The world according to Wikipedia

This is not-a-graph that is the direct result of this xkcd comic*, which has the following gem in the mouseover:

Wikipedia trivia - if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parenthesis or italics and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy."

It is true probably because the first paragraph of every article attempts to put the topic in a wider context, which means the first link will probably lead to a topic broader than the previous one, and all roads lead back to how we organise information and knowledge, and how we think -- philosophy!!

But what is just as interesting is how all those paths converge. So I did some clicking around, and came up with this diagram. It traces fields of study (=majors, ="concentrations" because Brown needs to be special) offered at the undergraduate level at Brown University (see a list here) through the Wikipedia maze and shows how they all converge onto philosophy. This is an incomplete selection of concentrations because not all would fit, and I excluded 'sub-field' concentrations e.g. biochem, biophysics, geo-bio...with the exception of marine biology, which is my concentration and therefore I am obviously biased toward wanting it in there.

Interestingly enough, there are only 3 links into philosophy for 40+ fields of study mapped, and the third link only includes one field, education. Everything else eventually goes back to math or to academia, academic communities and interactions. Some paths are also surprisingly weird...check out engineering and business studies. Business studies is linked through 'planet' but astronomy isn't.


*it is also the result of Jenni posting this on Facebook so that I was thoroughly distracted for the rest of the night and did no studying for my GRE. so this entire post is her fault.

Graphing finals

I have been busy studying for the past two weeks or so, but finals are over, grades are in and I am all moved out of my dorm and essentially waiting for the summer to really begin. I am supposed to be up in Nahant, MA running transects for algal biomass but I don't have an approved dive buddy to work with yet so I am stuck here in Providence for now.

So I decided to make some graphs and look at the thing that sapped the last couple of weeks of my life...finals! Armed with Brown's final exam schedule and course enrollment numbers from Banner, my plan was to look at how the number of exams taken (=number of people taking exams) changes over time, by department. Unfortunately, that was far too hard to make any sense of - data overload and lines everywhere. So I changed my analysis a little.

First of all: Here is a simple graph of the total number of exams taken by department. As you can see, the econ department gives out the most exams by far, with the biology department coming in a distant second.


This kind of follows my original idea of tracking number of exams over time in a more manageable way. Brown follows an exam schedule that has two final exam sessions a day (9am and 2pm) and so exam session 1 on the graph corresponds to 9am on May 11 and session 18 to the very last session, 2pm on May 20. The black line is the trend for all departments combined, which is pretty close to a straight line. I also plotted the data for selected departments/areas in comparison. It looks like it is a good thing to be taking math and humanities classes because an average you get done early, whereas it's not so great to be doing econ or political science, and it sucks to be taking physics (I know; I took physics and its very-last-day final).
I admit that lumping all the humanities together is completely arbitrary and reflects my science bias...oh well, I don't think humanities people take that many exams anyway. And the final exam schedule does not give any information about final papers, etc.

Student activity monitor!

The blog has been quiet for a while, but I've been putting that time to good use by collecting data. Some time ago I realised that this little panel on the MyCourses* page had been staring at me all along. It tells you how many people from each of your classes are logged on to the system (and you can see who they are). So I basically have a way to track student activity over time. Over the past 2+ weeks I have been recording the time and the number of online students by course every time I logged on, with at least 20-minute intervals between consecutively recorded data points.


The UCS, UFB and CCB Elections category is a dummy course that contains candidate statements, endorsements, etc. for the elections and presumably, all undergraduates are 'enrolled' in this dummy course on the system. This gives me a large enough sample to look at general patterns of student activity over a general 24 hour period on a weekday. It is actually quite interesting! It looks like peak hours of academic activity are in the mid-afternoon 2-3ish and at night. In the morning there is a steep increase from 9 to noon and there is a noticeable drop around dinnertime.

Of course, this is as much of a graph of my own activity as of general student activity (since I can only get the numbers when I log on to the system myself). I am almost never up past midnight and I generally get up between 7 and 7.30am so there is a big data hole between midnight and 7. I would love to fill in some of it, particularly the 12mn to 2? 3? 4? am part because I want to know what time the number starts falling and people go to bed. But my sleep > data on other people's sleep so I may never know. (If you are a late night-early morning worker and want to help me collect data on this you are most welcome to!)

Breaking it down by class, these are trends for physics 40 (which I take) and bio 42 - ecology (which I TA). These are standardised by the total class size (physics has slightly more than 3 times as many enrolled students as ecology). They both show similar trends of steep increase in the morning, but are much more variable for the rest of the day (though if you take the average it would be pretty much a straight line from noon to midnight). My favourite part about these graphs are the outliers :)

I think this is something worth looking at again next semester, over a longer period of time. It might also be fun to compare weekends vs. weekdays and...so many things.


*people from Singapore: MyCourses is pretty much exactly like the NUS IVLE, but with a clunkier interface.

"Spring Break"

My next real break will probably occur in 2012. At least spring will get here sooner...

Off meal plan

This is a graph idea that came out of the inevitably frequent conversations with people on my hall and other 'off meal plan' upperclassmen about how ridiculously expensive the college meal plan is. I think it comes out to something like $9 a meal, but a number like that is not that easy to compare to the less well-defined manage-your-own-food-budget. I generally think of meal plan as 'a lot' more expensive than off meal plan but have no clear conception of what 'a lot' is. I decided it would be easier to visualise if I graphed it.

I was pretty surprised at how much 'a lot' really was. My initial idea was to stack things up on my 'off meal plan' bar until it equaled the meal plan bar but I pretty much ran out of 'large expense' things to stack, with over $200 to go.

The graph isn't meant to convey an expenditure switch because none of the other expenses actually 'came out' of meal plan money - Benthics $$ came out of a Brown travel grant and TA stipend, NEAS from the stipend and a research assistant job, dive gear came out of a summer research fellowship, etc. - it's just a visual comparison of magnitude.

Other (qualitative) benefits of not paying the college to make food for you:
1. flexibility
2. feeling like a real person
3. not being utterly lost and helpless when the dining halls close (spring break week, ha.)

Okay I am off to make lunch and work my butt off so I can spend the second half of next spring break freezing in Nahant water and looking for algae.

A hypothesis

We talked about density dependence in a tree, masting in another tree and the link between environmental and population synchrony in soil mites. Today was a slow day...

Becoming educated

So taking biochemistry makes me think of my life in RJC, and (somewhat) recently people have been posting links to a couple of blog posts on "growing up in the 90's in Singapore" which unsurprisingly included many references to primary school. Which got me thinking, counting and graphing. This one graph pretty much summarises the last 15 years of my life. Really. I am still a little awed by that fact.

Here are a couple of graphs on the diversity (or 'well-roundedness' which is a term I never really understood because it just made me think of kids in the TAF club) of my education over time. The top graph is a simple count of the number of subject areas (language, math, sciences, social sciences, humanities) each year while the bottom is weighted by the evenness of class composition - basically like a Shannon-Wiener diversity index...BUT FOR CLASSES.


So it looks like I was most diverse around Sec 3 and 4...and least diverse during my 3 seas year. This is what graduate programs do, kids. Expect a downward trend when I start grad school in a couple of years.

Biochemistry flashback

Every time I sit in my biochemistry lecture this semester I have flashbacks of learning some of the same stuff in the lecture theatre and the "Raffles Rooms" at RJC...something like 4 years ago (!!!). So while going over the lecture slides for the first exam I started keeping a count of 'old material' I learnt in JC1 and JC2 (= US grade 11-12) and 'new material', measured in numbers of content-bearing slides. Then, of course, I graphed it.
So...yeah. At least for the first third of the class, there is not that much new stuff. Plenty of re-learning things I forgot, and plenty of re-discovering that molecular-level things are awesome. So, yay for Singapore and the MOE's grand plan to push students into molecular biology and bio-tech-y things? I think that in the 3+ years since I took my A-levels, I've grown to appreciate the value of the strong background in molecular bio and genetics I got out of MOE's syllabus...at the same time, their attempt to push me in that direction obviously didn't work, and I'm glad it didn't :)


(This post is rightfully dedicated to Dr. Adrian Loo, who pretty much taught me everything in the blue part of the pie, answered all my questions on evolutionary biology and ecology, and enjoys getting students stuck in the mud...)

Histograms!!!

Okay, so it must be that none of my previous instructors have been cool enough to exploit the FULL RANGE OF DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICAL TOOLS on MyCourses because I have never seen this little function before. It is seriously awesome.

Behold the BIOL 28 grade histogram!!!

You can toggle the width of the bins (I think the allowed range is from 3 -65 bins). Below is the largest number of bins for which the interval labels are still readable (after this they kind of smoosh together and you just get vertical lines). I won't say how long I spent toggling them back and forth...
So...apart from being awesome by scanning and grading every single exam (of 255) the same day they were taken, the biochemistry instructors win because they have histograms I can play with.