By combining this information with articles you have read in the past it should be able to determine how closely related the articles are. Finally, if it seems to be something of interest, the news is delivered to you. Ideally it would be like having a little person somewhere on the internet filtering news for you and picking out the things you are most interested in reading. Realistically who knows how bad it will be :)