Archived-Announcements-2014

Prior announcements -- from most recent to earliest

• 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.