waaaaaaant

Facebook Poll's Closing / What's Uppening

the should-i-should-i-not-get-Facebook poll is drawing to a close, with one day left to vote. as of this writing, Yes has a commanding 7-1 lead over No. nay-sayers should get on their horses and fight the good, but pointless fight. otherwise, y'all can just look forward to stalking me by the end of the week.

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and for those that are oddly interested in this sort of thing:

i started my internship this week at the elementary school i volunteered at last May, working with a grade 6 class, primarily to help them prepare for the upcoming EQAO testing.

today, i spent most of the day in the library coding an Excel spreadsheet to analyze the marks from a standardized reading test that was done earlier in the school year for the grade 7/8 class. it took a long time because a) i'm not a programmer; b) i've forgotten most of Excel; c) i'm way too ambitious about spreadsheets sometimes.

the analysis called for counting the number of students in each level per question by gender. i thought a handy COUNTIF function would suffice as i use it all the time for counting things in columns that fit a certain criteria. unfortunately, the AND function does not work in conjunction with COUNTIFs. after devising a crude workaround (sorting by gender and COUNTIFfing for those specific ranges) i happened upon a new function: SUMPRODUCT.

this function operates with arrays, which allows me to basically do a count with multiple criteria. here's the tutorial i found just after i printed out the poorly coded version. so i spent about half an hour editing everything with SUMPRODUCT formulas instead of COUNTIFs.

ex. =SUMPRODUCT((B2:B50="M")*(C2:C50=3))

to count the number of male students who scored a Level 3 on the first part of the first question.

my other accomplishments today: the teacher i am working with discovered that her sunglasses had fallen apart while sitting in the staff room during recess. one of the 'legs' fell off. after about 2 minutes of staring at the ground looking for the screw, we gave up and conceded defeat. i looked on the table and found the screw. while she went back to class to corral the students, i set about screwing the 'leg' back on with limited tools. i checked the knife drawer for something to turn the flathead screw with -- too unwieldly. i checked my wallet for a thin card -- nothing thin and strong enough. on a whim, i went to the photocopy room and rooted around the little container of miscellaneous items (staples, clips, scrap paper) and found a box-cutting razor -- success. i am king of random problem solving.

last year, i defeated the industrial stapler which had been jammed for months and neglected. prior to grade 8 graduation, i was called upon to add a student's grad photo to the framed copy in which he had been mistakenly exempted from. this required me to emulate the name font, scan a copy of the photo, crop and adjust it to the right size, learn how to disassemble a fairly complex frame and glue it down with elementary school supplies. it's still on the wall today.

tomorrow, i will try to solve the busted three-hole puncher.

i still haven't visited my babies yet, but i've seen half a dozen of them at various times in the halls. they still recognize me =D

TDSB Interview: 9 AM

tomorrow, i have my first teaching-employment-related interview with the Toronto District School Board.

what should i wear?

EDIT 17:12:
it is now well after the interview, which went as well as it could have. it was not nervewracking at all. then i went to a career fair at the civic centre. it was meh. then i went to visit the company i worked for two summers ago and after another interview, i now has a summer job. it was pretty much a 5 red car day.

yesterday, i woke up to find a message: Opera 9.5 Beta 2 was released!

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In Europe and North America, tally marks are most commonly written as groups of five lines. The first four lines are vertical, and every fifth line runs diagonally or horizontally across the previous four vertical lines, in either of the two possible directions (the popular direction may vary from region to region). The resulting mark is known as a five-bar gate, from its similarity to the same. [...]

Chinese, Korean and Japanese tally marks use the five strokes of 正 which is the character meaning "correct" "proper" and "honesty."

from Wikipedia

this is the proper time to close the gate. and maybe get a different perspective.

By the Numbers: Compatibility

ever wonder how those matchmaking sites find people to make matches?

i always thought it'd be something like this:

Matchmaker 1: okay, it's your turn to throw the darts.

Matchmaker 2: so we're putting the green ones together?

Matchmaker 1: and the blues. try to get them in the nostrils.

Matchmaker 2: don't we have to send these photos back?

alas, this is not the case (because matchmakers cannot throw darts). in actuality, they use the power of maths to hook you up with someone compatible.

they don't even know me; how can they possibly find someone that matches? you might ask.

when you sign up with a matchmaking service, you undergo rigorous psychological testing to determine your personality in finite, objective terms; it's a questionnaire. the results of your test are plotted into a vector generator. a vector is like a coordinate (x, y), but has an anchor at (0, 0), thus forming a line. the vector of your personality, lets call it [y1, y2, y3, ... yn], is then dropped into a databank of other desperate lonely folk's personality vectors and a computer runs them through a stiff algorithm: the dot product.

finding the dot product between two vectors is quite fun. you take the number in the first dimension from one vector and multiply it with the number in the first dimension of the other vector and add it to the product of the numbers in the second dimenion and the third and so on:

x dot y = x1y1 + x2y2 + ... xnyn.

this is equivalent to the product of the two vector's magnitudes (lengths) and the cosine of the angle between the two:

x dot y = |x||y|cos(theta).

the computer solves for the angle and uses it to determine the strength of compatibility. really small angles between two vectors mean that they are very similar, and therefore compatible. angles of around 180 degrees are also considered compatible since opposites attract. the computer then compiles a list of candidates for each person based on the data.