Paper
Degree
A paper is the means for a degree, but it is not part of it. Several steps needs to be taken in a specific order to get a degree. It is easier than one may expect.Finalizing
Finalizing the paper, writing the discussion and conclusion, and cleaning it up takes time, so it is good to always finish earlier than expected to polish that. But it is also important to think about how the outcome of the paper can lead to some valuable knowledge.Deadline
The start of the second try of the paper writing was both slow and difficult, mostly due to significant bad time management and information. However, it looks like it might turn out alright anyway considering how bad I first thought it looked at first. I still dread for the next three weeks where I have several smaller deadlines and an opposition.What now
A couple of days ago I found out by my teacher that they skipped the next round of opposition(I think that’s how you translate it), so I have to start all over in the next course starting next week. While they will be more strict this time around, needing to be more specific regarding the research question, I can still reuse most of my current work. Hopefully I can even finish writing earlier due to this, but I have no idea what the future holds. For you who reads this, it only means that you will be able to engage in my content for a bit longer, maybe more details regarding my work.
What happened
I got sick for a couple of weeks, was lazy and had a hard time getting into the mood to work on it at all. I think I just recently got over it, but it is definitely a struggle to keep on going on this, especially as I’m doing it alone.
But what I’ve done the last couple of weeks is to fix a couple of issues my tutor told me, add 1-99 percentile (or something similar at least), and contemplate the research question. Now on for the result.
Research Question
The single most important thing with a thesis is the research question. It spans over the whole paper and binds every section together. It doesn’t need to be short, but it needs to be precise and clear.
I wrote this question in my introduction, but it is a bit rough, so I need to re-specify it. Normally you should write a research question and go from there, but it is more common that you have a general idea of what you want to research, and change the question along the way. It’s, odd, but understandable if you are either inexperienced or in an unknown field.
Tools
It is pretty late mention this, but it may help understanding how my workflow goes and how each tool interact with each other. A tool should be used to help the workflow, but also reduce the time it takes to do one or more tasks.
LaTeX is subjectively one of the best markup languages to create documents, slides, and whatnot. It takes time to learn it, but once you have used a template and get hang on references, figures, bibliography, etc, you will find it really powerful and efficient. For instance, I can throw all my references into a bib-file and let my tex-file interpret it by only taking the references I’m using. On top of that, it will put the reference list wherever you want, and link the citations from the text automatically. The same goes for sections and figures, where you can put a label on them and reference them from other parts of the text. And finally, you can also make slides, which can either be static, “interactive” or include comments for each slide. If you also want to have one for viewing and one to hand out, this is also possible. There is basically no limitation on what you can do with it, at least practically.
Graphs and plots
What makes experiments most interesting is graphs. Or at least what they represent. To do this, my program generated a csv file with all the metrics it had gathered, and with that I loaded it into a second program that created the graphs. Here lay some mines to be aware of.
First of, how should the values be represented? If there are some deviates, most of the points may end up in a tiny cluster where we have no idea what they mean. If the points follow a general exponential curve, it might be better to represent the data logarithmic, meaning it might visually look linear, better enhancing the exponential point.
Reference
One important part with a study is to reference your sources. It is not just to give credit where credit is due, but also to reduce repetition of known information, or avoid explaining redundant or complex structure that has little to no value for the paper itself.
What is hard is to find good references. You need a few, very rarely a whole article itself. My study for instance uses only two paragraphs as my core, and one page for the overall structure. Of course this is insufficient to glue the whole study, as I need more background data and related studies either directly or indirectly.
Experiment
An experiment in Computer Science usually is a small trivial program that runs a larger complex program.
There are tons of ways to execute an experiment. Most end up checking how long it takes to run a specific task, and compare between different algorithms or change the size of data. Another is the amount of occurrences of a specific event. Most of the time it is difficult to determine what metrics to measure, so you end up taking several of them in different locations and later create graphs which you can pick whether you think they are useful for your study.