Revisiting my earlier slogs, week 11

I don't think my feelings have changed regarding recursions, that is to say, it is interesting but infuriating sometimes.

With recursions, practice really makes perfect, and I feel that I am getting a lot better at understanding the flow of it.  I think that is the case with many other students as well, as I take a look at other students's slogs.  Trees have been quite interesting, and i said earlier, it reminds me of the Tree of Knowledge.  I wonder if Google uses this type of model to organize their search engine, since it seems to know everything!

I feel that the course slogs have not helped me at all.  I know that the intended purpose of the course slog is to allow us to reflect on what we have learned, and perhaps make connections with real life, but in my opinion, it is hard to reflect upon it when neither Diane nor Danny give any indication of what these things relate to in real life or how it affects our lives, etc, and I am not really a computer savvy person so I did not bring with me any real own knowledge of the science.  The other thing that the slogs are for is to get us to write and practice writing, but the problem I have with this is that I do not feel comfortable to express all of my ideas on a public place, and my mode of  expression feels somewhat artificial.  Given the circumstances, I do not feel like I am enjoying writing more at all.  I had stated in my first slog on why geeks need to know how to write, but the type of writing I was talking about is exceptionally advanced, i.e. research papers, but those things require an entire separate course pretty much to learn.  I would argue that geeks would need their own english class!
I have read some other slogs, and some people comment that writing helps to get our ideas on a function out to help us plan what we are doing, and I totally agree with that, but I think that, personally, I can already do that, so the slogs do not help me in this respect even if it helps others.

Now, i personally understand the the concept behind writing down out thoughts,  I do it personally all the time in my private journal.  It certainly helps to reflect upon our ideas, as this helps contribute to our overall understanding of a problem.  By keeping record of it, one can go over it even if one forgets the original idea, and the combine that idea with whatever is in our head at the present time and see what manifests inside our think tank, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, I don't have own knowledge of compsci and the lecturers do not go over the history of compsci or anything to give us a deeper understanding of how it affects our world, so to stimulate our own perception of compsci.  I could certainly guess how it affects us, like my example on Google, but guessing is just that, a guess.


This week, we learned about Big O and time efficiency.  Luckily for me, I have learned that in 165 and so understanding it was easy.  I have not gotten a chance to practice the worksheets as everything has been so hectic, but I really enjoyed doing Big O in 165 as it was very fun to do proofs.  Time efficiency was difficult for me, as it requires understanding the function and coming up with a function for  generic value such that the function calculates the running steps required for the function to execute.