Posts

Improving College Room Banding

Main problem with college ballot system at the moment is the room banding and pricing. The JCR claim to have ‘fixed’ it by giving each room a set of variables (size, ensuite/no ensuite, floor, etc.) and then have assigned some weights to each of those variables to form a linear equation. Each room is hence given a score and the bands and band prices have been arbitrarily chosen to cover some of these scores such that the total rent is equal to what is being demanded by the college accommodation office.  Several problems with this: Variable weights are clearly very subjective - for example some people may really want a big room on the top floor but don’t care about an ensuite whereas for other people an ensuite may be essential and they may be indifferent to what floor they are on. Hence the JCR just deciding what these weights should be feels arbitrary and unfair to the student body. The number of rooms bands and prices of each room band also feel arbitrary and unfair.  Potent...
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Tokenisation of CUED Supervisions

Key problems with supervision (that I have found): Some supervisors just run through the crib, which is of little benefit, since the crib is usually well-written and understandable. Often if there are any questions where the crib is difficult to understand or wrong, this applies to all students. Often these questions relating to mistakes in the crib are asked on the Moodle forums and get quick answers. Because supervisors have often not looked at the lecture notes, they are sometimes unable to properly answer lecture note specific questions - although it does vary a lot from supervisor to supervisor. I have found that supervisors on the whole are much better at answering questions on the examples paper than the lecture notes. This is not really their fault, they prepare for the examples paper - I think it is more a problem with the overall system. Supervisions can often come at inconvenient times. For example, too long after the content has been covered and hence supervisees have to po...
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Codifying Communication

The problem with written communication is that it is often very ambiguous what the writer really thinks/feels. With verbal communication there is tone and body language but this is lost in writing. Even with verbal communication, people often do not say what they really mean - due to politeness and social norms. The way people speak and the translation one must do to work out what they really mean can differ between regions and between people of different ages and backgrounds. Ultimately, I think this leads to a lot of time wasted working out what people really think/feel and working out how to express your thoughts/ideas in the context of your social relationship with that particular person. To solve this, I propose a system of codified communication for use in companies, to make teams more efficient. By code I mean there is a written code, a set of rules that define how people should communicate with one another. Similar to how a computer rejects the code you write if not properly sy...
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