Today was the final content lecture of the image processing course at the university, with the lecturer going over deep learning as a technique for pattern recognition in images and videos. For the next few weeks the students will be concentrating on their assessment projects, which is where the fun really begins. So far the students who have talked to me are planning some of the usual suspects for project ideas: tumour detection in medical images, car and other object detection for automated driving, handwriting recognition, and so on. I’m hoping some team will come up with something cool and new.
Today was also the first total fire ban of the… summer that we’re not in yet. The temperature only reached 27.4°C, but it was very windy and the humidity was super low, getting below 10% in parts of Sydney. I’ve been noticing extremely low humidity the past few days, as it’s drying my skin out and I’m using tons of moisturiser.
There’s no rain forecast for the next week and temperatures should get up to 29°C again. Some of the grass in the parks is starting to turn noticeably brown from lack of rain. We had 2 mm of rain last Friday, but apart from that it basically hasn’t rained for almost a full month now. Which is very unusual for Sydney.
More interesting responses tonight from kids about that car driving question about letting people cut in ahead of the queue in the turning lane:
- 2 American + 1 Canadian kid: Let the car in.
- 1 New Zealander: Don’t let them in.
- 2 Hong Kong: Very strongly don’t let them in. When I explained why it could be dangerous not to let them in, the Hong Kong kids both changed to: Let them in, but everyone should honk at them.
- 2 Thai kids: You should let the car in. But for different reasons: (1) because it’s dangerous to leave them in the other lane; (2) to be nice and “show them mercy”.
- 1 Hong Kong: “Definitely not!” They should block the car out until they give up and keep going straight. Because they’re doing the wrong thing and deserve to be punished.
- 1 Portugal: No, block them out, because otherwise everyone will think they can do the same thing.
New content today: