Journal



On Tuesday, March 24th, we had a meeting with Professor Hassibi over Zoom. Prior to our talk, we had issues with our code regarding the fact that it didn't produce the results expected. He told us to find and graph the eigenvalues of the graph Laplacian, as that would indicate the number of clusters found and value you can refer other datapoints to. He noted that graphing the corresponding eigenvector would indicate whether a cluster had been isolated or not. On that note, it was up to us to tinker with values for a bit and try different algorithms like K-means. Below is a video of the meeting with Professor Hassibi:


This week has been very interesting, to say the least. As you may know, COVID-19 has just taken the U.S. for a turn and has put a pause on daily life, forcing businesses to adapt, overcome, or fail in some cases. For us high schoolers, classes have migrated to the Zoom platform. With it followed teachers with bad internet service, leading to indecipherable dialect and confusion across the board. Many standardized test dates have been postponed which has got me very stressed. The silver lining: some schools are no longer requiring/accepting subject tests! Below is Zoom's introductory video:


I am also taking an online course on how to use machine learning with medical data. The first module is very "legal" intensive. What I mean by that is that it informs you have the laws you have to abide by when working with human subjects. I finished that module within a day or so but the second module has proven itself more demanding of my time. It is on statistics and probability and I struggled a lot. Luckily, I am 4/5ths of the way through and I understand everything. Below is a picture of what a page of reading would look like:


I have also begun to listen to podcasts. My favorite one so far is "Stuff You Should Know" which has hour-long episodes on random topics. Such examples are: How Ice Climbing Works, How Ironman Triathlons Work, and Where Did Trick-Or-Treating Come From. My favorite one is Chopsticks > Forks because I could relate to it on so many levels. I definitely endorse commonizing chopsticks since it makes eating, cleaning, and storing easier. I could understand how chopsticks have a high learning curve but that's why you gotta start them young. Below is the Spotify page for "Stuff You Should Know":

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