SLOG the First

Hello World!

This is the first entry of my SLOG. I’ll be using this space to keep track of my progress through the CSC165H1F 2014 course.

The main challenge I seem to be facing is I’m going to need a large bank of questions to practice on. Even if I understand the concepts, I have to be able to answer questions quickly and reliably in a test situation and the only way to get that kind of speed is through practice. If anyone knows of an online resource or even a textbook, please let me know!

I’m trying to constantly remind myself to work hard rather than rely on my intelligence. This is a common issue studied by Carol Dweck and you can find more information on it here and here.

What’s something that challenged or frustrated you this week?

I had trouble understanding vacuous truths. I’ll try to find some sample exercises to practice on.

I’ve been having trouble taking notes in class on my laptop. I found a quick way to insert the symbols in Word, though. Typing the hex unicode value and then pressing Alt+x converts the value into the symbol. A list of the symbols can be found at this link. You just need the last four-digit hex values and not the “&#x” portion.

Some common ones:

2208 – ∈ – element of
2282 – ⊂ – subset
2286 – ⊆ – subset of or equal to
21D2 – ⇒ – implication
00AC – ¬ – toggles truth/false value
2200 – ∀ – for all