Blog Marco

I remember the frustration and the tears (!) associated with not being able to solve a problem or to find out some fact or method for maths (mathematics) problems, chemistry or physics. The Internet makes it so easy now. I was reading the New York Times article about these websites out there which help you out in "unravelling the mysteries of complex math and science problems.". You've got so many tools. Being stuck on a problem and the frustration of having to wait the next day to learn from your teacher the method is now a thing of the past. If you need homework help you just need a little initiative to go visit one of these websites and ask them on how to solve your particular problem.

Homework help. Bah! First start off with Google. If its a science related problem - like maths or physics give the newly launched Wolfram Alpha a try. And if you are an Engineering student, or if you love Mathematica - you'll love Wolfram Alpha!. Now, getting more to the point, you've got a popular site called Cramster which is an "Online Study Community". Other homework help websites are: Koofers which provides (shares) lecture notes, Spark Notes (owned by Barnes and Noble) and Course Hero. Good Luck with your maths problems!

The best math teachers connect with students.

Other ways to solve the problem:
2x+y = 60 == y = 60 - 2x
x+2y = 75
x+2(60-2x) = 75 == x+120-4x = 75 == -3x = -45 == x = 15
y = 60 - 2(15) == y = 60-30 == y = 30

{15, 30}

Here's a simpler straight forward method of solving the math problem:

2x+y = 60
x+2y = 75
Multiply the 1st equation by 2:
4x+2y=120
Subtract the 2nd to get:
3x=45 ---> x=15

Or if you're an advanced student you can solve this math problem as a set or matrices:
[2 1 60]
[1 2 75] = a

[1 0 15]
[0 1 30] = rref(a)

Many Australian uni students like to associate themselves with the stereotype of a struggling student living on a small amount of cash. But Ross Gittins, the Sydney Morning Herald economics columnist doesn't buy into it. There isn't such a thing as a poor uni student. He says that these "self-pitying university students" are "middle-class kids pretending to be poor and deserving, whereas they're actually setting themselves up for a life of well-above-average earnings. The few years of their life they spend having to scrimp and save won't do them any harm. It might teach them to have some concern for the genuinely needy." He also notes that "on average, the lifetime earnings of graduates are about 70 per cent greater than for those who went only to year 12." But all in all, he concludes that most under 25's live at home anyway, plus some would get Youth Allowance from the government and more than 60 percent have some form of work to subsidise whatever expenses they have...

Gittins goes on to talk about HECS repayments by uni students - which affects all graduates after they leave uni and start earning a REAL income (HECS is the Australian system of deferring university/college fees, where accumulated fees have no interest but is indexed to inflation).

An article from SMH reports about illegal downloads in two universities based in Sydney: UNSW and UTS - but no doubt every university in Australia or internationally faces the same problem... students logging on the free university wi-fi internet connections from their own laptop and downloading copyrighted movies and songs... But students have always found ways to beat the system. There are plenty of ways to avoid getting caught using torrents.

Why do students illegally download stuff at university? Because the internet connection is SUPER FAST. Universities have access to the fastest internet connections - at optimum speed downloads can reach 500mb to 1 gig in one second. And according to the report, incidents of copyright infringement are increasing.

I read an article today about university students outsourcing their uni studies through websites called RentACoder and Kasamba. There are other websites out there called Elance and Guru that do the same thing. You can write down what work you want done, post it on the outsourcing website and wait for the incoming bids from service providers from all over the world including India, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

In the article, it discusses computer science students using these outsourcing services to have their programming assignments done by other people overseas. Perhaps it is more worthwhile for them to find part time work - being paid around $20 per hour and trading it with the arbitrage advantage of outsourcing with hourly rates starting from $2 per hour.

But don't stop with Bachelor of IT or Science in computing sciences. You can apply this outsourcing magic with any uni course. Journalism - you can hire people to do your research for you. Engineering - similar with programming - hire someone to "show you" how to do things, calculate equations, etc. Commerce - assignments can be tendered out to the best bidder. What if you can outsource the actual exam taking? You could probably do it with those computer multiple choice questions. Good luck!

Number of school pupils in Australia: 3.3 million; number of schools: 9600; number of full-time teachers or equivalent: 230,000.

Proportion of male Year 10 pupils in Australia who continue to Year 12: 72 per cent; of females: 82 per cent.

Here's an interesting video of University Students by university students. It reveals what a typical college student life is about, what they do and issues that they are thinking about. Well done Kansas State University!

There's plenty of foreign students in Australia... studying because they either find Australian education better than what they can get back in their country or so they can get a PR (Permanent Resident) ticket into Australia. But the latter reason is being tightened up by the Australian Government. From September 1, foreign students finishing their courses will no longer be automatically entitled to apply for a general skilled migration visa - which is used as a stepping stone to PR status. From that date, their will need to have "competent" English skills equivalent to those of a year 12 student with 12 months work experience in the field in which they studied, working a minimum of 20 hours a week. Labor's immigration spokesman, Tony Burke was all for it saying that Engineers arrive in Australia with English so bad that they end up as Taxi drivers... "and they don't make great Sydney taxi drivers," he said. Also some universities are becoming visa factories where there has been a surge of enrolments in cooking and hairdressing although they have no intention of following up with that vocation - only to use the education as a ticket to PR status.

"Give Us the Answers!" Cry out the students... was I on the right track back in my math tutoring days? I usually gave a few examples before I set the student on their course of homework questions. Some questions used similar techniques as the example questions and other questions needed some extra thought. A research team from UNSW have found that looking at an already solved problem reduces the working memory load and hence allows the student to actually learn. Which means next time you come across a problem like that, you have a better chance of solving the problem. They found that "The working memory was only effective in juggling two or three tasks at the same time, retaining them for a few seconds. When too many mental tasks were taken on some things were forgotten."

Powerpoint presentations are ineffective (Generally). It all depends on how use use the presentation tool. Most presenters have multiple dot points on their lecture presentations - a popular way to present new material to University students. It is more effective to speak to a diagram because it presents information in a different form according to a researcher from UNSW. It is ineffective to have a lecture powerpoint presentation speaking the same words that are written because it is putting loo much load on the mind and hence decresing your ability to understand the presentation. The research findings show limits to the brain's capacity to retain and process information in the short term memory.

4. Practice the shit out of them.
Musicians often practice 8 hours a day.

Mark Cuban on how to make money from Basketball.

If you can't own an NBA basketball team, buy a minor league team, recruit good basketball players from high school, train them up and then sell them off at a profit.

New research suggests that good-looking people do better in exams and thus probably in later life, than the plain or downright ugly.

In the study, better-looking students achieved superior results in both oral and written exams - the latter marked anonymously - suggesting that success is not just down to teachers favouring attractive students but to superior natural ability.

Debate has raged for years among sociologists and economists over "the beauty factor".

Most research, beginning with Gary Becker, the 1992 Nobel prizewinning economist, has suggested that discrimination, whether because of looks, height or race, is due to observed physical characteristics.

The significance of the new research is that even where testing is "blind", good-looking people do better. One reason for this, the researchers suggest, is that attractive children get more attention from their parents.

Even more important is that good looks lead to higher self-esteem. Attractive people may be more confident and work harder.

Don't use Wikipedia as an Academic Resource.

"Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia’s founder) said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has gotten them into academic hot water. “They say, ‘Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia’” and the information turned out to be wrong, he says. But he said he has no sympathy for their plight, noting that he thinks to himself: “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”"

You can rate your professors at ratemyprofessors.com - too bad University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) ain't on the list otherwise I would be making a fair number of comments.

Our Autumn end-of-semester final exams are coming up this June so don’t expect any random posts about celebrities or technology or anything about photography for that matter. I’ll be blogging about my studies from now, for about a month. So if you want to learn a thing or two about studying electrical engineering, go away for the next month or two.