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Compressing Written Information - Hazzy - 2011-05-01
Today I was drafting the 'cheat sheet' which we are allowed to use on our Econ and Gov finals this week when I started to think how best to store the information. We are allowed a single, standard piece of paper. Anything which we can hand write is allowed. Double sided.
This got me thinking about how to configure the information. Writing it out small in plain English would take a lot of time and waste a lot of space with the minor things holding English together "The", "a", etc. Words are often times rather long, and abbreviations could become confusing. I was thinking is there a way to compress the physical space the information takes up, without compromising readability (when you know how to 'decode' it)
The first idea that I can think of is to write out a draft without regards for space, and then transform popular words and phrases into some form of code. Numbers or various symbols (eg Greek Letters), perhaps. A Legend could fit nicely into the corner. But that requires a lot of hard memorization and isn't very adaptable or elegant.
For this specific example, spending half the time of setting something like this up on actually studying would be better, but this is more about the concept than the application.
Southperry has at least some background in cryptography - which may be relevant - and is generally good at abstraction. What do you guys thing?
tl;dr Goal:
Transform written information(notes, graphs, etc) to take up less physical space in an elegant manor that is fairly easy to read, when you know how.
Compressing Written Information - Shidoshi - 2011-05-01
Using keywords can go a long way in compressing text. If you've studied something for a bit, just a few words are enough to make you access the information that's already on your brain.
Compressing Written Information - Kurtle - 2011-05-01
Shidoshi Wrote:Using keywords can go a long way in compressing text. If you've studied something for a bit, just a few words are enough to make you access the information that's already on your brain.
This. Study to the point where you only need to use the sheet to remind yourself if something goes wrong during the test.
Compressing Written Information - Fiel - 2011-05-01
Organization is better than compression. What good is compression if you don't know where to find the information? Information that exists but can't be found is useless.
Only put down the information with which you're having problems.
Use a symbol to represent common information. For example, my father, being a theology major, had to write the word "Bible" a lot. So instead he just uses a B inside of a circle to represent Bible and it saves him a lot of time.
Compressing Written Information - hadriel - 2011-05-01
If you are studying the sciences, then yes symbols would make it much easier for you, BUT be careful not to overlap symbols.
Well... given I have study things like this...
Spoiler
You know how many symbols and abbreviations I need to know.
Spoiler
On a more accurate note, I DO have to know much of this:
Spoiler
Hadriel
Compressing Written Information - modular - 2011-05-03
At first I was gonna be all uppity and say "When your prof says you can have a cheat sheet, don't bother because it won't help you anyways if you know the material well enough to be tested on it." But really, if you 'have' to memorize ridiculous things like hadriel's picture, just write as small as possible and a front and back will be more than enough to cover whatever material you're being tested on. Seriously, writing in 4-6 point font makes sheets of paper HUGE. Space won't be the issue... organization will.
and if you can't write that small, train yourself to by squishing 2 lines into a wide ruled line in a notebook. and then in a college ruled one.... and then 3 lines in one wide ruled... etc. ...and buy a magnifying glass. use .5 or .3 pencil lead.
Compressing Written Information - Russt - 2011-05-04
Obviously you don't want to write in complete sentences, but if you distill the actually useful information from syntactical junk it may go a long way. Also use unambiguous abbreviations if you can, such as (just looking at a page in my own Gov book and making up some examples) committee -> cmte, introduced -> introd, Senate -> Sen, President -> Prez, etc. Just be careful not to use possibly ambiguous abbreviations because it will not help you at all if you have to try to remember what you meant.
Unfortunately it's still not going to be able to hold every single thing you need, especially when things come with peripheral details. So that's where the organizational aspect comes in, write down important keywords and trouble spots and internalize what you can.
Compressing Written Information - OB3LISK - 2011-05-04
To be honest study sheet should be for just things to jog your memory, not to write down real information. You need to study that.
Compressing Written Information - Flonne - 2011-05-04
This gives me bad flashbacks of my high school history teacher. Except, we didn't ever get cards. Each test was 10-15 pages minimum of exact carbon copy of the notes in exact order or you were pretty much sure to fail. I still remember the senior final, 40 page report to be written within 2 hours. I got 15. Needless to say, I found out that you can still pass a class even if you fail the final horribly, that day...but yeah, the only way it was even possible to study for his tests was by typing it up once in full, then memorizing it well enough that you could cut out words from the text and still be able to remember the missing ones, up to the point that at the end you just had a few words per paragraph at the front of your brain that triggered the memory of the full text. And god help you if you forgot something, since that generally caused a domino effect of failure because you knew something was missing and stressed over it....
If time is an issue, just try to stuff as much information you are having trouble with as possible on there, but the more efficient method (if you have the time) would be to memorize it and use the key word triggering system.
Compressing Written Information - octopusprime - 2011-05-05
Everyone, please the obvious answer is to learn a more compact language, duh.
but for serious, summarize and organize things. information is useless if it is all over the place and all looks the same. symbols and simple diagrams are good ideas if they help you remember entire concepts.
If all else fails though, master a more condensed alphabet, it is more important than just studying!
Damn, i just made a sarcasm sandwich.
Compressing Written Information - happylight - 2011-05-17
I used to write stuff on top of each other using different color pens so you can still read them. This can fit several pages of material onto one page. Also using very fine tip pens help a lot.
Compressing Written Information - 2147483647 - 2011-05-18
OB3LISK Wrote:To be honest study sheet should be for just things to jog your memory, not to write down real information. You need to study that.
This. Basically, by the time you're tested, you should have already learned most, if not all of the information. There should not be any significant portion of the material that is new to you. The only things you should be writing on your cheat sheet are details that you can't figure out through reasoning, things that you are actually confused about (not even "might be confused about"), and possibly any formulae that you've devised that can save you time. Therefore, your cheat sheet should really be treated only as "data sheets", because after all, the cheat sheet is meant to save your time, not consume it.
Only if you have extra space should you fill your cheat sheet with random junk that you probably don't need, but you might find helpful.
Here's an example of the cheat sheet I used for one of my Gen Chem 2 exams:
[spoiler=]
![[Image: 17933810150180115014012.jpg]](http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/2246/17933810150180115014012.jpg)
[/spoiler]If you write small and only what you need to write, you should not run out of space, and you should not need to "compress" the information to such a point that you need a legend to figure out what you're trying to say.
As an experiment, try producing such a cheat sheet, where you're trying to write literally everything down. Then read it from front to end and see how long it takes. If it takes more than 10 minutes to read the entire cheat sheet front-to-back, your cheat sheet is more hindering than helpful, especially if your exam is only an hour long.