Blog Marco

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.

Holy crap. Rail guns exist? It looks like the US Navy will soon have the technology to shoot anything in North Korea from a ship with a rail gun. A rail gun basically shoots a bullet or some projectile with EM energy (Electro-Magnetic) instead of the usual gun powder. Here's more information: PopSci. I thought this type of technology was just Science Fiction. (They have these rail guns on ships in the TV series Stargate)

Its been known for a while that Australia is undergoing a shortage in engineers across all fields. Companies are resorting to importing skills into Australia. Perhaps this would raise engineering incomes in future?

Skills shortage threatens Queensland projects

"Engineers Australia has warned that despite commitments of huge funding for Queensland infrastructure projects, the delivery of many projects will be jeopardised without access to enough professional engineers.

"Speaking ahead of a presentation to the Queensland Infrastructure Summit in Brisbane last week, Engineers Australia chief executive Peter Taylor said: "the limited availability of professional engineering skills will be a major factor in determining whether or not the huge infrastructure programs for Queensland can be implemented.

""The number of engineers graduating from our universities across Australia has remained static for a decade and when the massive expansion of infrastructure projects needs the skills base to underpin their delivery, we have been caught short.

""Even though the Australian government's own list of migrant occupations in demand shows that there are significant shortages of civil, mechanical, electrical power and resource engineering, there is no recognition of the connection between that list and the inability of our own education system to produce more engineers," he said."

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.

When a system is in the steady state, a sinusiondal input generates a sinusoidal output at the same frequency but the two sinusoids differ in amplitude and phase angle. The differences are a function of frequency.

Sinusoids can be represented by phasors. One part magnitude, one part phase.

Phasors can be represented in three ways: Polar form, Rectangular form and the Exponential form from Euler's Formula.

You can plot a phasor in two ways: As a function of frequency and on a polar plot. Usually when the magnitude or phase is plotted against frequency it is converted to decibels by taking the log (base 10) and multiply by 20 and plotting it on a log scaled frequency plot - i.e. bode plot.

From Control Systems Engineering by Norman S. Nise

I was in a laboratory tutorial this morning learning how to play around with MATLAB to obtain the controller specs from knowing the transfer function of the plant i.e. the Maze Rover (from which the transfer function was obtained experimentally from a step response as well as a series of input and output magnitude and phase measurements to form a bode plot, which in turn would give the means to the derivation of the transfer function for the maze rover.

Assume that the transfer function you derived from your plant or maze rover was:
0.5
---------
s^2 + 2 s

Today we formally finished all our formal lectures for Signals and Systems and it also marks the first day to begin our group project - a.k.a "lab #6". The objectives of the lab are:

"1) To obtain an s-domain block diagram model of the maze rover – that is, to synthesize its transfer function of observing its input/output behaviour."

What does that mean? We need to make up a transfer function (out/in) in the frequency domain (s-domain) into a block diagram model given some design constraints. We would obtain the transfer function of the back box – i.e. the maze rover (a little motorized car with a controller/plant setup) by testing out input / output behaviour. (By feeding specified inputs, measuring output then plotting a bode plot)