Archived-Announcements-2014

Prior announcements -- from most recent to earliest

• 07 May: Once again, it was a pleasure to teach this course; thank you for the useful feedback on the course evaluations and during class, and for prototyping some new ideas. Keep experimenting.
• 07 May: and, this might be of interest to some of you. Please tell your friends and co-op bosses and colleagues to sign up - it's totally free, and covers all the DoE part of this course. There will be many case studies, applied to engineering and real-life, not just ChemEng.
• 07 May: The final grades for the course are posted on Avenue. Please read the column: "Final grade for the course", since the Avenue calculation doesn't handle the grading system for this course.
• 22 Apr: I hope the final exam went well for all of you. Feedback about your experimental project from myself and from your peers will be sent to you shortly. We are just working on combining all the comments from all sources.
• 21 Apr: It's always a great idea to be engaged with issues in the area where you live and work. Read these five articles, especially 1, 2 and 3 (links in the top right corner). There's a question about it in the final exam on Tuesday.
• 21 Apr: The solution to the RSM project is released. Sign in to see how close you got to the optimum!
• 21 Apr: the deadline for the response surface activity is 16:30 on Monday. Please make sure your reports are submitted before that time.

The solution will be released on Monday evening, and reports received after the solution has been posted will not be accepted.

• 11 Apr: Dream big!! We are always interested in improving ChemEng; please provide us with suggestions by 23 April, on how the undergraduate experience can be improved for you. You are the best qualified to provide this input, because you have gone through the whole system, and can see it all in perspective now.
• 09 Apr: the last question for assignment 7 is posted as a short write-up that you should work on over the next 10 days. It is not possible to cram this in before the due date, so start right away.
  • The advantage of this write-up is that it brings together several aspects of the course, and is a great way to study for the final-exam.
  • A further advantage is that it replicates a real-life scenario, and many prior students have said this was the most interesting/fun/insightful aspect in the course.
  • However, as you're all aware, one of your assignments gets dropped from the average grade, so feel free to skip this assignment, if you wish.
• 08 Apr: the next batch of peer evaluations (number 2 and 3) were emailed out over the weekend. Please complete them by Friday, 11 April. Those that requested an extra two evaluations will receive them in your email later this week.
• 02 Apr: the first batch of peer evaluations were emailed around 7pm tonight. Check your McMaster email. You have to review it by Friday, 4 April.
• 01 Apr: the final, assignment 7 has been posted. The first 2 questions are quick, and due by the last class, 7 April. The last question is an open-ended question that you will work on for the next 2 weeks, and covers aspects related to all parts of the course.
• 31 Mar: DoE project reports are due by 23:59 tonight. Please note, the submission process takes about 30 minutes to an hour (click this link ahead of time, so you are not surprised later). Your submission includes a self-evaluation, and checks to ensure your document is correctly formatted.
• 30 Mar: ready to submit your DoE report? Submit it here please (not via Google Drive).
• 29 Mar: new notes for the next section of the course, Process monitoring, are posted. Please print them for class on Monday.
• 25 Mar: as mentioned, the Design of Experiments projects will be peer graded, in addition to my own grading. Click on the link to see the grading rubric. Grading will be done anonymously.
  • 60% will be the weight from my grade
  • 27% will be the average of the graders in the class, your peers. There are expected to be 3 graders, minimum , but there might be more.
  • 4% will be the weight from grading yourself
  • 3x3=9% will be on the suitability of your grading 3 of your peers (i.e. you should not be providing useless/no feedback)

• 15 Mar: the next assignment, assignment 6, containing a single question, is posted. It is due on class on 20 March, or by 21 March if submitted electronically.
• 06 Mar: plenty of source code for R examples, and a full derivation for the CTS system. Make sure you can repeat that derivation, and understand how to calculate the main

effects and two factor interaction coefficients by hand.

• 10 Mar: I'm slowly getting around to replying to all the DOE emails; backlog of about 3 days ...
• 04 Mar: the 5th assignment is posted now, and due on 12 March, at class.
• 26 Feb: the 4th Quest has been posted and emailed to you. Please complete it before 11pm on Monday (extended by one day).
  • A number of you have set your McMaster email to forward to an external account. Please note that at the moment Hotmail emails are bouncing and the University has not been able to work with Microsoft to fix this. If you use Hotmail you will not receive any emails sent to your @mcmaster.ca account.

• 25 Feb: the slides for the next section, on Designed Experiments, are posted.
• 25 Feb: the midterm questions and solutions have been posted for you to review. The grades have been posted to Avenue, and the midterms will be returned in Thursday's class.
• 24 Feb: today will be a short class, due the lecture by Hans Rosling (see announcement above)
• 19 Feb: a new assignment is posted. Due on 27 February.
• 13 Feb: we will redo the midterm in a collaborative group of 4. It is a no-risk way to boost your midterm grade:
  • we will use the maximum of [(0.2)(collaborative grade) + (0.8)(individual grade)] or [1.0(individual grade)]
  • this session is essentially a peer-review of the midterm
  • very positive reviews of this process have been coming from students in my other courses.
• 12 Feb: We watched Hans Rosling's video in our class in January. He's giving a lecture next door to us on the 24th. RSVP if you'd like to attend.
• 06 Feb: the midterm will include all materials presented from the start of the course up to and including today's class (05C). More details and practice questions are provided for you.
• 05 Feb: grades for assignment 1 and the Quests have been posted to Avenue. Please bring any discrepancy to the instructor's attention right away.
• 05 Feb: the university is closing at 17:30 today; there will still be class at 16:30 through.
• 04 Feb: solutions to assignment 2 are posted.
• 03 Feb: the midterm date is Wednesday evening, 12 February, starting at 18:30
  • T13, room 127, if your last name started with A to O
  • T13, room 106, if your last name started with P to Z
• 30 Jan: I'm interested to know your opinion on the following:

"How would you feel if 4C3 was offered as a purely online course, with high-quality videos, website, assignments, quizzes, and interaction/office-hours with TAs and the instructor via Skype (or similar web-based chatting software)". In other words, replace the 3 hours of class time with (interactive?) video modules.

Let me know your thoughts by email, or at via this web page (if you'd like to respond anonymously).

• 29 Jan: interested in presenting a paper? This will be a great experience to practice making a presentation at the Monsaroff night, Thursday, 06 February.
• 28 Jan: the third assignment has been posted; due on 05 February, in class.
• 28 Jan: the notes for the next section, least squares modelling, have been posted.
• 23 Jan: it's not too late to sign up and watch some of the online course videos from Coursera's Computing for Data Analysis course. It covers the use of R to analyze data sets.
• 23 Jan: the full solutions to assignment 1 are posted.
• 22 Jan: a new version of the PID course textbook has been published; minor spelling/grammar corrections and layout updates only. Thanks for all the suggested updates.
• 22 Jan: a new Quest has been posted. Check your McMaster email addresses for a sign in code. It closes by Friday, at 23:59.
• 21 Jan: there has been a request to cover more practice problems in class; unfortunately there isn't a lot of class time for this course, so I'm relying on you to go through many of the worked examples in the course textbook - there are full solutions to most questions in Chapter 2.
• 15 Jan: it is interesting that this blog article was recently posted: looks like I got my dates and person wrong regarding the standard deviation. What is interesting is the notion of using MAD instead of standard deviation. As discussed today in class, I quite agree with his statements (to a point).
• 14 Jan: the first Quest is posted. If you are registered for 4C3 or 6C3 then you would have received an email about it today.
• 10 Jan: the first assignment is posted. Due in under a week from now. Use the software tutorial to plot any of the plots (or whichever software you prefer).
• 10 Jan: the slides for the next 2 weeks are posted. We start a new section where we consider univariate data analysis on Monday.
• 09 Jan: Please make sure you can see the 4C3 course in Avenue; if not, please do a search for the course and add it. If I can't see your name then you are not on my class list, and will be missing out on the on-line quizzes (and grades for them).
• 06 Jan: the midterm date is now Wednesday, 12 February, in the evening.
• 06 Jan: slides for the next section, data visualization are posted.
• 04 Jan: the first class is on 06 January, at 16:30 in MDCL 1110. See you there!
• 30 Dec: consider following the Twitter account for this course: @stats4eng so you always stay up to date.
• 30 Dec: the course outline for 2014 has been posted.