ethics – Page 28 – dangermouse.net

Back to Ethics

The new school term started this week here in New South Wales, and schools are pretty much open for business as usual. Ethics classes also begin this week, for the first time since they stopped for COVID-19 back in March, and my first class was today. There was no screening of any sort at the school gate – it was wide open and I just walked in. But I walked past another primary school on the way, and they had staff at the gate meeting kids with hand sanitiser and making them use it before coming in, and not letting parents in. I guess each school is doing things differently.

I only had these kids for 3 weeks at the start of the year, and I’d just about learnt all their names, but with the intervening months, I’ve forgotten most of them again, so I had to resort to name tags again. The discussion today was about animal rights. We began with a story about a chimpanzee who was taken from his parents as a baby and raised in a succession of human families, trying to teach him sign language. This chimp became violent and ended up in a cage in a research lab, and died at 20 (about half the age of chimps in the wild).

So we talked about whether chimps and other great apes deserve to have rights to freedom like humans, and experiments on them being banned. The kids were generally in favour of that. Then I asked about rats and mice that were used to test drugs that save human lives. That split the responses a bit. One boy said they shouldn’t test things like that on animals at all anyway, they should test on humans(!). Eventually we converged a bit and the kids were generally agreeing that animals deserved to have the right to live wild and free. Then I asked about dogs and cats – should they all be free, and having them as pets banned? And wow… that got interesting responses. One girl said, “Now you’re asking really hard questions!” And I answered, “Yes, that’s the point of Ethics class.”

So it was a good robust discussion, with plenty of the kids interested and contributing good comments. The behaviour could still improve, with things breaking out into spontaneous chatter more often than ideal, but it might have been a little better than the first classes in March.

I walked home a longer way, and then when I got home my wife was out with Scully and asked me to take her for a walk so she could go back in to work, so I extended it an extra couple of kilometres. I ended up walking over 11 km – before 11am!

We’re also planning our weekend away. We leave on Friday afternoon to drive out to Mudgee, a country town about 3.5 hours drive away (non-stop – we’ll have a rest break along the way). We arrive Friday evening, and have dinner and accommodation booked, at a place where Scully can stay with us. We spend all day Saturday there, and have a really nice dinner booked for Saturday, at a lovely place we’ve been to before. I think they said they have a private room where we can dine with Scully, rather than having to sit outside in the cold. And then we drive back on Sunday.

Speaking of the cold, the forecast for the weekend isn’t great, alas. Mudgee on Saturday is forecast to be -1°C overnight, to a maximum of just 14°C, and around 15mm of rain with possible thunderstorms! So it’s going to be wet and very cold. We’ll just have to make do and enjoy as best we can – we’ve been looking forward to this trip since we had to cancel it back in April.

New content today:

Ethical dilemma

Primary Ethics has decided that ethics classes will cease from next week due to coronavirus concerns. They’ve left this week’s classes up to each individual school ethics coordinator. Mine has said that classes will run tomorrow.

However, I’ve decided that I won’t be going into the school to take my class tomorrow. I think the risks are low at this time, but still, I really don’t want to get sick a day later and realise that I may have exposed a classroom full of kids to the virus. I’ll miss the class, because even after just three weeks I’m keen to see the kids again and lead them through more of the ethics curriculum. But it’s because of that that I can’t bear to put any of them at greater risk.

Today I tended to a few odd tasks, finishing off writing annotations for the last batch of Irregular Webcomic, and queueing up a bunch of iToons submissions. And I picked up Scully from my wife’s work at lunchtime and looked after her all afternoon, including taking her to the dog park. The regulars there are still showing up each day, but noticeably keeping more distant than normal, and discussing virus-related stuff. It’s good to be out in the fresh air though.

New content today:

Ethics and comics

This morning was my weekly Ethics class, teaching Year 6 children at a nearby school. With the weather better than last week, I walked to the school, taking the chance to be out in the fresh air. This is only my third week with this new class, and I have 21 names to try to remember. I wondered if any might be away, with parents perhaps starting to worry about coronavirus and keeping them out of school, but I actually had more kids than the previous two classes, with only 1 away today.

Once they’d arrived after the morning bell, I tried to remember as many names as I could as I handed out nametag stickers again. I managed to remember most of them, but still have a few to go. Hopefully by next week I’ll have them all down.

We discussed fairness in society today, with several examples of potential new school rules regarding who would and would not be allowed to do various activities. We had a very good discussion and most of the kids were participating well, but this year I have a couple of boys who think it’s funny to be disruptive, and they’re playing off each other, so it’s much worse than just one troublemaker. I’ve been pretty strict with them so they get the message that I’m not to be messed with. Hopefully it will get better as the year goes on.

Back home, all I did the rest of the day was work on assembling Irregular Webcomic strips from the photos I took on Monday. I got most of them done, but still have a few to finish off. And that was the day!

New content today:

Ethics and rain

Rain came in overnight, and it was still heavy this morning. We’re still at a point where when the weather person on the nightly news says it’ll rain, the main newsreader replies, “Good news!” SO although it was pretty heavy, it was most welcome.

It meant I had to drive to my Ethics class though, instead of walking like I usually do. I mean, I could have walked, but I would have been pretty wet by the time I got there and that wouldn’t have been fun.

Because of last week’s Year 6 camp, this was only the second week of lessons I’ve had with this class, and I was still busy learning the names of the kids. I think after today I have about half of them memorised and matched to faces. I remember the distinctive individuals first, and end up struggling with the last few who look somewhat similar.

The syllabus repeats every two years, so I’m now teaching the same material I did in 2018 (to kids who haven’t done it yet). Years 5 and 6 get the same material, so Year 5 classes are also learning the same stuff this year, and both years get the odd-year syllabus next year. I think this class might be a little more challenging behaviour-wise than last year’s students. There are a few boys who are chatty when they should be listening.

One of the girls looked rather sick, with what looked like a pretty severe cold. I asked her a couple of times if she was okay, and she insisted she was. But honestly if I was a parent and my kid looked like that before school, there’s no way I’d send them in. After class I informed the front office and asked them to notify her regular class teacher and keep an eye on her for the rest of the day.

Before heading home I popped into the supermarket near the school to get milk and bread. I was amazed to see that several items had sold out or were close to – a result of the near-panic levels of buying that people here in Sydney are doing to stockpile supplies in case the COVID-19 coronavirus gets to a point where people need to start staying home for weeks at a time.

Toilet paper seems to be the number one item that people want, for some reason I can’t quite fathom. Paper towels and tissues were also completely sold out.

Rice makes more sense at least – at least it’s edible.

Long-life milk. There was a little bit of skim milk and goat’s milk left.

Canned vegetables.

Flour. There’s mostly just a bit of bread-making flour left. I guess most people don’t bake bread at home. Although maybe they should consider it.

Bottled water I don’t understand. There isn’t going to be a disruption to the water supply. Some people seem to be preparing for nuclear war or something.

Most puzzling: eggs. Who’s coming in and buying 8 cartons of eggs today, thinking they’ll last for two or three months???

It’s interesting because there aren’t any actual shortages of any of these items. All these shelves will be restocked overnight, and will keep being restocked for the foreseeable future. At some point people will realise they have a spare room full of toilet paper and rice, and there’s still plenty of both on the supermarket shelves. They don’t need to hoard tons of the stuff – they just need enough supplies to last a couple of weeks of self-isolation if they get the virus.

Interesting times…

New content today:

ISO meeting day 2

Today was the big technical day of the ISO photography standards meeting that I’m attending virtually. We had presentations and discussions on the topics of standardisation of measurements of camera imaging noise, resolution, autofocus repeatability, depth metrology, image flare, as well as standardisation of Adobe’s DNG file format, and a presentation on new work by JPEG.

Much of it was very technical and probably not very interesting to most people. However the autofocus presentation had some fascinating experimental results. The presenter had at first assumed we could do image statistics to determine the best focused image from a series of photos taken by a camera. Defocus blur smooths out the image, so the variance in the pixel counts is lower, which means that if you measure the variance in a photo (of the same subject, at the same light level, taken by the same camera), then the image with the highest variance should have the best focus.

However, doing an experiment in which he measured hundreds of images, he found that sometimes when the autofocus failed and the image came out blurry, it actually had a higher variance than in-focus images. The reason was that the camera added artificial image noise as an image processing step. The reason it might do this is because it’s known that slightly blurry images look sharper to human eyes if a little bit of image noise is added. So the camera has been designed to add some noise, to fool human users into thinking the photo is sharper than it really is. The result of this is that when a photo is truly out-of-focus, it adds so much noise that the variance ends up higher than an in-focus image. (This was a phone camera that was being tested, by the way, not a DSLR.)

So to make our standardisation of a method to measure autofocus workable, we have to deal with this artificial image noise that some cameras add to the image, and we can’t rely on the image statistics being sensible and based merely on the physics.

This sort of thing is becoming more and more of a problem for us in this work. Measuring the performance of a camera is getting more complicated because of all the post-processing that modern cameras (particularly phone cameras) do to make the image look “nicer”. Even a conceptually simple thing like defining the exposure time of a photo is riddled with complications caused by cameras that take multiple exposures when you press the shutter button, and then combine different parts of different images to produce a composite final image. For example: some areas of the resulting photo might have pixels taken from an exposure with one exposure time, while another area has pixels from an exposure with a different exposure time, while another area has pixels that are an average of two or more different exposures, and then the brightness levels might be adjusted in different ways. At one extreme, there is no single “exposure time” that physically describes what is represented by the pixels across the whole photo, and at the other extreme to fully describe the “exposure” you need to list an array of different exposure times and their blending coefficients for every pixel in the image. While that would be physically correct, it’s obviously impractical. We still haven’t figured out how to address this issue.

Another interesting thing came from the JPEG presentation. JPEG is not just an image format, it’s a large technical committee (separate from the ISO Photography committee), working on a lot of new stuff related to image encoding. Their representative was giving us a report on recent work they’re doing. One thing I thought was interesting is a new project to add privacy controls to images. Say you want to share a photo of yourself on social media, but you don’t want random strangers seeing your face. This JPEG project is working on a way to select a region of a photo (e.g. your face), and encrypt the image data for that region, so that a person without the key can see the background but where your face is it just displays a blurred/pixelated version, but a friend who has your encryption password can see the original photo with your face. (I described this to a friend of mine and he criticised the idea as unnecessary complexity, as there are already ways to achieve basically the same effect without building encryption into JPEG. I’m no expert in file encoding, and I suspect there’s more to it than that, but *shrug*.)

Anyway, this is kind of all I did today – this sort of highly technical stuff. One more day of the meeting tomorrow. There’ll be a bit more technical discussion, followed by administrative stuff. (And I’m not getting paid for any of this…)

Oh, the other thing I did today was go to teach my Ethics class this morning. I had time to do this because the virtual meeting is running on Tokyo time, so it started at 11 am Sydney time. So I had enough time to go teach my class. However, when I was set up and ready to go, and the school bell rang… no students showed up! I had to go find a teacher, and they told me that Year 6 was away on camp this week! So I packed up and headed home. Oh well… next week!

New content today:

New Ethics year

This morning was my first Ethics class for the new year. I got to the school and collected the roll, which had the names of 21 new Year 6 students for me to meet and teach this year. I wrote out name stickers for them all to help me with learning all their names.

When the kids arrived in the classroom and I started getting them to tell me their names, I ended up with three students who weren’t on my roll! There was some mix-up, and a few minutes in the ethics coordinator for the school came and removed those kids to a different class where they were supposed to be.

Being the first lesson, it was introductory, and mostly – from my point of view – about establishing rules and boundaries, so the kids know what sort of behaviour I won’t tolerate. We discussed the introductory question: Can good people do bad things? I got several good responses from different kids, including a few who thought there was no such thing as a “good person”, saying that everyone does some good and some bad things.

After the lesson I walked home via a longer route, to pass by the kitchen supply shop. I wanted to get a black tablecloth for my market stall, but it turned out they barely had any tablecloths in stock. So I’ll go get one somewhere else tomorrow.

At home, I planned to mount all of the photo prints I’ve had made into matting boards, to make them look nice for sale and be ready to frame. I opened the parcel of matting boards I’d mail ordered… and discovered that it was only the matts with the holes cut out – there were no backing boards! I double checked my order – I definitely indicated I wanted backing boards included. So I contacted the company and told them about the error – they’ll ship the backing boards ASAP. I just hope they arrive in time for me to mount all the photos before market day on 1 March.

Instead I did some ISO standards work, since we have a meeting coming up next week. It was planned to be in Yokohama, but I was going to dial in remotely. However, the meeting has been converted to a fully virtual dial-in only meeting, with the original Yokohama venue cancelled, due to concerns about coronavirus. In a sense it’s fortunate that I didn’t have to cancel flights and hotel just a week out from the meeting.

New content today:

Falling bodies

After a day of science yesterday, I also spent most of today doing science – this time writing up my latest Proof that the Earth is a Globe. That took pretty much the whole working day.

After finishing that off, I starting making dinner while my wife and Scully were out at the hospital doing their Delta therapy dogs visit. I bought kipfler potatoes on the weekend, planning to make potato salad at some point, and I figured I had just about enough time to get it done in time for dinner tonight. I boiled them up, and also made a couple of hard boiled eggs while doing that. I’m glad I’ve found an effective way to make the eggs so they’re easy to peel. I used have trouble peeling eggs until I stumbled across the technique of plunging them in iced water immediately after removing them from the boiling water. It helps a lot.

I also chopped and fried some onion – I normally use raw red onion which is milder, but I only had brown onions so I cooked it a bit to soften the flavour. And chopped some gherkins. Mixed it all together with some mustard and prepared coleslaw dressing. I know they make potato salad dressing, but I find coleslaw dressing to be more to my taste, with a bit more tang and less creaminess to it.

To serve with the potato salad I cooked up some vegetarian sausages – spicy Italian flavour, which had tomatoes and herbs in them – and some asparagus. It all turned out really nice.

Tomorrow morning is my first Ethics class for the year, meeting a new group of students. To prepare I printed out the lesson plan and went over it. It’s a simple introductory lesson, mostly about meeting the students, going through the rules of the class, and giving them a taste of the sort of things we discuss during the rest of the year. My job for this lesson is mostly about learning the names of the kids as quickly as I can! It took me four weeks last year to be able to go without name tags. Let’s see if I can beat it this year.

New content today:

Ethics kickoff morning tea

The new school year has begun after the summer holidays, and the kids are getting stuck into new classes. This means a new group of kids for me when my Primary Ethics classes begin. The school needs a couple of weeks to get the kids settled into new routines before they start the scripture/ethics classes, so my first day with the new Year 6 group will be 19 February, two weeks from today.

This morning we had a morning tea to meet the new teachers and for our coordinator to give us any relevant news. We met in a cafe near the school, and had a group of 7 present, with a couple of others who were’t able to make it today. Besides the coordinator, there are two women returning from last year, one woman transferring from another school where she taught ethics last year, and two new men starting this year.

One of the main issues we have this year is the fire that burnt down the school hall a couple of weeks ago. The hall was the venue for non-scripture, the kids who do neither scripture nor ethics classes, and there were a lot of kids in there, who now need to find somewhere else to sit and be supervised. Which puts pressure on the limited classroom space. So our coordinator told us that we may end up having some of our ethics classes outdoors. Which will be challenging if it happens that way.

I walked to the cafe and back, nearly 9 km of walking, and we spent 1.5 hours chatting there, so this ended up eating up the entire morning and I didn’t get home until after midday. This afternoon I’ve been making spreadsheets of costs and pricing figures for my nascent photography business, as well as recording invoices and taxes and stuff. Fortunately the accounting is fairly simple and I think I can handle it with nothing more complex than a spreadsheet.

This evening for dinner I cooked something I’ve never cooked before: Brussels sprouts. I bought some the other – the first time in my life I’ve ever bought them. I used to hate them as a kid, and thought they were disgusting. But a few weeks ago my wife and I went to a restaurant and one of the recommended side dishes was fried Brussels sprouts, with salt and chilli. I’m always keen to try something new, so we ordered them… and they were delicious! So I decided to see if I could emulate them.

I made vegetarian sausages, mashed potato, and I fried the sprouts, cut in half, in some olive oil with a pinch of salt, fresh sliced garlic, and some dried chilli flakes. And wow, it turned out really good! So easy to make.

New content today:

Final Ethics of the year

This morning was my last Ethics class of the school year. I walked to the school (3.1 km away) because the weather was cool and winds had blown yesterday’s smoke away, thankfully.

In this class we didn’t discuss ethical questions, but instead reflected on the year gone past and what the students learnt. I asked them what topics they enjoyed most, which ones made them think when other students expressed different opinions, and which, if any, changed their minds. We had a really good discussion, and the kids’ behaviour was excellent. Towards the end of the lesson I handed out completion certificates to each child. I told them I wished them well as they begin high school next year, and said I would miss them, as this would probably be the last time we ever see each other.

I genuinely will miss (most of) them, and it makes me a bit sad to think that I really won’t ever see any of them again. However when the bell went, they basically just got up, waved bye, and filed out the door. I think at their age it doesn’t really hit them when they have to say goodbye to someone forever. Come February I’ll have a brand new class with new names to learn, and no doubt I’ll grow fond of the new kids as well.

I decided to walk home through the Lane Cove Bushland Park, which is more or less an alternate “shortest” route home. The track passes through some dense bush, and it would be very difficult to go cross-country off the established walking track. I should have emerged back into a street near my place, but when I was almost there I found a fence blocking the track, with signs indicating that it was undergoing repairs and was closed for safety due to heavy equipment being used. The idea of jumping a safety fence and incurring the wrath of construction workers didn’t appeal, so I had to backtrack through much of the park and emerge an extra kilometre of so away from home, adding maybe 2 km to my journey.

On the way though, I went down some streets I’ve never walked down before, and found a lovely old estate house on a big block of land:

Back home, I didn’t have much time before picking up my wife and Scully to take them to their very first job as a Delta Dogs therapy dog team! This was an event held at Macquarie University for international students who won’t be travelling home to see family over Christmas, with the dogs there to give them some good cheer. They had a team of seven dogs there today, with Scully among them. Normally she’ll be working solely with my wife on hospital visits, but occasionally they have other sorts of events like this as well. Here’s Scully in her Delta uniform:

While I waited to pick them up I had lunch at a nearby friend’s place, and we played a game of Wingspan (the same game I played last Friday games night), which I won handily. Then I picked up Scully and my wife to head home.

I spent this afternoon and evening doing some coding work on the mezzacotta generators, adding some stuff to a new band name generator which we’ve been collaborating on.

Oh, and last night I made a batch of eggnog, using Jamie Oliver’s recipe. It had to refrigerate overnight, so I didn’t taste it until tonight. Actually, I had some commercially produced eggnog at my friend’s place at lunch today, to compare it against. It was the first time in my life I’ve ever had eggnog. The commercial stuff tasted okay, but honestly not something I’d buy.

But then I had my own home-made eggnog tonight… and it was delicious! A much nicer drink than what I’d had at lunchtime.

Yummo! I’ll definitely be making more of this some time.

New content today:

Rhino poaching

Today was the second last Ethics class of the year, and I started a new topic with my class this morning. It was about the dangers of false beliefs, and started with a story about rhinoceroses being endangered by poaching, driven by the trade in horn for traditional medicines. There was a sharp increase in rhino poaching after 2010, when a prominent Chinese politician declared publicly that rhino horn had cured him of cancer. The question put to the children was: Who is to blame for the rhinos being endangered?

There were several possible answers: The politician, practitioners of traditional medicine who push the “cures”, the masses of people who believe that rhino horn will help them, and the poachers. Most of the kids agreed that the poachers deserved most, or even all, of the blame, as the ones who are actively killing the animals.

There were a few other short questions on who is to blame for various things, such as a cricket player hitting a ball out of the field and damaging a car (the kids mostly agreed the player should not be blamed). And then we ended with some questions about various false beliefs, and if it matters whether people believe them or not. It doesn’t matter if a young child believes superheroes are real, but it does if an adult believes it, because they might be regarded as crazy. It matters if people believe smoking is not harmful. It matters if people believe rhino horn can cure cancer.

Back at home, I avoided going out again because of the ongoing smoke in the air around Sydney. There are now stories every day about the adverse health effects of this bushfire smoke hanging over Sydney. The air quality has been awful for days on end now, and it’s forecast to stay until at least Saturday. Today was warm and tomorrow will be hotter, and the fires continue to burn. I saw a story on the news today that said that in parts of Sydney the smoke is so heavy that being outdoors for eight hours is equivalent to smoking 40 cigarettes.

So I stayed indoors and assembled comics from the photos I took yesterday. I also briefly drove Scully to doggy daycare, so she could get some exercise and play time with other dogs, because it would be bad to take her out in the smoky air outdoors.

For dinner tonight I tried a new combination: mushrooms, broccolini, pine nuts, garlic, and a bit of basil pesto as a sauce for pasta. Normally when we do pesto we just have that, but throwing a couple of vegetables in added some nice body and texture to the dish.

New content today: