Graph-Theoretic Algorithms Spring 2020 Delivery

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Ramblings and FAQ about the videos/scans/readings

• What should I parse first: the readings or the video?
  Probably the best approach is to do readings and video in parallel: Read until you don't understand some example, watch the video that goes through that example, get back to the book if the details went by too fast in the video. But if you can learn the material from only the readings or only the videos, that's fine.
• What are the scans for?
  The scans for the most part can be ignored. The readings are crisper (and has typos and other errors cleaned up) and cover the same material. The scans might come in handy if the video is too blurry at times to make out what I drew/wrote and you'd like to see the details.
• Why are the readings and the scan not always the same?
  The scans are the pages that I used while shooting the video. Often I discover minor typos or pictures to add while shooting the video. I don't want to re-shoot the video just for that, but I do change the lecture notes before uploading to reflect that.
• Are the scan-pages exactly what is visible in the video?
  Mostly, yes. The scans are taken shortly after the videos are made, and so should be identical to what's at the video at the end. However, sometimes a pages was used by multiple videos, and so the marks on the page may have occurred by one or the other.
• The readings sometimes leave out a lot of pages. What's up with those, and where do I get them?
  The full set of lecture notes includes lots of material that was taught in past offerings of cs762 but that I chose not to cover this time since the course would be too full otherwise. I will occasionally post the current version of the full lecture notes on LEARN, so you can get missing pages there. (The page-numbers and even chapter-numbers may be off a bit, but you should be able to find your way around that.) Reading anything that wasn't in the readingss is completely optional.
• You're obviously using a DocCam. What kind is it, and where did you get it?
  

  No, I don't have a DocCam. But I'm operating under the principle ` "If I don't have a DocCam, I'll make one", she said.' (Credit to Dr. Seuss.) I bought myself a little gooseneck lamp, and a gooseneck web camera. The lamp sits on the window-sill, the camera on some random seed-container (don't ask), and it works nearly as well.

• The videos are frequently fairly blurry. Why?
  The web cam that I bought (a HUE HD Portable Camera, in case you care to know) is nifty, but was probably designed for longer distances. The focussing-wheel is rather small in size and not fine-grained enough, so that it is nearly impossible to get the focus just right. Sorry.
• The videos frequently have random shadows across them. Why?
  The gooseneck lamp, while very handy, is unfortunately not quite strong enough to counter the shadows that come from the room lamp when I move my arms about.
• What is that rough wooden surface in the background of the video?
  

  My house is small and we are 5 people here, so I do not have an office or even a desk. I'm shooting the videos in my plant/work room, and this is one of the work surfaces in it. Gratuitous shot of the entire setup is to the right; observe the scanner wedged in between the toolbox and the basket full of seeds. And the very important tea mug to keep me going...

• Why is the window so dark in that picture, and the time stamps of the videos so horribly early?
  As I said, small house, 5 people, no office. The only time I have the peace and quiet needed to shoot videos is really early in the morning when everyone else is asleep. So time stamps are typically between 5am and 7am, and a few are as early as 3am. Any errors that I make in the videos can safely be credited to lack of sleep....
• What program are you using for recording?
  I'm running linux ubuntu 16.04 and using the built-in webcam program `cheese' to shoot the videos. Nothing fancy about it, but it works.
• What program are you using for editing the videos?
  None. Editing the videos takes forever, and I find that it is faster to re-take the video rather than trying to edit out major flaws. Minor flaws will simply stay. On occasion I cut a too-long video into two parts, and this can be simply done from the command line with "avconv -i input.webm -c:a copy -c:v copy -ss 00:05:13 -t 00:07:33 output.webm" where the two numbers are the start-time and the duration of what you want to cut out.
• Why are the scans of such low quality?
  My scanner simply wasn't that great. Around Lecture 4 it broke altogether and I had to buy a new one. (The picture-quality of the scans got a bit better after that.) It's a small portable one, so pages aren't always in exactly straight. Since the scans aren't that important, I decided not to spend too much time on re-doing it, as long as things are legible. I am keeping all the originals (at least for a few weeks), so if you really can't make out something, ask me and I'll re-scan.

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