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Math Contest Season Winds Down
Since the insomnia seems to have cleared up, I set an alarm this morning so that I could be sure to be at work in time for the doughnuts and the showing of the MATHCOUNTS National Countdown finals. MATHCOUNTS always happens on the east coast, so we have to get up far too early to watch it here in California.
You might not be familiar with MATHCOUNTS or Countdown. That’s fine. I hadn’t heard of either until I started this job. MATHCOUNTS is the major math contest for middle school kids, and each state (or state-like region or other such entity) sends four kids and an adult to the finals for a long weekend every May. On Saturday and Sunday there are a bunch of written rounds (alone, in a group, with a calculator, without a calculator, whatever, I’m not really sure how the details all work). The 12 students with the best scores on the written rounds get to participate in Countdown which is a single elimination tournament that is broadcast on ESPN. Not the main ESPN; one of the minor ones, like the one that shows the spelling bee.
Each match features a pair of students (based on their initial seeding) in a five-problem round, and they have to answer questions like “What’s the remainder when \(2018^{2018}\) is divided by 20?” Whichever student has answered more questions correctly at the end of the round moves on to the next round.
What is interesting is that usually Lou DiGioia is the moderator of the Countdown competition. Up until fairly recently Lou was the Executive Director of MATHCOUNTS, but he left earlier this year to lead DECA. So instead
Wesley CrusherWil Wheaton moderated Countdown. It did not go flawlessly, but he did a really good job of dealing with the various minor mishaps. I’m sure that a lot of the teachers appreciated the choice of moderator more than the kids did.Reprising the finals from last year, it was Luke R. versus Andrew C. Luke won again, becoming the first two-time National champion in MATHCOUNTS history. With both Luke and Andrew exhausting their eligibility, a lot of eyes are on Jessica W. (a sixth grader who was the 5 seed coming into the finals) to dominate the competition in the coming years.
And so, MATHCOUNTS is over for the year.
Fun fact: 102 users of our site logged in from the IP address of the hotel wifi where the MATHCOUNTS finals were being held.
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She Tried to Plot Spirals in an HTML5 Canvas And You Wouldn't Believe What Happened Next
Apology 1: No post yesterday because all I did was stupid stuff, and I had a migraine, so I slept approximately as many hours as the cats did.
Apology 2: Sorry, people using feed readers, but the JavaScript spirals won’t show up for you because the RSS feed strips out all the JavaScript (as it rightly should).
I’ve still been playing with the spiral stuff that I’d been working on since March. Mostly because it makes cool pictures, and the ideas behind it are simple enough that I can learn what I want to by playing with them. Also because my grand scheme to write something that tracks the high-altitude planes flying over this city requires a much higher level of skill than I currently have, so I might as well get better at drawing things on web pages.
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Stages of a Data Project
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Oh wow! This sounds like a fun project! Previously we had just been adding up the total number of these, dividing by the total number of those, and then sorted based on this number. We can put together some interesting heuristics to determine which rows should be included in the analysis, and we can fit a more sophisticated model. Maybe we can run the model iteratively and apply a scoring metric that decays over time to incorporate what we know about the past. Since we have a bajillion rows in the table, we can have a training set and a test set. There is so much to do!
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HUMANS ARE TERRIBLE. Approximately all of the data in the table was typed into fields on the site by people. People who have different views about the right way to go about doing things. People who can not spell. At. All. And don’t get me started about the fact that we designed the database that stores all this information, and you need to check the value in a particular column to figure out which other columns are important for understanding that row. There is no consistency.
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A fairly naive regex catches enough of the important parts of the rows that we care about that we can still fit a good model, even if the data is not perfect. In fact, we can use the iterative idioms of the language to fit a whole family of models by grouping the data based on the values in important columns. Without lowering ourselves to using the sorts of
forloops that seem very out of fashion these days. -
Time passes. Code is written.
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The parameters generated by the models are great! They have remarkably tiny p values. The conclusions drawn from the training set match with what we see in the rows that we withheld as a test set! This metric is so good at identifying the feature that we care about that we don’t even need to consider what happens over time. When we run the model, this code produces a score for each subgroup that is very effective for classification.
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No matter which way we group the data, the scores seem to be remarkably consistent. In fact, they are all approximately equal to the value that you would get if you add up the total number of these and divide by the total number of those.
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Did Not See the Ocean Glow
There was supposed to be some sort of bioluminescent phytoplankton making the ocean glow blue at night. But we did not see it at La Jolla Shores.
I took some long exposure photos of the normal-colored ocean. It was dark out when I took the picture, but the camera was patient enough to allow a lot of light in, so the image is brighter than what reality was.
We were going to see if the ocean was glowing up in the Carmel Valley/Del Mar area, but there was such a traffice nightmare that we couldn’t get anywhere near that beach.
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The Secret Lives of Cats
When we are sleeping or at work, the cats sleep.
I would not recommend these devices unless your love for gadgets (and your pets) significantly exceeds your commitment to spending money reasonably. One of the devices that I got from Amazon was used and broken (so I returned it). I bought a replacement at Best Buy, where it was on clearance. Never did hear back from the company’s support team about possible fixes (aside from returning) the broken device. Would not be surprised if they went out of business and everything stopped working at only a moment’s notice.
Also, they probably have a pretty shallow user base, as Sophie is in 20th place among all cats, and even though we think she’s special, she’s probably not that special.
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Minimally Productive Sunday
Instead of making a lame visualization of how many headaches I’ve had in the past year, I spent part of today trying to recreate in Javascript some of the Fibonacci-type spirals that I had been making in R about a month and a half ago.
I also read the newspaper, played some Pokémon (STILL NO FREAKIN’ DITTO), did a few chores, and pet the cats. Also played with one of the cats in hopes of getting her activity level up so that she could continue her four-day streak on her feline fitbit.
Still haven’t figured out how to make the spirals that I intended to.
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Tales from the Bugmaster
Current homework bug reports (not all real).
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One USD is equal to 101.60 ISK btw.
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I typed 1.20, but it said I typed 1.50.
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woops i didn’t save my work.
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my name is bbob
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I tried everything, didn’t work
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Does homework always accept answers as numbers?
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There was nothing wrong with the problem.
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it is not showing the picture
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my mom told me the wrong answer
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too hard
(Sorry for no “Cinco de Drinko” post, but I’m hoping to get home before the twenty-somethings flood the streets. #northpark)
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