NUS Semester 1 AY 11/12 results

So... Gonna be blogging about my results which I justreceived this morning. Don't read on if you're going to be all judgmental andngeh ngeh why this guy so lame put his results up online. 

If you're looking for a module review, go here.

So once again this year,  Iwas plagued by a restless night and weird dreams before the release of myresults via SMS in the morning. I woke up at 6 and couldn’t really go back tosleep (results typically released some time between 7-9)  and had weird dreams like one in which I checkedmy results and I got an A++(doesn’t exist) for one module and a C- - for anotherso didn’t know whether to feel happy or sad.

ANYWAY. On to the results.

GEK1519 - Science of Music

Predicted Grade - B+
ActualGrade – A-
Thoughts:

Whew, I survived the bell curve. It was no secretthat this module is highly competitive because it’s such an easy module that it’squite hard not to get a good score for the tests if you studied just a littlebit.

While both tests I only scored around themedian/mean, I think my essay / MIDI probably pulled me up (worked on both fromthe start of sem… so had a lot of time for improvement and stuff)

Overall satisfied with this grade of course, becauseI expected to S/U it (if necessary) due to the high competitiveness. Yay still have3 S/Us!

SE1101E: South East Asia - A Changing Region

Predicted Grade - B+
ActualGrade – A-
Thoughts:

Kinda expected grade, considering howmy CA was already not bad (A/A- average) so it would take a major screwup in myfinals to drop it anywhere below B+.

(I almost did.. if you missed my Tweetpreviously, my finals question 1 was: ‘imagine you’re giving a lecture toaliens… ‘ and I ended my essay with a reckless stupid ending: “… and as seen,the region is a dynamic and changing one which you will not be used to, soplease don’t invade us!”
Guess the marker liked it. Lol.

PL3236 - Abnormal Psychology

Predicted Grade – B-
ActualGrade – B+
Thoughts:

My mid terms did pretty badly, so I was not sure howI was going to fare for this. The gf damn leet, she got A for this! Hermidterms was good also la. Glad I got a B+ at least instead of a B or worse.

PL3233 - Cognitive Psychology

Predicted Grade – A-
ActualGrade – A-
Thoughts:

To be honest I was expecting an A for this, becausemy mid term tests were both pretty darn high! Like I would think A+ range. ThusI was slightly disappointed when I didn’t get an A for this, meaning my finalsprobably got about B or B+ level. Oh well.

PL3240 - Group Dynamics
Predicted Grade – B+
ActualGrade – B+
Thoughts:

Mid terms did badly but project did relatively well,so I was expecting an average grade for this. Kinda hoped I would get A- forthis at least, but I guess B+ is good enough.

Overall…

No real shocker in terms of grades or anything like last sem's SSB2216... everything was more or less close to my prediction (besides Ab Psych, which was just me being pessimistic so I wouldn't be too disappointed)

Hmm I initially believed my grades were better than last sem and yet my CAPstill dropped. However after checking last semester’s grades, I realized I didexactly the same! Same CAP as last sem, but overall CAP dropped because myfirst sem’s CAP was higher than both sems.

Hope to do better next sem! I want to pull my CAPup!

The myopic gamer

Life can be reduced to a video game. Everything and anything we do can be described as some aspect of a game. Many parallels can be drawn between things you do in a game as well as things you do in life.

I will list each example with the real life activity first, followed by the gaming example.

Real Life: Earning money
We all need money. To eat, to travel, to buy frivolous things for ourselves. Unless you were born with a silver spoon or you grow a money tree, most of us would have to actually work to earn money. We slave for hours to end and when we get home everyday, deadbeat and exhausted, we ask ourselves, 'Why am I doing this? Oh right, I need the money."

In a Game: Farming Gold
We have all done it. From breeding Air Dragons to sell in Dragonvale and spamming collect on the Plant Habitats, memorizing mining routes like these to level our Mining profession in World of Warcraft to trade more lucrative ores,

Typical Mining Route in World of Warcraft

to killing more mobs in Skyrim to collect more material for sale. We often do things that are boring and monotonous and grind-like to get more gold. When you are extremely bored and tired and ask yourself "Why am I doing this? Oh right, I need more gold."

Real Life: Multi-tasking
If you have a dog, a girlfriend, a clique, and a family, that is already 4 different groups that you have to divide your attention between them. You fail to do so in any aspect and that could mean soured ties, and the effects could snowball and just come back and bite you in the butt later on. You could even lose your girlfriend.

In a Game: Multi-tasking (Macro)
In Starcraft 2, players have to multitask constantly to keep their economy going. If you are unable to multitask to keep up your larva injects, Chronoboosts and MULEs, it could snowball and come back and bite you in the butt later on when you cannot produce enough units to defend a push. You could even lose the game.

Don't lose your MULES!

Real Life: Building friendships
Psychologists list many types of relationships, and a famous related principle is the social exchange theory, in which individuals focus on the costs/benefits of a relationship to determine whether it's a worthwhile relationship.
Whether we like it or not, relationships involve investment, effort and time to maintain, and you have to put in some amount of these, otherwise you will never have good, healthy, friendly relations.

In A Game: Farming Reputation
Anyone who has played some kind of RPG that requires reputation with a faction will know what this point is about before even reading on.
In many games, you have certain ties with groups of people (factions) in the game. You will need to do quests for them, kill monsters for them, etc, to improve your honor/reputation with them. There are various thresholds such as Neutral -> Friendly -> Honored -> Exalted, etcetc, to indicate your level of relationship with the particular factoin.
Whether you like it or not, forming these reputations involve investment, effort and time to do so, and without these, you will never have a good, solid reputation with any faction.

Someone with leet In-Game reputation but probably terrifail Real Life relations.

Real Life: Work in a Team
School project groups, work project groups, teammates in a sport... I could go on and on listing the different types of teams we work in. You can't escape it, you have to learn how to work with other people and coordinate efforts to contribute to a joint result. You may have problems such as people not turning up, people being late, conflicts within your group, etc. But if you are the leader, you're going to have to mediate and iron these out, in order to have any level of success in your group's tasks.

In A Game: Work in a Team
Whether you are in a 25-man raid in World of Warcraft or playing a 5v5 DoTA game with your buddies, teamwork and coordination is usually crucial in winning/killing a boss. You can't escape it- you can be the best Rogue, the best Lina Maiden, the best Holy Paladin in your group, but if the rest of your team f**ks up, you're going to fail.
You may have problems with people being late or not turning up for raid, and maybe even conflicts over whose fault it was that you failed the last wipe. But if you are the leader, you're going to have to get everyone focused on the task at hand and stop pointing fingers, in order to have any level of success in your group's tasks.

Mid-fight in a game of Dota 2

These are just 4 of the more common examples, there are probably others more trivial cases which you can easily draw a gaming parallel as well. I think this will suffice to prove my theory though.

Life is a video game.

Teaching The GF How To Cycle

Today me and szehong went to East Coast Park to... cycle! Well not quite, because she can't cycle! So today was basically me teaching her how to cycle!

I have not taught anyone how to cycle before, so this would be good warmup/experience for me to teach my kids in the future hehe. I will just recap the experience here, so if you want to teach your friends next time you can.. learn from my mistakes!

When we first started off, with virtually no prior experience, I didn't quite know how to teach her how to cycle. I tried holding her handlebars to steady her but she said I was making her more off-balance so that didn't work.
I then tried to hold the back of her seat but somehow I wasn't doing it right and was making her off-balance or something!

Thus, we started off with me asking her to coast -  basically push herself forward and try to lift her feet off the ground. (We were at east COAST park after all.. hur hur. ok ignore this sorry)

After a while of this it seemed pretty pointless as she wasn't really making progress, so I told her to try pedalling. (The idea of coasting came from a website I was researching the night before, which said the best newbie technique was to coast down a gentle slope to develop balance)

I went back to trying to hold her seat or handlebar or even her body to steady her, but I was somehow off-balancing her according to her. Thus I just resorted to yapping words of encouragement, trying to motivate her to keep going.

This went on for quite a while, with me continually telling her she's doing a good job and that it was awesomeee. I mean, you have to motivate the student regardless because chances are he/she is going to be even more frustrated than you!

We tried a new strategy too, basically for her to complete a complete 'pedal-cycle' - basically start with a pedal higher than the other, step on that to pedal forward, then step on the other pedal.
She kept losing her balance after just the first pedal though, so this went on for quite a while, interspersed with a few occurrences of her succeeding in this pedal cycle once, even 3 times.

After some time of little progress, I decided to go back to giving her support by holding on to her seat and her shoulder. I began to get the hang of how to help and feel her balance and providing the right balance-support for her.

With this technique, she managed to pedal for a few metres before losing her balance or swerving wildly to the side and I have to basically catch her or cushion her. Times like this I'm glad I don't have a hippo of a gf =X I know i know, so mean. But realistically, if she was like, my weight, I would probably not have been able to support her.

I felt that she was making progress (despite her saying that she hopes to finish learning by 3 days, I told her she was going to learn by TODAY!) so I just held the back of her seat as in the picture above.

This was because she was having problems with starting -

The first pedal is always the wobbliest as you have to get your balance, but once you establish it you can continue pedalling!

Thus I was stabilizing her by holding the back seat when she made the first few pedals, and when I felt that she had stabilized I released and let her go as far as she could. (I didn't tell her whether I was holding anot after awhile, I just continued running next to her as if I was :) )

Of course, at first she couldn't go far after that and wobbled and had to stop/fall so I had to run alongside her to catch her when she fell.

I repeated my advice to her to:
1) Just start pedalling (as mentioned, the wobbly start is scary to a beginner, and if he/she doesn't muster up the confidence to make a few pedals to get into a moderate pace, it's going to be very hard to pedal at a super slow pace)
2) To maintain a constant speed (she kept speeding up at first... which is bad as I have to run super fast to keep up and if she lost her balance it would be harder to stop) and to just keep pedalling!

And I kept holding the backseat to stabilize her start and would release it when I felt some semblance of balance. After repeated tries of unaided 5-10 metres, she actually managed to cycle for a good unaided 20 metres before feeling the jitters and losing her balance!

After this I got her to practise starting on her own without me holding the backseat - basically urging her to not be afraid of the initial wobble in the first few pedal cycles and just use her newfound balance to readjust and stay straight.
After some time, she managed to start on her own at about a 50% success rate :) (which went up as time passed)

One thing I realized was that her 'stop' was horrible - she was basically losing her balance and she would swerve wildly and I had to catch her. This meant I had to constantly run alongside which was damn tiring for me! And also very dangerous if she swerved off the path and fell on rocks.
(I think beginners don't know how to slow down, so naturally the bike stops when you swerve sideways so that's what you do? lol)

Thus the next thing I began training her was to stop properly - I got her to cycle for about 10 metres (unaided) and then begin coasting (not pedalling but keeping feet on the pedals) to slow down, and finally put both feet on the floor for friction to grind to a stop.
The first few attempts were bad with her being very jerky/sudden with the stop or swerving again, then after awhile I gave her the ultimate test - I stood in front of her 20 metres ahead and told her to slow to a halt right before me (otherwise she would hit me)

She did it :D (stop properly, not hit me)

Once she had the basics of starting, stopping, pedaling and balance there, I felt safe enough to let her cycle on her own without running along next to her to catch her if she fell.
By then I was pretty much exhausted at having spent the past 2 hours (she learn how to ride in about 1+ hours, but I still followed her closely for awhile after that to be sure) running next to her and supporting her whole bike/weight and motivating her and stuff, so I collapsed onto a seat and let her cycle on her own for awhile till the rental timing ran out.

Below are just some videos are took, they're really short, like 20 seconds each, so just have a look!

Ah, it was an exhausting but very satisfying experience. Nothing beats the feeling of her suddenly pedalling on her own for 5-10 metres even after I had released the backseat (she probably didn't know) and realizing she CAN cycle. Aiya basically every bit of progress was very exciting, my heart literally jumped the first time she went for like 10 metres on her own!

So proud of her :) My amazing student! Learnt in only 1hour+ ! (ya ya if you learnt under that shut up i dont care she's still awesome)

And thank God for no accidents! I was quite concerned that she may fall and get a bad graze or something because the bicycle track was asphalt. The only injuries she sustained were some minor scratches from her bad 'stops' earlier on and thus her toes hitting the floor abit, the pedal hitting her legs abit, her hands gripping the handlebars too tightly, etc.

Great day today :D Love that girl!