teaching – dangermouse.net

Starting up data engineering again

Today was the first lecture session for the University of Technology Sydney first year course on Data Engineering. As in the past few years, I’m doing tutoring work on this course again. Unfortunately the scheduled lecture time clashed with two of my online ethics classes, so I’ve had to move them from Monday to Tuesday. I don’t think all of the kids can make the new day, so some will probably have to drop the class.

Straight after my two morning classes, I had to dash off and take Scully to my wife’s work and drop her off there, then dash to the Metro station and catch a train into the city. I stopped quickly at a supermarket to get some sushi for lunch, since I hadn’t had time to eat anything while travelling, and just made it to the lecture on time. I had to eat my sushi in the class as the lecturer began teaching! It’ll be like this in two weeks as well (next week I’ll be away in Tokyo so will miss the lecture), but after that the US goes on to daylight saving time, and I move all my day classes an hour earlier to adjust (since most of the students in them are in the US), so I’ll have an extra hour to get into the university and have lunch.

The lecture went pretty well. I expected more people in the class, but I suspect some stayed home today because there was a sort of shadow strike action on the Sydney trains today, with hundreds of train drivers calling in sick in what the government calls an unauthorised strike action, but which the rail workers union claims was genuine sickness. Being a Monday, and the first lecture of a first year course, it may well have been the first time these students had attended a university lecture.

I made it back homeward in time to meet my wife at work and we walked home together with Scully. I made pizza for dinner tonight, and am finishing off some final Irregular Webcomic! strips for this week, before heading into two more ethics classes from 8pm. Quite a busy day!!

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Finished marking. Nearly.

Today I tackled the last of the video assignments from the university image processing class. I had some… interesting… issues to deal with. I shouldn’t say too much about them, but a few students had done bad things and I had to consult with the professor to determine how to handle comments and marking.

I also had an interesting online ethics class this morning. The topic is still Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities, and the first class I had with older 13-15 age group kids kept getting sidetracked into them bringing up a certain recent election and a certain previous President who is set to be President again as examples. I had to keep reminding them we weren’t there to talk about politics. Fortunately all the kids were pretty unanimous in their opinions (negative!), so there were no arguments.

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Video assessments

Today I got stuck into the individual video reports from the masters students in the image processing course. I had 17 to view and mark. I managed to get through 12 of them today. I would have done more, but I had a moment of horrific realisation when I reached the second group of students and had the suspicion that the paper subject they were talking about had nothing to do with their group project report.

I checked, and discovered to my shock that I had accidentally downloaded the report of the wrong student team and marked that yesterday! So I had to scrap that work, download the correct report, and spend a couple of hours reading through and marking that before I could get back to viewing the videos. That was pretty awful.

By 5pm I was wasted on marking and had a bit of time away from the screen to relax my eyes before launching into three consecutive ethics classes. Apart from a lunch break and that time, I was working essentially 9am to 9pm today.

So I’m going to take a well deserved break and watch the second half of my current movie on Netflix. A quite fun horror film called Abigail. No spoilers, but it’s playful and amusing.

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Is marking assignments a right, a privilege, or a responsibility?

Lots of teaching related stuff today. I started by writing my lesson plan for this week’s ethics topic of “Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities”. I got that done fairly quickly, and I think I have plenty of material.

Then I got stuck into marking more image processing final reports. I wanted to power through the final three written reports today, leaving me with just the 16 individual paper review videos to do. I managed it, and then entered all the marks so far into the university system. I found a faster way to do it than I’ve been doing the past three years. Instead of sequentially pasting remarks into each individual student’s page, having to copy/paste the same remarks 6 times for each member of the team, I opened all six team members at once in different browser tabs and pasted each remark 6 times with just one copy. It saved a significant amount of tedium.

In between I took Scully for a walk up the street to the shops and got some sushi for lunch. Scully was off her food today with a tummy upset, but seems better this evening.

Tonight I had the first class with the ethics topic. After going through some questions on the differences between rights, privileges, and responsibilities, I had a triangle diagram with one at each corner and asked where the kids thought things like “medical care” or “driving a car” or “voting” are. The voting one was very polarising. One kid said it was halfway between a privilege and a responsibility, but not a right. One said it was dead in the middle of all three. And the third kid said it was all the way in the “right” corner – he said everyone over the age of seven (!) should be allowed to vote and nobody should have that right taken from them.

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Games and marking

Friday was online games night. My wife and I went out to the local pizza place for dinner and I joined in games with my friends when we got home. We played El Grande and then Just One. People were in and out a bit doing things so we had a few interruptions.

The other main thing I’ve been doing both yesterday and today is continuing to mark university image processing assignments. I powered through the remainder of the undergrad ones today, both the written reports and the presentation videos. Now I only have three postgrad teams left to mark, but these will take longer because they have to submit individual video reviews of papers, rather than a single team video presenting their work. So I have seventeen 20-minute videos to go, having marked just four so far. So it’ll probably take me well into next week.

I did a 5k run today, barely scraping the distance under 27 minutes, which is a good time for me. Especially given it was 22.4°C and 75% humidity.

We had fajitas for dinner. I planned to do this to use up some halloumi which we’ve had in the fridge for a while. But when it came to chopping up the vegetables and cooking them up, I completely forgot about the halloumi!

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Back to the university

After two more Halloween special ethics classes this morning, I had some lunch (leftover Moroccan chick peas and rice from last night) and then went into the city to the university for the second last tutorial of the semester. The students are now working on their final assessment tasks and I’m there to assist and answer questions or provide suggestions and tips. It was a pretty busy session, as many students had questions arising from the first assessment report, which they just got their marks back from. Some of the teams are well advanced and looking good for their final reports, while others are a bit behind and trying to catch up on work. Hopefully the final reports I have to mark will be high quality!

Tonight I have two more classes online. Because we’re now into daylight saving time, they’re an hour later for me and I don’t finish until 10pm. In between I’m doing Japanese on Duolingo and watching Italian YouTube videos to practice my comprehension.

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Assessment marking day

Today I got up and went to collect the grocery shopping. I didn’t have time on Friday when I usually do this, due to the ISO meeting, and I forgot to order early enough to pick up on Saturday.

After getting home and having some breakfast I went for my 5k run. Today was the day of the charity 7 Bridges Walk around Sydney Harbour, and the walk route goes very close to my place. I had to choose a running route that wouldn’t intersect too much with the hordes of walkers. Interestingly, at various points along my run, I could see (in the distance) a total of 5 of the 7 bridges: Sydney Harbour Bridge, Pyrmont Bridge, Anzac Bridge, Iron Cove Bridge, and Gladesville Bridge. It was a good day for the charity walk event, as the weather was mild and partly cloudy.

For my run I was surprised to record an achievement on Strava, my fastest 2 mile time. I didn’t keep it up though, as my 5k time was good but not among my best times.

After I had a shower to freshen up I got stuck into marking the image processing assignments for the university course I’m tutoring. This was several hours of work, and I only finished just before dinner. I made a quiche with pumpkin and asparagus for dinner.

And now… tomorrow I have a full day off when I can relax and do nothing work-related! It’s usually my busiest day with online ethics classes, but since I cancelled a week of them to fit in my ISO meeting, I have none tomorrow, and will restart on Tuesday. The weather tomorrow looks decent, so I might spend a day out with Scully somewhere.

Oh! Also today we let Scully do another painting. This is a “dog painting” kit we got some time ago from my sister-in-law. We did the small canvas a while back, but finally decided it was time to do the larger one. You smear it with paint, seal the canvas in a plastic ziploc bag, the outside smeared with peanut butter, and then let Scully go to town licking it. Here’s what she painted:

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Sydney ISO meeting: Day 4; D&D night; marking day

Friday was the last day of the IOS Photography Standards meeting. We had one technical session on camera image information capacity. The goal of this project is to come up with measures that can be calculated from the pixel statistic that reflect how well the image supports machine vision tasks such as object detection to be performed. This is a very different measure from image quality for humans. The use case is similar in fact to the machine vision standard I mentioned on Day 1, but here we’re using measures such as the Shannon information capacity.

After that we had the closing administrative sessions, going over action items, finalising plans for the next meeting, adopting resolutions, and paying thanks to the various organisers and hosts (which includes me this time!).

I came home about 2:30pm and got straight into housecleaning to prepare for the Dungeons & Dragons game in the evening. I vacuumed, cleaned the shower and bathroom, and had a shower to freshen up. Friends arrived at 6pm and we played the next session of our current adventure. Much fun was had, and we finished up around 10:30.

Today I got up, had breakfast, went for a 5k run. I didn’t do as fast as last weekend. It was warmer and more humid, so it was a bit tougher going. After a shower I made a new Darths & Droids strip for tomorrow.

Then I got stuck into marking student assignments for the university image processing course. I have seven groups to mark, and got through three this afternoon. Hopefully I can polish off the last four tomorrow.

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Another full day of teaching

So, two ethics classes this morning, on the Copying topic. Followed by dropping Scully with my wife for the afternoon and heading into the university to teach at the Image Processing tutorial, while students are working on their final project assessment tasks. The professor is away this week at a JPEG meeting in Berlin, so it was just us tutors handling the students today.

And then back home for two more online ethics classes. In this topic I got an interesting take on copyright questions from one of the kids. She said that whether it’s okay or not to copy someone’s work and make money from it depends on how famous the work/author is. In the sense that it’s more okay if the work is more famous, and less okay if the original is less well known. When I asked her why, she explained that if you copy something well-known, then everyone will know it’s not your own work, and any amount you make off it will be tiny compared to the original creator. Whereas if you copy something relatively unknown, people will be deceived that you made it, and you could make more money than the original creator.

It’s not the direction I thought anyone would go when answering that question, but her logic was sensible and she’d clearly thought about it to try to come up with some reasoning. So I consider this a success!

Scully had another somewhat restless night, but not as bad as the past few. She went in and out a bit, but eventually settled down to sleep for the remainder of the night in our room as usual. So… maybe she’s getting used to whatever the disturbance is? I guess we’ll see tonight. I had a talk to the nearest neighbour who I suspected might be the most likely cause of ay new noise, but they said they haven’t started using any new equipment of any sort recently. Depending how tonight goes, I might have to write and copy a note to stick under the doors of several other apartments to try to locate the source.

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Hot and busy time passing

Today was very warm, close to 30°C. But I spent most of it inside doing my Monday classes online, ending the topic of “Time Passing”. I started work on planning for the next topic, which is “Copying Things”, covering aspects of copyright, intellectual property, and so on.

The weather tomorrow is set to be much cooler, with a forecast maximum of only 19°C. It may be another day like we had a week or two ago, where the maximum temperature was set at midnight.

In the afternoon I went for a walk with my wife (who was home from work for the Labour Day public holiday) and Scully. And then I made listings on eBay for some more of my 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons books that I don’t want any more. If you’re interested and in Australia, these may be a bargain for you to pick up (if you’re overseas the postage will probably be prohibitive):

My last class tonight started at 9pm, but because of daylight saving starting here it’s an hour earlier for all the students, including one in the USA who had it move from 7am to 6am. He was dedicated enough to get up early for it, but was yawning a bit. All my other classes I made an hour later (for me), to keep them at the same time for the students, but this one I really didn’t want to move to a 10pm start – I’d be turning into a pumpkin before it ended at 11pm. Unfortunately it’s going to get even worse for this kid in November when the US goes off daylight saving, and the class becomes a 5am start for him. I suspect he won’t keep doing it after that.

Finally, a weird thing I noticed taking photos of my D&D books for eBay. I’m using my brand new iPhone 16 and taking photos saved in HEIF format. Some of the photos when I open them in Photoshop, I hit save and it allows me to save them as a JPEG. But some of the photos I hit save and it has a restricted set of save formats available, excluding JPEG. I have to use “Save a copy” to create a copy of the image before I can save it as JPEG. I suspected it might be because the iPhone camera was automatically using HDR mode for some photos and saving them in a higher bit-depth or a different colour space or something, but examining the HEIC files shows no such differences – they’re all 8-bit colour in Display P3 colour space. I examined the EXIF tags of the images and I don’t see any salient differences at all.

So I have no idea why some of these images Photoshop will allow me to save as JPEGs and some it won’t. I tried searching briefly for an answer online, but my search terms couldn’t locate anything relevant.

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