I know, I know, I shouldn't be in this class

[cosmolinguist]

As I mentioned, I got my grammar midterm back yesterday and I did impressively well on it. Today I got my CSci midterm back, and it was ridiculous. I got 65/100, which is not the kind of score I'm used to seeing. At first I was sure I had gotten all the multiple choice questions wrong, because there was red lines and letters scrawled everywhere, but upon later inspection I realized that she writes the correct letters next to questions you get wrong, and "C" next to answers that are correct.

The truly annoying thing, though, was the short-answer section. She asked us "Who owns the Internet?" and I thought that was a really stupid question. It depends on how you define "Internet"--is it the hardware? the information? No single entity owns all that stuff, anyway. I ended up saying that nobody owns the Internet. The only thing she wrote was "So how does this work?" and she took off half the points the question was worth. How does what work? The Internet? The system of ownership? We never talked about any of this in class. I talked to one or two of the girls in our class who worry a lot and work hard (the antithesis of me, in other words) after the midterm and even they agreed that the test was crazy. This, I think, is evidenced by the fact that she told us she was grading on a curve and that everyone gets to add ten points to their score, so I have a C.

That's okay. But it's funny that, while feeling like I didn't study enough for either of them, I did quite well in grammar and rather badly in CSci.

Comments

[czircon.livejournal.com]

Do you have any idea what answer she wanted for "Who owns the Internet?" I really can't think of any way to justify saying that anyone owns it, no matter how much I warp my logic.

[cosmolinguist]

I have no idea, really. I can't think of anything, either. And I do not know what she means by "So how does it work?" or what that has to do with her questio or my answer. It'd be amusing, if it weren't so sad. I might ask on Tuesday, if I'm feeling up to a fight. (I probably will be; I have to have some good reason to get out of bed so early in the morning.)

[tenbaset.livejournal.com]

Methinks you have a Clueless Teacher.

You see them every so often, teachers that really think they know stuff but, er, don't. But tend to bluff and make enough noise to distract most people. You don't tend to encounter them at that level though.

Saw it once in secondary school - the head of IT was quite, er, forceful. (Well, actually, I'd say she was a bully.) To this day, I think she was like that to make sure that people didn't discover how little she really knew.

I am curious what the teacher thought the correct answer was though.

(Anyway, I own the Internet. I bought the CD from an ISP for $30. :-)

[writerdog.livejournal.com]

Oh no, I own the Internet. I won it a late night poker game from some guy named Al. He was playing to an inside straight and I pulled four Kings -- and I gotta say, that boy didn't have much of a sense of humor either...

Anyway, after much moaning and bitching that he don't get no credit for nuttin' anyway (he mumbled sumpin' about setting some gal named Monica up with his Boss and the Boss denying the whole affair), that he might as well let me have the Internet if I could give him cabfare and expalin it all to some other gal named, Tipper, (who names their child after something you do when you're drunk anyway--I digress) who was waiting for hom back at their ranch, so I gave him cabfare and he gave me a receipt for 98% of the Internet and we called it squared.

Funny, I ain't heard nuttin' 'bout that boy since that night.

[kratkrat.livejournal.com]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

THAT was hilarious!!

[setharoo.livejournal.com]

At least she isn't making you implement an operating system. She'd probably make you code it Jeroo.

[cosmolinguist]

Was she the one who made you do that? Gah. I have massive respect for anyone who survives more than a semester with her. I'll be lucky if I make it that far. You, a real CSci major, should get a prize or something.

[hyuri.livejournal.com]

I suddenly find in myself an incredible desire to go to school there, so that I can flunk a class for being both correct and lazy, rather than for being merely lazy. ^_^

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, it's a nice change of pace for me (I'm usually just lazy, as well)! And to know more than the professor in, of all things, a computer class. It's ironic, considering that when I first got to college, I was still under the impression that I hated computers and they hate me. And today I mada a correction to the code she'd written for us, since it had syntax errors and thus no one could get it to work. And I do find that ineffectiveness does so detract from the learning experience.

[silverwraith.livejournal.com]

"Who owns the Internet?"

the temptation to write Al Gore is strong. I admire your restraint, as I could not have held out in the face of such a glaring opportunity to be a smart-ass.

[parakleta.livejournal.com]

I hate incompetent people... especially when it's their job to teach and assess the performance of others. I had a really bad lecturer for a neural networks class a year ago, I actually did two neural network classes in the same semester, and they had almost the same content, one was with the elec eng department, the other with compsci.

The elec eng one I got 85, the compsci one I got 50. When I went to see the lecturer of the compsci one about it, and ask him why I did so poorly, he told me that he had to bump my mark up to even give me a pass, apparently he couldn't understand my answers.

I'd written them as they appear in any of the multitude of academic books on neural networks that I've read (until this point it had been a great interest of mine). Apparently that was too abstract for him, and he couldn't understand my answers because they weren't written to the level appropriate for a first year. This was an honours level (4th year) subject, and I'd expected him to understand competent answers, but apparently not.

Can I cut in comments..? Here's what happened.


In neural networks, you basically apply the inputs, run the algorithm, compare the outputs with the desired output, and then using a weight update function you adjust the neural weights. This is the same of almost all neural networks, at least all the ones covered in the class. So when on the exam he asked us to explain different network models, and compare them etc, I just focussed on the weight update function, because the other information is redundant.


Hey, can you post the questions for your exam, so we can publicly disgrace your teacher... :)

[cosmolinguist]

"What is an operating system?" struck me funny (it was a multiple choice question, though, so I couldn't be creative (or a smartass) with my answer; I had to just pick "A set of programs that allows the user to complete specific tasks productively." Even that answer makes me want to be a smartass.)

Then there's "What is an instantiation?" which I got wrong because the correct answer was "A specific concept or item that is relevant to the problem we are trying to solve," and that seemed vague and nonsensical to me.

On at least one question, she was basically presenting her opinions as fact. "List and explain 4 design issues to consider when creating a web page." I knew she wanted us to say, among other things, that you need subpages so people don't have to scroll down too much. Oh, those people people, I remember thinking when she brought this up in class. Some other kid was brave enough to actually say that he finds pages with a lot of links annoying, and would rather have things simply and in one place. She blew him off. I hated writing her opinions as my answer as if they were inarguable truths, but I knew it was the only way to get the points. I hate her concepts of web design; she made us have animated .gifs and other stupid things on our webpages.

"Explain how object oriented programming works, and explain the two benefits it brings to programming." I actually had no idea what to write for this one; the only thing I really remember from that day of class is hating her for saying "orientated."

"Explain how telnet works. How is it different from FTP?" FTP? What? Would someone confuse the two? I wanted to write "How are they alike?" but I didn't.

"Is a computer language different than a spoken language?" Oh, where to begin.

[parakleta.livejournal.com]

• What is an Operating System? An operating system is in fact just the piece of software on the computer that manages the hardware and allows programs and users to share the resources effectively. From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) :
  

          <operating system> (OS) The low-level software which handles
          the interface to peripheral hardware, schedules tasks,
          allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the
          user when no application program is running.
  



• What is an instantiation? I would say the instance or objectification of an idea or concept. It's relationship to the probelm at hand is irrelevant. In OO programming you talk about instantiating an object, and that's when you actually create an instance of it, and take the description of the object to create the actual object so you can store data in it, and interact with it.


• List and explain 4 design issues to consider when creating a web page. Useability (in the form of navigability, and download/render speed), Compatibility (Browser/Platform), Relevance/Grouping/Flow of information. The idea of having multiple smaller pages was the case several years ago, and is still used in marketing driven websites. It is a better design for people who aren't as smart, have shorter attention spans, or are not familiar with computers. You want to get the information across to them in one screen, and have them click on what they want to see next.
  People who use this design to place abstracts of several articles on one page have missed the point. Major fork points in the users navigation should be accessible from every page. The other issue with multipage websites is the ever growing overhead present now days in the form of title blocks and menus and the javascript loaded for the fancy features on every page, and resending this is quite inefficient. Frames would solve this, if only they weren't so poorly implemented and unreliably supported.


• Explain how object oriented programming works, and explain the two benefits it brings to programming. Object Oriented programming has the two benefits of increased abstraction in the programming design (which makes it easier to have multiple developers on a large project, and to conceptualise and design the project). It's a higher level programming philosophy than procedural programming. The other benefit is that the extra abstraction makes it easier and more suitable to take advantage of code reuse. The basic idea of object oriented programming is that you break you program down into objects, and then each object contains the data it requires to define it's state, and defines a collection of acceptable message it can receive to influence it's state.
  There are quite a few languages in the market that claim to be object oriented. Java is the foremost of these at the moment, but I don't believe it is a very good example of the OO paradigm. Personally, the language I think adheres most closely to the paradigm is Objective C, and it uses a MVC (Model View Controller) paradigm for the overall structure of the program. The syntax in Objective C is a hybrid between smalltalk, the first OO language, and C, the most ubiquitous and powerful programming language ever.

Stupid 4300 character limit (how did they come up with that number..?).

[parakleta.livejournal.com]

• Explain how telnet works. How is it different to FTP?Telnet works by opening a TCP stream to port 23 on the machine you are connecting to. This stream is basically just a bi-directional character stream, but on the server side is most commonly attached to a shell account, allowing the user to access programs and resources on the remote machine as if logged into it locally. It's unencrypted nature has caused it to begin a drift into obscurity, now largely replaced by ssh. The telnet programs are often used by geeks to connect to other ports on remote computers to interact with TCP services directly (I use it for testing all kinds of stuff, since most Internet protocols defined in the RFC's just use simple ASCII commands to interact with them).
  FTP is actually quite interestingly different. It actually uses two ports, 20 and 21. When you first connect to a computer by FTP you open a connection on port 21, which is actually identical (search for telnet) (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc959.html) to a telnet (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc854.html) connection, but the remote computer attaches you to an ftp server, rather than a shell. When you request a GET or PUT command to transmit files, a connection is made with port 20 which is used to transmit the files. This connection can be specified as a binary connection, meaning that data files that aren't stored in ASCII format aren't destroyed by being transmitted.
  The specifics of how the data port connection is opened is actually quite interesting. Along the control connection you send a command which specifies which host(computer) and port is to receive the data connection, and it doesn't even have to be the computer that initiated the control connection. The server then uses port 20 to connect to the machine specified and transfers the file. With the proliferation of firewalls and private subnets and NAT, these return data connections don't work properly very often anymore, and so now PASV FTP is more commonly used, which has the host machine initiating both connections.


• Is a computer language different than a spoken language? Yes, it's more precise... :p Actually, it depends on the language. Objective C is based on passing messages to objects, and those messages tend to be quite verbose and use full English sentences, where the nouns are other objects or variables. I don't know enough about spoken languages in general to comment really. There are people working on natural language programming languages, and I don't know where they are at, but there are already quite a few high level languages around. I'm pretty sure you can program Prolog with natural language (well, with small syntactical changes) and the programs will not only work, but will also conceptually make sense.


• Who owns the Internet? You're right, it is a stupid question, it's too broad. Conceptually the internet is owned by nobody. The protocols and specifications are generated by a process of proposals and peer review, and the best solution to a given problem is usually fairly easy to choose on purely rational measures, or from lack of competitors. Most of this work can be seen in the steadily RFC archives.
  From a hardware perspective, saying the hardware is owned by everyone is probably more accurate. A lot of the major backbone infrastructure in each country is often owned by the government or at least subsidise by taxpayers money. The smaller networks are owned by their respective companies, and often pay people higher up the chain from them for the privilege to use their network. People that own links of significance often charge people at either end to send data across it.

Hope you find this interesting. I feel a bit bereft of challenge since I'm not studying this semester, and my challenges consist of earning enough money to pay the bills, but it's not very intellectually stimulating. Thanks for the quiz... :)

Oh, and it turns out you can't put cut's in comments.

[cosmolinguist]

I liked your answers; they made me smile. And I learned some stuff! Such things were never explained so clearly in my class (I understood most of them, at least vaguely, before I even started the class, but that can certainly not be said for most of the people in the class; I don't know how they are doing with this). Of course, this is easy stuff for someone like you. :-)

[parakleta.livejournal.com]

Of course, this is easy stuff for someone like you.

I'm of the opinion that this stuff should be easy for anyone... it just depends on how much time you want to put into it... I don't believe computers are as hard as people think they are. For a really good example of how simple they are, read the RFC's for SMTP (RFC 821) and POP (RFC 1939), in fact, read just about any of the RFC's.

I have an advantage in that I've already spent 5 years at uni doing computer science and computer engineering, and then spending much of my spare time reading computer manuals and howto's and stuff. My consumption of fiction works has slowed to a trickle since I started uni, because all my spare time has been spent in front of a computer. In the last 5 years I have read in the vicinity of 10 fiction books, about 2 dozen roleplaying books, and hundreds and hundreds of pages of scientific non-fiction and manuals etc. I'm just now starting to read more fiction, because I've missed it more that I realised.

Hey, check out dict.org (www.dict.org) and find yourself a friendly unixy client. An easy way to show off to your friends is to open up telnet and connect to dict.org on port 2628, and then type

define * something

. Type help for other nifty tricks. The neat thing about this is that it will actually lead to the RFC numbers for protocols, and give you quite good descriptions/explanations etc of technical stuff, as well as everything else.

[autumnsshadow.livejournal.com]

I would definitely question the "who owns the Internet" question. Even if you had discussed it in class, that's really non-specific.