Archived-Announcements-2014

Prior announcements -- from most recent to earliest

• 24 Feb: today will be a short class, due the lecture by Hans Rosling (see announcement above)
• 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.