October 27, 2019
Here is a sampling of topics people in past quarters have investigated in their second projects. The purpose of this list is to help you come up with Project Two ideas. It is okay to work on project topics that others have done: everyone is different, and the projects always come out different.
- Graphs
- songwriter collaboration
- MDS
- food consumption by country
- food exports by U.S. state
- visual perception of lipstick color
- tech companies
- Fortune 500 companies
- NBA (basketball) teams
- Wikipedia (distance between article)
- baseball players
- U.S. university
- U.S. presidential inauguration speeches
- Species in U.S. national parks
- Cities
- Countries
- Monte Carlo
- Aeroplane Chess
- Durak
- Snakes and Ladders
- BS (card game)
- Battleship strategy
- Baseball card game
- Starbucks queuing
- Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe
- Escaping a forest
- Traffic analysis
- Photosynthesis
- Markov
- novelists
- song lyrics
- folk songs
- baseball
- Uno (game) strategies
- breast cancer progression
- Florida Keys coral reefs
- Markov chain + Monte Carlo
- Seattle weather
October 24, 2019
Some comments regarding the Milgram/Travers paper homework.
- A student pointed out that non-humans (e.g., cats) can "have" Facebook accounts. So the Facebook network vertices do not necessarily correspond to people. Several students pointed out that an individual person can have multiple accounts, which complicates the question of connectivity a bit.
- The Facebook graph is not connected, though one paper states that 99.91% of all users are in the largest connected component. I imagine the acquaintance graph is not connected, either: there are small groups of isolated people in the world, such as the people on North Sentinal Island.
- Many people said that people would have more Facebook friends than first-name basis acquaintances. This is not obviously true, as it is false for many people (including me, and a number of people I know). My hunch is that people under-count their acquaintances, and so figure the number is less than the number of their Facebook friends, which Facebook counts for them.
- Be careful with your use of certain words, including:
- diverse
- quality
- dense
- biased
- efficient
- Some folks suggested that, in the Milgram experiment, it would have been harder to reach a celebrity than a stockbroker, and others said it would be easier. My guess is that it would be easier, since people often know when they have a short path to a celebrity. Note that this doesn't change the length of the shortest path, it only effects the length of the path in a Milgram-type experiment.
- The first problem asked you to compare the network in the Milgram paper with the network of Facebook friends. The problem did not ask about performing a Milgram-type experiment on Facebook, which is why I specifically said there is not need to do such an experiment since the data is readily available (to Facebook employees, at least).
October 13, 2019
Histogram of scores from the first writing assignment (graded out of 10, with 2 bonus points for following the directions in the homework guidelines).
September 26, 2019
The first writing assignment is due October 4. Find it by clicking on the "Writing Assignments" link at right.
September 26, 2019
Washington state law requires that UW develop a policy for accommodation of student absences or significant hardship due to reasons of faith or conscience, or for organized religious activities. The UW's policy, including more information about how to request an accommodation, is available at Religious Accommodations Policy (here). Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks of this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form (here).
September 24, 2019
I have created groups for Project One. Please go to canvas and find your group. You should start communicating with your group members right away. Here is a tutorial for doing that on Canvas.
September 23, 2019
Welcome to Math 381 A, Autumn quarter 2019.
For those students looking for an add code, I do not overload my courses. If there are opening in the first week, you can add yourself to the course. No adds will be allowed after one week (i.e., starting 10/2/19). There are no add codes.
The first writing assignment will be posted soon.
You will need to install lpsolve to solve LPs in this course. You can start here. The download site is here.