Feeling about social media

This week, I explored numerous social media platforms, including Flickr, Reddit, Pinterest, Diigo, Discord, Goodreads, and others. It was remarkable to discover so many new tools with diverse functions and to view a wide array of media products from other users, such as posts, comments, images, and shared experiences.

Social media provides us with an abundance of open information resources, some of which can serve as excellent educational tools. Through posts on Reddit, I gained ideas, experiences, and insights from other users. On Pinterest, I found many creative instructional images introducing various concepts. Most of this information is completely free of charge, presenting significant opportunities for learning from Open Educational Resources (OER).

However, as some Reddit posts reminded me, much information may be created by service providers, and these "free" resources can sometimes intentionally exaggerate, mislead, or deviate from real concepts or facts. It's a valuable reminder to remain vigilant and critically assess the information I encounter online.

Another important issue is that, despite the abundance of tools and information resources, my time available for learning is still constrained. Utilizing too many tools can cause time to become fragmented. Therefore, after experimenting with different platforms, I need to select and stick with only those tools that are most convenient and beneficial for my work and daily life.

Programming practice 2: data visualization

Data visualization is an essential function in programming. In my last programming practice, I gained significant knowledge about using loops in programs and automatically collecting data from web pages. This was a valuable, albeit small, step in my programming journey. To continue advancing my programming skills, I will now focus on practicing data visualization using Python.

Selecting a data source can be somewhat confusing, as there are many types of data, including text, numbers, ordinal data, and dummy variables. For this practice, I will use price data from the stock market and display it as a price diagram within my program. While this duplicates the functionality of most stock trading software, I believe it will be an excellent fundamental practice for a novice programmer. It will significantly improve my skills in visualizing time series data and understanding various functions relevant to data visualization.

Learning about intellectual property

In the internet era, a vast amount of information is shared and learned online. While enjoying the convenience of open educational resources, it's crucial to be aware of the legal requirements for intellectual property (IP) protection.

Intellectual property encompasses various forms, including copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets.

Copyrights protect original works of authorship, such as text, images, music, videos, and other media products. They safeguard authors' privileges, benefits, and incentives for their creations. The Creative Commons (CC) license allows creators to share their work with others while retaining their copyright. Instead of an "all rights reserved" approach, CC licenses offer a spectrum of "some rights reserved" options, promoting broader use and collaboration.

To enhance understanding of copyright, learning from U.S. Copyright Office | U.S. Copyright Office is highly beneficial. If I aspire to be an author in the future, I must become familiar with how to properly use others' media products and strictly adhere to copyright requirements. Thorough knowledge of copyright law is essential for responsible and ethical content usage.

It's also helpful to gain knowledge of patents from Patent Basics | USPTO , the official website for patents in the US.

Diving into the CFA Community on Reddit

I am considering taking the CFA Level III exam in February 2026, so I've dedicated some time to the CFA community on Reddit to understand the topics of concern and learn from others' experiences.

In this community, I sense the study pressure is quite significant. People often post to discuss upcoming exam dates and express how stressful or boring the preparation process can be. Some posters talk about their feelings after receiving their charter, while others express frustration about not passing the exam.

Some are asking for partners to prepare for the exam, and I'm curious about how such partnerships can help. In my opinion, the exam covers so many concepts that it's difficult to see how communication alone could provide much help. However, purely out of curiosity, I replied to a post seeking study partners and am waiting to see how that goes.

Progress in Programming Practice 1: Automatically Collecting Data from Websites

Collecting data is the first step in conducting research. It is very important, which is why I set my first programming practice to automatically collect data by coding.

As a novice programmer, my initial step was to collect content from a single webpage using code. Collecting data from the internet is an essential method nowadays, given the convenience and plethora of resources available. Even though there are abundant resources online, collecting them manually is time-consuming and overwhelming. I believe it will be very helpful in my future research if I can use code to automatically collect data from the internet.

To achieve this, I first chose a simple HTML webpage, input the URL into Python code, and set a keyword. It was then easy to download the webpage and collect relevant text using keywords as tags. However, this wasn't very useful. To collect comprehensive data, the program needed to be able to select many webpages and collect content by keywords automatically.

Therefore, it became indispensable to set up numerous loops in the program and define many trigger conditions for these loops. The program needed to handle many decisions by itself, such as how to choose different webpages, sign in, discern old data from new, handle errors while opening webpages, save data according to different conditions, and so on.

In recent weeks, I spent a lot of time practicing how to set up multiple-level loops, as I found that configuring loops can be very complicated. For some periods, I felt confused about why the loops weren't working as I thought they would. After struggling with it, I found that using "matrix" (or perhaps a structured way to manage conditions/states,) can provide better triggers for complicated conditions.

Now, I have practiced multiple aspects of multi-stepped loops and successfully finished the small program. I have completed over a thousand lines of Python code, and I have a much better understanding of how to achieve automatic actions using code. This practice has truly taken a lot of time, but I believe it will be worth it.

Crowdsourcing is essential for self-instruction and independent learning.

Crowdsourcing facilitates the collaborative collection of information. I believe its most important effect is avoiding the bias inherent in a single person's perspective.

Numerous events occur daily worldwide. For research purposes, it's crucial to collect historical data as comprehensively and precisely as possible, to understand how the world operates and to analyze the patterns of events. However, data collection is not an easy task. The process can involve observation, communication, surveys, experiments, and so on. All these methods require attention, time, and cost. Due to these limitations, it's challenging for a single researcher to collect massive, detailed data for many events from various, distant locations.

With crowdsourcing, the difficulty of data collection is reduced, easing both time limitations and location constraints. By collaborating with information from the crowd, researchers can acquire more data, offering different perspectives on the details of events.

The quality of crowdsourced data might be a concern. Participants in crowdsourcing might not always collect accurate data, and each of them may have a personal bias. However, if the number of participants is large enough, these biases might be mitigated by multiple observations.

Therefore, I believe crowdsourcing is always helpful for collecting information. Unlike decision-making, collecting information is more resilient to misinformation and conflicting opinions. With all kinds of information gathered, research and analysis can be conducted to determine the best course of action. On the contrary, crowdfunding is not as beneficial, since investment decisions bring direct, irrevocable consequences. It's better to maintain clear alignment between responsibility and benefit, which is often lacking in crowdfunding.

Coding practice this week.

This week, I started to code by myself.

As a novice programmer, I aimed to create a small program that could perform practical functions, like discerning different pictures or shapes and automatically triggering certain activities. I initially thought this would be an easy task, especially since I could start by setting simple shapes as targets. However, in practice, many unexpected issues emerged.

One difficulty I encountered is that while humans can often discern shapes instinctively, translating that activity into code requires strict logic. Any missing consideration leads to incorrect results. Another significant challenge I found was with loops. While I knew loops are fundamental and thought they'd be easy to use, it's quite different in practice. To simulate an activity and achieve various reactions under different circumstances, a program might need eight or even more than ten levels of nested loops. It's incredibly easy to get lost in which conditions should be placed at which loop level.

I've spent a lot of time testing the bugs I made. It's fun, a bit like a game, but truly time-consuming. The bugs aren't thoroughly solved yet, and suddenly, it's the last day of the week!

Readings and Learnings in the r/Python Community (First Week)

This week, I've read several posts in the r/Python community on Reddit, and I feel most of them discuss substantial themes.

Many authors post to share code freely. They provide excellent introductions to their code's advantages and functions. I believe most members in this community are generous and willing to share their results. Perhaps programming is like knowledge: in most cases, sharing it doesn't harm the original owners. Instead, it can bring valuable social reputation and further opportunities, as well as invite other users to test their code.

Some posts discuss daily topics, such as how to earn more money or how successful programmers find love. I think such topics act like a cohesive agent, helping members find common interests or simply chat for fun.

There's a small number of posts discussing dangerous experiences users have faced while using free downloaded code, often warning about malware hidden in those codes. Even though such posts are not numerous, this type of risk is still important, and I will keep it in mind.