Filler Journal - 10/18/19 - 11/15/19

     On Thursday, November 14th, I ran into a multitude of issues. All of which was because of pent up anxiety and downright disappointment. It all began in my debate class. I had a tournament coming up soon and my case was barely finished. I know I could finish it late in the day but I felt the need to do it during class. I was compelled to do so since I wanted to do well but I ended up not because I had a math test one period away. For the rest of the class, I did a last-minute cram session but I guess that was bad luck. Right before the test, my teacher, Mrs. Linton, said that if we had 6 minutes left, we "should get on the calculator section ASAP." Judging from her statement, I wrongfully judged that I would need around 10 minutes since I thought she implied that the calc section would take 6. Instead, I really needed much more time. I ended up doing extremely poor and got disappointed. During my "alone" time of thinking about what could I have done to do better, my friends have tried calling me. Due to my ignorance and current state in mind, I was in no mood to talk and hung up the calls. It turns out that those calls were about my biweekly trip to Caltech for this class. I ended up missing the bus and spent my time at the office to explain my troubles.

     In other news, I recently went to CodeDay LA to help out with the event. CodeDay is a 24-hour hackathon where teams of up to 4 create a project during that time window. Because I was volunteering for the event, I spent most of my time helping teams with their projects. During there, Matthew and I got to host a small seminar to introduce people to machine learning and a separate one on how to make a website. We used the Iris dataset for the ML class which did plenty but I wish we could've made the seminar go more smooth. A video below is an explanation of what CodeDay LA is. The image below is a table showing the data given from the dataset.
Image result for iris dataset

     Previously mentioned, I had a debate tournament this week at Arroyo High School. My partner, Eric Jiang, and I did Public Forum and we believe that we did okay in our rounds. While the records have not yet shown up, I can rightfully assume that our record is 3-1 which, in my opinion, is not terrible. Our weak point was most definitely our affirmative case because it was a last-minute trick. Unfortunately out of the four rounds, we did, three of them we were on the affirmative-side but luckily we were able to somehow outdo all but one team (partly in due to our bad judges). A photo below is a picture of the high school we debated at:
Image result for arroyo high school el monte ca

     Finally, something related to this class, I did a technical journal about the Girvan-Newman Algorithm. It took me some time but I'm proud of my explanation and review. The algorithm, in short, is a hierarchical method used to detect communities in a graph depending on the iterative elimination of edges with the highest number of shortest paths that go through them. In pseudo-code:
Repeat until no edges are left:
  1. Calculate edge betweenness for every node in the graph
  2. Remove the edge with the highest edge betweenness
  3. Recalculate edge betweenness for all remaining nodes
  4. Connected nodes are considered communities
You can find more information on the algorithm in the following video:

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