Selected for PiP Challenge

So I've been selected to take part in the 'Portfolio in Peril' Morgan Stanley challenge. This is a competition of various university teams competing against each other within an investment management role. The idea is that as a team of 8 we will have to manage a multi asset portfolio over a simulated period of 4 years. The various asset prices and news and macroeconomics will be generated over 8 decision periods.

Its next week and all expenses paid, down at Morgan Stanley's London offices. Even thought an element of luck will certainly be involved... It's going to be fun :-)!

MSc Courseworks

I have now finished teaching the MSc module at Loughborough, so I thought it would be fitting to write about my impressions on the blog. As always teaching can be intimidating at first but in my case I felt very much at ease having taught the BSc class last semester. Rightly so, lets compare the BSc with my MSc experience:

MSc. vs. BSc.

• BSc. class was huge (150 students) compared to 16 students in my MSc class. The great thing is that I could build a more personal relationship with the individual students. You can actually remember their names and very soon you get a good idea how good every individual is.


• Since the group was much smaller I found that; the dynamics in the class were less formal (Students asked more questions and I encouraged them to). It was a small and enjoyable class to teach.


• In a way I hate to say this but the MSc students were certainly brighter and hence the material could be covered at the lightning speed of 2 weeks. When you have bright students it's a pleasure to teach. On the other hand I should say many of my BSc students were also pretty decent and I did have lecture time to cover XSS and all kinds of funky JavaScript, including some JQuery.


• Big negative with the MSc class. There's just too little time to cover everything to my unilateral ideal of great learning in 2 weeks that is alloted for a fat-module. Then again I can't fight the system and the class was supposed to teach strong foundations but it wasn't meant to make superstar programmers out of my students in 2 weeks, but of-course I would have loved that challenge!

The assessment for the MSc course consisted of a 40 minute in-class test on paper and an programming coursework (over a week). The coursework was to build a sudoku JavaScript board game skeleton that allows a player to load puzzles (81 long integers) and play on the 9x9 board with the basic 3 sudoku rules enforced. In addition the possible numbers for board elements had to be suggested.

A number of solutions were done very well to the specification and showed good understanding of my students. Here is an example coursework by Tomas Kavaliauskas.

Tomcat on XAMPP server

XAMPP is a wonderful light weight open source web-server package. I recently bought one of those little netbooks and wanted to set up a local server to play around with jsp and php.



It turns out XAMPP is just perfect for this, as it the basic installation comes with php apache, mysql and there is a separate plugin for tomcat server. The installation is easy, just two things to consider and you should be off to server side coding adventures.

- php root folder on localhost: ...\xampp\htdocs
(the place you will put your php pages to, and to access them from a web browser type http://loopback/ or localhost)

- the equivalent tomcat folder will be in (xampp\tomcat\webapps\ROOT) this assuming you followed standard installation steps. To access this location in a web browser you might have to type something like, http://localhost:8080/ (the tomcat server is on port 8080, since 80 is in use by apache)

I'm teaching MSc students!

Next to my current research and various part time work (I am consulting two companies at the moment in web system design and data mining applications), I am about to start teaching the Client Side programming course COP451 for the MSc course.

This will be a fat module course, and a much more intensive version of the COA122 JavaScript/DHTML undergraduate course that I taught last semester. Since there are only 2 weeks, this course will be very intensive in terms of a lot of new material being covered over a short term span.

I favour an alternative teaching style to engage my audience by justifying the need of particular methods and technology! This is facilitated by communicating abstract and clear concepts in a down to earth, easy to understand manner!

Procedural Programming Concepts
- Basic Operands and Operators
- Loops / Repetion
- Branching
- Methods (Divide and Conquer)
- Fundamental Data Structures (arrays, dictionaries...)

Client / Web UI Programming
- Basic Webdesign (HTML/CSS/JS-includes)
- JavaScript in a web architecture context (conceptual keypoints)
- DHTML: addressing page elements via DOM with JS
- Building DHTML client-side applications and board games

The goal of the course is to educate the students on fundamentals for programming and bring the world of the web alive through applications of JavaScript at the same time. I also focus on issues regarding proper coding and testing practices, code team-work, time complexity and a number of other things.

Last semester has shown on a group of ~150 students that teaching fundamental programming with JavaScript is a very effective method for three reasons.

- Simple language (basic subset of JS)!
- Ready interpreter in the form of a standard Browser (IE, Mozilla, Chrome, Safari...)!
- Visual results (DHTML pages) and can be used by students straight away for all kinds of applications!

Stockmarket on the Rise

Shown is the FTSE-100 index over the past 2 years, as I am sure you can gather from the chart without much of Technical Analysis experience, there is now an uptrend / recovery ongoing. Since about July 2009 the capitalisation of UKs top companies increased by about 30%... pretty strong growth if you'd ask me! (actually this isn't growth as such, but the immediate prospect of financial failure probability rapidly having disappeared...)

See the 5 year chart here, to gain a fuller picture of where we are in terms of historical price behaviour.

Conclusion: Speaking from a Technical Analysis perspective, we can expect a rebound and further short term (1-3 month) growth in the market, i.e. 5300 to about 5600 points, thats about 6% growth in the immediate future with a potential to cash in on a good 10% growth in a more mid-term time frame!

Fundamentals aren't so interesting, but to be honest, compared to where we were a year ago (politically, economically,...), things are looking rather good! i.e. 1% economic growth, housing/morgage figures, (+)ve anticipation of general elections, ... on the other hand, the tax cuts are wearing off (VAT back to its old level), threatening taxes & regulation for investment/corporate banks...

...any comments, please feel free, I apologise for the moderation, but with all the spamming going on I am sure you understand. Thanks.

O(f(n)) notation EXPLAINED... doh

UC Berkley Lecture by Computer Scientist and Physicist Dr. Jonathan Shewchuk, where he really explains a number of misunderstandings with this commonly used notation! It is also a good introduction for the inexperienced ones!

Here it is, enjoy:

Banking Bonuses

It is a sure way to climb the millionaires ladder :-) A path to riches is through the financial sector, and this has been so for many years. Recent criticism of Bonuses paid out to employees of Investment Banks / Funds have just achieved more advertising for these institutions for talented people.

At JPMorgan 1'626 staff received $1 million or more and 27 individuals walked away with a hefty 8 million bonus, at Goldman Sachs this was 21 employees. [source: Andrew Cuomo's recent report on Bank Bonus Culture]

Working at one of these organisations shifts the odds of becoming a millionaire in a lifetime considerably in your favour.

C# vs. C

So how efficient is C# really?? In relation to a language like C. Well the answer is, that there is no conclusive answer, yet a set of features of C# where performance matters is investigated in this nice MSDN article.

The article was written back in 2004, and much has improved in the C# world, and not just in terms of VM performance but the language capabilities aswell.

Large Search-Querry datasets

On a blog I recently visited, it was pointed out in context of a web search analysis study that: "This study also highlights the current situation in web-scale research: that only companies like Microsoft, Google or Yahoo! have access to the sheer volume of data needed to do such an analaysis." (sorry I do not remember the source of this, if it is ur blog please let me know, so I can reference you) This has been brought up numerous times in the past and I couldnt agree more. What is really very important is for society (/ internet users) to realise that they are the creators of the content and they should demand access to the agregatted datasets [Tapscott&Williams in Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything]. Or in other words (since most people wouldnt know what to do with the datasets) some kind of compensation. This applies less to search engines, since they provide a free service, and applies more to other collaborative web 2.0 apps. However, search engines make money on advertising, so thats the reason why they are free to use, not because users are being compensated for the datasets that these search companies decide to store and aggregate.

My criticism is that search engines shouldn't keep the raw data hidden behind proprietary domains but open up to the world research community.

Submit your video into space

A pretty cool and interesting PR project launched by NASA, where you can submit a video clip on the topic of why you think space research is important!

check it out under:
http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/myexploration/index2.html