For you

Moving mountains, parting seas,
Deeds that lovers please.
Wooed love, admantine.
To be loved beyond dying.

That love, is for the strong,
Like life, lopsided; mostly wrong.
Fighting evils within the self,
This love I feel is a saving grace.

I won't kill dragons to win your affection,
Nor shout to the world my mind.
I'll hand to you, with shaking knees,
my being and a knife.

Attendance in St. Stephen's College

I've been hunting around for datasets I can relate to for some time now. This fine evening I arrived on the conclusion that I could simply use attendance data from the website of St Stephen's College.

The complete analysis notebook is available as a gist (here's the gist).

Collecting the data was a matter of inspecting how the website was obtaining it's data. A company has been handling our attendance since the beginning it seems. (GreenClouds site link). As far as I'm concerned they've made a mess of the data transfer as I can see. Perhaps it originated in the college itself, perhaps it's due to some mistakes on the company level. Whatever the cause the data format is a mess.

I open up my console and spin up a Python script to get the data from the college website. Takes about two minutes on my Internet connection to collect all the information.

We then proceed to put it in a nice tabular form with columns being Name, percent LA, percent TA, percent PA, admission_year, course.

Things are now ready for graphing.

Graphs

We go on to make Box plots. If you were to line up people in order of their attendance you would get a box plot. The person in the middle of the line is the line cutting the box in the middle. It shows that there are an equal number of people on either side of the line.

You cut each part of the line in half again and you get the bounds of the box.

This one is a gem. What is up with Chem! The attendance of their Lectures is absolutely ridiculous. While everyone more or less has the same attendance in a course Chem people are all over the attendance spectrum! Then again, their Tutorials box plot is neat too!

Yes. I see it too. Math people are consistently in class with a few people as outliers. Nobody else has this kind of spread. 

Perhaps a better way of seeing this would be violin plots where you get to see the density of the people instead of simple boxes. The thickness of the violin denotes how many people people are at that point.

For example we can see that a lot of the math  people are high attendance junkies and a substantial amount of CHE, PHY, PCH and, PCS are low attendance lovers.

There! The average PHI student absolutely does not give a hoot about attendance! The PCH and PCS programs do every class together as is apparent from their spreads. ENG and HST do compete with PHI but PHI does take the cake.

Let's move on to the simplest of all graphs. The Histogram. No explanation needed here.

Looking at the histograms we can see that almost everyone attends class with the exception of a few people who absolutely don't come to class. Perhaps people who left the course and the administration just did not remove them from roll calls? What about experience?

We do a regular point plot to see change in attendance over months. The vertical lines along the points denote a 95% confidence interval.

The third years have found that perfect balance of leisurely attendance during most of the semester and then picking it up during the last months. First years exhibit that trait of a "नया नया मौलवी" perfectly. Second years have figured out that attendance does not really matter, but are still to find out how badly those marks can affect their marks. With time comes wisdom,

That's it for now. I'd love to do some more if someone can come up with data at a lower granularity.

MatheMonsters

It’s Monday again. The weekly tests plague us...me. Not this time though; this time it’s the lovable creatures of Math. Everyone seems to think that they are monsters, but they are beautiful creatures. If you ask them they would tell you anything, but you have to understand their language to be able to ask them. Even our teacher thinks that this particular species of knowledge is a monster. Little does he know about the conversations I've had with them. My mother told me once that one should always try to understand. That the world is a knowable place and we must make an effort to understand it. These angels help me do that.
The invigilator hands out our papers. Sheets of wood beaten into submission so that we may give existence to what would otherwise only be in our minds. Human arrogance at display again. We would kill, only to make our thoughts known; for if you die without doing that, nobody would remember your memories. The first question asks me to define Pi.
I remember the class where our teacher told us that Pi is 22 parts divided into 7 pieces. Oh the confusion I had had that day! If that is all Pi is why does it have a name? What is so special about 22/7 that it deserves a symbol to name it? Where is the equality among those who belong to the species of mathematics? No! There must be something else about it, something which all the other mathemonsters have deemed worthy of their respect.
I asked mum about Pi. She does not usually now a lot about math but there is no other person who has taught me more about it than she has. She tells me that I was right; that Pi was a special bird. She does not remember what was special though. I take to the Internet. As long as I write well formed sentences and Google before I ask, I pass as a respectable adult here. My questions are taken seriously.
“Question 1. Define Pi. (2 marks)”
A statement so simple for those who do not understand. Oh what joy to be able to answer it! To simply write 22 / 7 or perhaps the circumference / diameter for those who pride themselves in going a step further than the rest. It would be lies of course. Pi herself is laughing at everyone present. They all take her for 22 / 7 and we both laugh at the private joke.
Pi is everything and nothing at the same time. I can only see her face which starts with 3.14.... and as I look lower I lose my ability to see her. I can look at parts of her but then the others disappear. I am thankful for even this. The Internet tells me that people like me, those who could see and communicate with the mathemonsters could not even see that earlier. They had to always start at the face and go down from there. Any second that you take your eyes off and she would disappear. It was some men who later discovered a way to look at any part of her without looking at her face to start with. This sight came at a cost obviously; we could not look at her as a whole.
Pi is an infinite being. She never ends. Starting with the face, as you get further and further away you would see more and more of her and yet never come across a part which seems familiar for she is a never ending and never repeating number. She is of the irrational clan. She mentioned e once but I haven’t met him yet.
If I was to manage to look at all of Pi at once. If I was to mark the even parts of her as 1 and the odd parts as 0, I might have something like a computer’s code. Pi however, because of her nature would have given me all the knowledge in the world. If you can look at Pi; you would have all the knowledge in the world.
The name of my great great grandfather. How did Bose die? Are we alone? When will I die? Who would be my friend? All of these Pi would tell you, you only have to look at her once. But these feeble eyes of mine don’t allow me to do that. This beautiful woman who promises me an understanding of everything, lets me have nothing as long as I cannot look at her. As long as I don’t understand all of her.
She is everything and nothing at the same time. She is all that I want to know, and yet I cannot. My future, my past, my love, my hate; all is known to Pi and she tells me nothing.
“Everything and nothing”

That’s how I managed to fail most of my tests. People kept telling my mum that she needed to put me into tuition, but both her and Pa knew that tuition would do me more harm than good. They would blind me and have me believe that the mathemonsters are nothing more than monsters. They would reduce pi to 22 /7 and e to a benign number. They would label the other numbers as complex and lend us faith in their non existence. They would never let me know about the family relations of the clan of irrationals and the complex. They would hide from me the love expressed within e^iπ = -1