Thursday.

I had the final lab100 quiz of the year this morning.  It was the hardest one yet but most of it was still doable.  It helps that my friends all have their quizzes before I have mine so they can tell me their answers.  At least then I can have a decent guess if I get completely stuck on a question.  I usually just go for it on my own though because my friends aren't exactly whiz kids when it comes to 'R' code. 

My two Tuesday morning lectures were fairly uneventful beyond being told twice that the end of module test for Series will be at 10pm.  Still, I think I'll turn up early for the 10am lecture just in case.  The UAAA seminar time was spent watching and listening to presentations by the three groups that didn't have chance to go last week.  The first one was full of information and was well presented, but it suffered from the same problem as every other group (apart from mine) in that the people giving the presentation were reading it straight from the sheet in front of them.  Hopefully there will be big marks for groups that clearly know the subject well enough not to need a preplanned speech to read directly from.  If so then ours is looking even better.  On the other hand the first group of today did speak clearly and the whole thing fit well into the time allowed despite being 40ish minutes in the practice two weeks ago. 

The next group up was quite terrible in my opinion.  They spoke very briefly about exoplanets before showing us a short video that they had made.  The idea was that a guy wants to learn about exoplanets by visiting one.  Obviously limited to the university and its surroundings, it ended up being 10 minutes of a random guy who isn't even in their group (or on the UAAA course as far as I'm aware) sitting in a bathroom talking to a MacBook that had the iTunes visualiser on full screen, then a tiny cardboard box spinning around as if it was trying to be a TARDIS, and finally the random guy being amazed at trees, ducks and pigeons in front of the Fylde Statistics building.  The one thing that did make me smile was the part when they asked what aliens might look like and then showed some extraterrestrial creatures from Hollywood along with a picture of the guy, Matt, from their group.  He didn't look out of place among pictures of ET and the like.  However, in my opinion, one funny second of video wasn't enough to make up for the lack of science and general correctness in the whole presentation. 

The final group was slightly better, but only slightly.  Of the three people, only one spoke and he sounded very nervous to be stood up talking in front of about 15 classmates whom he has never been too shy to speak in front of when sat down at the back of the room.  The other two people did no more than click for the next slide and hold up a representation of atoms at different stages of a nuclear fusion reaction. 

Overall it was an hour that could have been spent on breakfast but I'm glad I went to the seminar just to see how much better my group was.