Thank you from your beloved Rankmaniacsnk

 

Is this true for most rankmaniacs?

The competition ends in an hour, so this may be our last post!  Unless we decide to share the results… Thank you for your readership, even if you get here by accident, and thank you for helping us with our homework.  We really appreciate it 🙂  At Caltech we’ll take all the help we can get.

From the rankmaniacs,

Janis, Jadot, Judy, and Dan

Rankmaniac 2012 Day!

Hopefully we are the rankmaniac breaking the tape

The day we have all been waiting for is here.  The finish line arrives in 4 hours.  Hopefully we win the Rankmaniac 2012 google image search competition.  Since we are failing at Bing.

The P/F technique

Rankmaniacs Try and Try and Then Give up

There is one technique that rankmaniacs use often in Caltech classes, especially those involving math or proofs or explanations.  In the title I called it the P/F technique although it can also be called “hand waving” or “It’s 5am, and I don’t care anymore”.

This is best applied when one knows the answer or at least what the TAs and prof want to hear, but are unsure of why it is correct.  It is a skill acquired by all Caltech students (and possibly any college student).  By the way, Rankmaniac 2012.

Expectations of Caltech

Rankmaniacs expected less

I actually think some rankmaniacs might agree with me on this one.  Although, I don’t care much for the video games part.

Being a Student Athlete at Caltech

High like a Rankmaniac

As some of you know, I am on both the swim team and water polo team at Caltech.  The rest of you may ask, how does a nerd with so much work have time to do anything besides study?

I’ll admit, my sophomore year, while still on Core (a math and physics class) and starting classes for my applied math option (abstract algebra, complex analysis) I don’t think I ever made it out my text books.  In hindsight this is one of my biggest regrets at Caltech.

Life needs balance – my brain was getting plenty of exercise and I still socialized with people in the form of “Have you done #2 yet?  I need help” but my mind was suffering from the lack of change and the body never responds well to doing nothing all the time.  Sophomore year was worst year at Tech and being more active may have made it a bit better.

At Caltech, all sports practices are scheduled from 4-6pm (PE classes may be at other times…) and professors are strongly encouraged to not hold class during this time for the exact reason that rank maniacs have a chance to take a break from studying and take a break.

After sophomore year I actually began to head back to the pool and have definitely been a much happier student ever since (although this also corresponds to my change of major from ACM to CS… I guess we’ll never know what really made me happy).

Of course, there are other ways to take mental breaks – music, art, reading books FOR FUN, other hobbies (I crochet and cross stitch sometimes), but sports are fun because there is still some purpose.

Caltech CS Undergraduate Requirements

Where Rankmaniacs Go

Being a CS major (or pretty much any major at Caltech) has many requirements.  First of all the general requirements for all Caltech students consists of a lot of math and physics and some chemistry (yuck).

Most freshman who are curious about CS start by taking the introductory courses which show the fun things computers can do and the range of what computers can do.

• CS 1: Intro to Computer Programming
• CS 2: Intro to Programming Methods
• CS 4: Fundamentals of Computer Programming

During sophomore year comes all of the nitty gritty details of computability and complexity and algorithms and some intro to graph theory and (my least favorite) how computers actually work.

• Ma/CS 6: Intro to Discrete Math
• CS 21: Decidability and Tractability
• CS 24: Intro to Computing Systems
• CS 38: Intro to Algorithms

Junior and senior year is when the real fun happens – CS courses and projects in whatever area you choose, math classes of your choice, and lots of focus on what you really want to do.

• 7 CS classes labeled 114 or above
• a 3-quarter course sequence culminating in a large project

This project is the fun part.  My project course was in Learning & Vision, for which I took Artificial Intelligence, Learning Systems, and as the final projected competed in a machine learning competition based on the 2006-2009 Netflix competition.

Examples of other project tracks at Caltech include Distributed systems, Networks (the Rankmaniac 2012 Class!), Graphics, and Theory (ew :P(says the girl taking Algorithms)).

Has anyone figured out Bing yet?

How are rankmaniacs supposed to get on Bing?

One image from this class appears on Bing – and it took a couple of weeks to get there.  So why can’t we or anyone else get on Bing image search?

According to the top articles found on Bing for the query “how to get on Bing image search”, the image search optimization methods are similar to Google’s:  appropriate filenames, alt text, and something about frame breaking (that I don’t actually understand and don’t have time to look up right now because I’m technically working on a different problem set).  Most of the other results were for how to be the background image of Bing or how to turn off the background image of Bing.

Any advice on how we can get pictures on Bing image search in 18 hours?

Last day for Rankmaniac!!!

Hey guys,

Unlike my Senior associate, who only has golf today, I have a huge amount of work.  Fortunately, we are winning Rankmaniac 2012 on Google search.  That’s pretty good I think.  It probably won’t last, but we have some plans for maintaining our dominance.

We are the big lion:

Rankmaniac 2012 Dominance

Anyway, the next to weeks are going to be awful.  We need to get CS projects in order for next quarter, I need to finish my PS 139 project (a study on election fraud) and I need to finish my CS 141 work.  OMG I have CS 144 due at the end of the week – blech… At least I don’t have any midterms…  I will power through like a true Rankmaniac.

Ready for another Rankmaniac 2012 Update?

Our Caltech Rankmaniac 2012 blog comes up 4th on google web search!

Hello loyal readers of our blog! Here’s an update on our class competition: Rankmaniac Reloaded.    We are doing very well in the image search (check the google site under the “rankmaniac 2012” page above to see exactly how well) and are also doing pretty well in the web search, as you can see above.  Not that the web search really matters for us Rankmaniacs this year.

So, what’s gotten us this far?  Lot of search engine optimization (SEO) techniques – constant updates of our webpages, link farming, title and alt tags for the images, and PageRank.  Funny how all of these things came together to give us the final boost we needed.

While this page has of course comes up when “rankmaniac 2012” is queried, we’ve even gotten a few hits for keywords “caltech”, “shortest unique substring”, and “Facebook weaknesses 2012”.  It’s pretty nice that we are being found for reasons other than our own 🙂

One problem we (and everyone in the class) are having is getting on Bing image search though.  We are indexed by and do appear on Bing web search, but we still aren’t sure how they rank images.  At this point in the competition, just getting onto Bing is equivalent to winning the Bing competition.  So, we’ll see what we can do in the next couple of days.

There are only a few days left in the competition, so this may be the last update before the final checking of ranks.  Come back later for more interview questions and CS advice!

Why Computer Science is the best major

CS is definitely the best major for these reasons:

1. Highest starting salary – CS majors regularly get paid anywhere between $75,000 – $90,000 right out of college (Facebook pays as much as $110,000 plus bonuses and options).
2. Workplace is super chill – CS companies often have free beer, meals and no dress code.  Trust me – it’s freaking awesome (unless you don’t like beer).
3. The tech industry is booming – You will be able to find a job a lot easier than your friends.
4. It can be pretty low stress – Compared to other jobs, software engineering positions have been continuously rated for their low stress levels.
5. Give you a chance to be creative – You will be working on big projects – most companies give a lot of leeway to their developers.
6. You can change the world – A lot of CS positions involve working on really big/important projects.  On top of that, with your skill set you have the ability to create the next Facebook or Google.
7. Chicks dig CS majors – Chicks are attracted by our naturally white skin and fat wallets.  Beware of the CS effect on women.