Tag: teaching

Engineering data 2

It seems this intense rain weather system is very unpredictable. We were bracing for very heavy rain today, potentially the worst so far, but it turned out nowhere near as bad as yesterday.

Still, what rain there was, and flash flooding, interrupted train services. I had to travel into the university this evening for lecture 2 of the Data Engineering course. I could leave a bit earlier since there wasn’t the ISO meeting this week, and I did so, planning a leisurely dinner at a nice Asian place in the “Spice Alley” food laneway near the uni. But I ended up waiting 40 minutes at the station for a train – about 6 or 7 trains in a row were cancelled. And of course by the time a train finally showed up, it was full of people – meaning I had to cram on in what seemed like a ridiculously dangerous proximity given COVID.

I got to the university too late for a sit down meal, and wasted time tried to find a sushi place where I could just grab a take-away bento box, but in vain. In the end I ended up in the university food court, where half the places were closed for the evening already, and I chowed down a chicken schnitzel on a tortilla quickly before heading to the lecture room.

The lecture went well, and I had to wander around the room during the tutorial exercises and answer questions form students. It was pretty easy today but will get more complex as the course progresses.

New content today:

A bit of a busy day, more rain

Let’s see. It’s virtually bed time and I’ve been too busy to get to this today. I got up, had breakfast, went for my run. I finally managed to clock another time below 12 minutes today, which was good.

I had two ethics classes, finishing up the topic of genetic engineering. Then I worked on the next topic, which is the ethics of humour. I wanted to get that knocked off today so I wouldn’t have to do it tomorrow to an even harder deadline. Then I worked on making a new lesson for the girl who I’m teaching science, who I haven’t seen for a month. She’s been busy, but had time for a new lesson today. I did one on DNA and genetics. And I also had an extension class going through written homework for one of the ethics students.

For dinner I made potato pancakes, and my wife suggested serving them with a fried egg on top, which sounded good so i did that. It was a really good combo. A quick and easy dinner, because I’d been so busy that I didn’t want to cook anything complicated. Oh, I also made a sourdough loaf today.

I planned to start up new Irregular Webcomic! strips today, but when the new strip didn’t update at the expected time I realised that I hadn’t assembled the strips from the photos yet! So I spent the evening after dinner making new comics and uploading them. I only have two done, and need to photograph new ones in time for Wednesday, but I think I can manage that… maybe…

New content today:

Super busy week: Thursday

Today it was an online ethics class at 9am, then my daily run, then another class at 11am. I had to do my run in between because I wouldn’t have another good chance to do it today. Unfortunately, it was pouring rain at the time. I recorded a rather poor time, but at least I didn’t break my streak.

I took Scully for a short walk while I got some lunch. The rain had stopped by then, but it was incredibly humid, and even though we were just walking I was again dripping with sweat by the time we got home.

There were three technical sessions in the ISO standards meeting today, but I had to skip out on the third one in order to head into town and the University of Technology. Unfortunately the trains in Sydney have been disrupted all week by a contentious combination of industrial action and government petulance, so trains were running to a much reduced schedule. And of course it was pouring rain again.

I managed to get into the city in time, and stopped off to have a quick dish of beef rendang and roti at Spice Alley, a string of Asian eateries near the university. Then it was over to the uni and the lecture. The class was pretty full, without close to 100 students. It was easy going this week though, being just the introductory lecture, with no real tutorial exercise work for the students. They have until next week to get Matlab installed and running, so next week we can start doing exercises during the 3-hour class.

We ended a little early tonight, and then I made my way home on the train again. In the rain again. It was weird being on trains again, with large numbers of people. That’s the most crowded I’ve been with people for close to two years, and honestly it felt really weird. Everyone had masks on, so hopefully there’s not too much risk of getting COVID.

New content today:

Super busy week: Monday

This is going to be a hectic week. I have the ISO standards meeting starting tomorrow, but today had plenty going too.

I got up, had breakfast, went for my daily run. I had to wipe the sweat off and cool down quickly enough to take my first online ethics class, followed immediately by class number two. Then there was no break before I went out with my wife and Scully. My wife was running errand while I took Scully on a walk and to get myself some lunch. This was the most relaxing part of the day, as I sat and enjoyed a chicken pie, followed by a Nutella slice, from the Naremburn bakery that I’ve grown to really like.

After lunch it was straight into another class, a follow-up extension class on the patriotism topic. This one was moved from its usual timeslot on Wednesday, because of the the ISO meeting falling on top of that slot on Wednesday. And I had a second one of those extension classes at 6pm. In between I worked on writing a new Darths & Droids comic, which is in fact for tomorrow’s publication, because I’m so behind on making those at the moment. And afterwards there was follow-up work marking the kid’s homework and adding suggestions for a few web pages on English grammar for him to read up on.

For dinner I just did a quick dish of pre-made potato gnocchi from the supermarket and pesto. After dinner I made the comic strip and iterated through some comments by my friends. Oh, and did my post-run stretches that I hadn’t had time to do this morning before my first class!

Phew!! And the week is just going to get busier from here.

New content today:

Working on data visualisation

Besides running my 4 ethics classes today, I worked on slides for the lecture on data visualisation that I’m preparing for the university course. It starts one week from tonight – this time next week I’ll be at the university helping out with the introductory lecture for the course.

I kind of also had a lot of housekeeping chores to do today, some literal housekeeping, but some other things like renewing my child safety training for Primary Ethics, which I’ll be starting to teach again face-to-face next week at the school.

Oh, and I’m now in the middle of contacting all the parents for tonight’s two online ethics classes and arranging different timeslots for all the kids for next week, since I can’t teach classes at the same time as I’m at the university… teaching classes.

New content today:

Engineering data presentation

Today I dedicated time to working on student exercises for the topic of data visualisation and presentation for the Data Engineering course. I wrote a couple of exercises using some public datasets to show off some data visualisation features, and also to explore how presentation of the data can be used to push an agenda and deceive the viewer. Simultaneously I wrote sample Matlab code to carry out the exercises. I’ve just uploaded the exercises, datasets, and sample code to the university Canvas site (a web app that lets students access course data) – it sits there unpublished until the relevant week of the course, but the lecturer can view and edit it.

Next step will be to work on slides and diagrams for use during the same week’s lecture, which I’ll do later this week – hopefully to complete by Friday.

Besides this work, I did my usual 2.5k run, baked some sourdough, and at lunch I went for a long walk with my wife and Scully to get some lunch and some outdoor time. I also took Scully to the dog park late in the afternoon, to get a bit more exercise in and socialising with other dogs.

New content today:

Too busy for comics again

I have a very busy couple of weeks coming up, and unfortunately I’ve run out of buffered strips for Irregular Webcomic! Rather than try to squeeze in production of a new batch, I’ve declared this week another hiatus week, and am doing reruns instead. I hope to be able to make more comics in time for next week, but I’m not convinced that will happen, so we’ll have to see.

This week I have to concentrate on getting some more work done on the Data Engineering course for the University of Technology. The course starts next week on 24 February. The lecturer and I have weeks 1-4 mostly sorted, and I need to work on slides and exercises for week 5, while he works on week 6. I’m planning to work solidly on that tomorrow.

Today I finished off the ethics topic on Tourism with two more classes, plus an extension class for one student. I’ll also need to write the new topic on Patriotism for classes starting on Wednesday. And the other thing I had to do was sort out my schedule, because of clashes with the upcoming Data Engineering course.

Unlike last year when I did the tutoring work entirely from home, the university is opening up to face-to-face teaching again, and I’ll need to travel in to do the tutoring work. The class runs from 6-9pm every Thursday. The university is a 20 minute train ride and about 10 minutes walk away, so I’ll need to factor an hour to take care of contingencies and arrive on time, and I won’t get home until close to 10pm. So it clashes with my current two ethics classes on Thursday evening, which I’ve decided to move to Tuesday at the same times (currently my “day off”). So I had to write a note to inform the parents of all the students about the shift, and ask them to either confirm that their kids can continue on the new day, or look to transfer them to some other class time.

The other thing that will occupy much of next week is the next ISO Photography Standards meeting. It should have been in Yokohama, but we are still doing virtual meetings due to COVID travel restrictions. It’s on from Tuesday 22 to Friday 25 February. The good news is that it’s at a very reasonable time for my time zone this time, with sessions beginning at 2:15 pm and ending at 5:45 pm. And, incredibly fortunately, that only clashes with one Outschool class, which hopefully I can move to a different time. However the Thursday ending clashes with the time I need to leave home to be at the university for the first lecture of Data Engineering, so I’ve told the chairperson that I can’t attend the final technical session on Thursday, and he’s scheduled the session that I am least interested in for that timeslot. So it won’t be too bad. It’s definitely better than doing a Zoom meeting for four days after midnight! (Which will probably happen for the next meeting in June…)

Oh, and as if I didn’t have enough to do, I had an idea for a new class I could teach on Outschool: Philosophy of Science. Although I think I wouldn’t call it that – it needs a snappy name that won’t scare kids away. But the basic idea is a one-off class that teaches them about the scientific method, Occam’s razor, the fact that science builds models to explain observations, etc. Basically a primer on what science really is, and what it isn’t, to correct/forestall many of the popular misconceptions of how science works. I’ve recorded the idea for now… hopefully I’ll get to work on it some time in the not too distant future.

New content today:

Engineering data…

On my day off from doing anything ethics related*, I worked on making exercises for the university data engineering course. I completed a couple of exercises, and wrote Matlab code to be an example solution, and then uploaded them and passed them on to the lecturer so he can integrate them into the lecture for the relevant week. These are fairly simple exercises on calculating summary statistics from a bunch of data, and making conclusions about the data based on them.

Then I started work on exercises for the next week’s lecture on data presentation. I’m partway through that, and hope to finish it off later this week.

Tonight I tried a new thing: sourdough pizza dough. It didn’t rise nearly as much as dough made with yeast – it would have been good if I could have let it rise for longer, but the timing is tricky with sourdough starter. I fed the starter this morning and then made the dough about an hour before dinner. I probably should have fed the starter last night, made the pizza dough in the morning, and let it rise in the fridge most of the day and taken it out for a final hour or so at room temperature.

But despite that it turned out pretty well! The pizza crust was nicely different and it didn’t really matter that it hadn’t risen much.

* That sounds wrong… I mean, I didn’t specifically do anything unethical today.

New content today:

Scully’s grooming day

Today I dropped Scully off at the dog groomer for her regular clip.She was getting quite shaggy, but now after the grooming she’s trim and velvet-fuzzy again.

In between I did my last couple of ethics classes for the topic of Artificial Intelligence. I did some comics stuff. And now that I’ve finished off the paper proofreading that occupied last week it’s time to start working some more on the data engineering course that I’m helping out with. This week I need to produce some exercises for students to do on summary statistics and data presentation, and also make some graphics for the data visualisation slides for the lectures.

This involves writing some actual code for the first time in ages. Both Matlab, and also some Python to massage some of the raw data downloads I’ve found into better shape for exercises.

Oh, and when I was outside doing stretches in the park across the street after my run, I saw about a dozen ravens circling right above my home. I can only presume this means something ominous. And for reference, I know that our place is built on the site of a former church, which must have been demolished to make way. So… it’s entirely possible that the place I live in is built on a former graveyard…

Maybe I’ve been watching too much horror on Netflix.

New content today:

Friday/Saturday double post

Friday I was very busy, doing the last part of the paper editing, so I could get it sent back to the author by the end of the working week. Then when I’d completed it and sent if off, the author wrote back to remind me that I also had their response letter to the journal to go through! So I had to do that as well, and cross-reference all of the comments regarding changes they’d made to address concerns raised by the referees, to make sure they were consistent between the edited paper and the letter. I had to change a couple of the edits I’d made. Finally I got it all done and sent off. Then the author wrote back to remind me that I had to draw up an invoice for the labour!

I had a couple of ethics classes before dinner, and then my wife and I went out to a Turkish restaurant near us to unwind and enjoy a nice meal. We tried a new dish, red lentil koftas, which I liked, but my wife thought they were very spicy.

After dinner it was virtual games night with my friends. I was joining late because of the dinner, but got in games of 7 Wonders, Kingdomino, Coloretto, Azul, and Wavelength. I neglected to post a blog entry because I was playing games.

Today my wife was doing a few things, and I took Scully out for a walk a couple of times in the morning so she wouldn’t get upset at my wife leaving. Then in the afternoon we all went for a walk together and to give Scully some ball-chasing exercise. The weather was unsettled, with intermittent sun, showers, and some heavy rain. We got caught in the rain when out with Scully, but it stopped and we’d dried out by the time we got home.

New neighbours moved in downstairs today. They have a cavoodle, and unfortunately Scully was barking and growling for much of the afternoon, hearing it running around in the yard down there. I posted a note under their door to introduce ourselves and suggest that we let the dogs meet each other some time soon, so they can get to know each other to eliminate the territorial behaviour. They messaged back and sounded nice, saying some time tomorrow would be good.

Late this afternoon I took some time to do a taste test on four bottles of gin. I’ve almost finished one bottle, and had been waiting for a chance to do this comparison test before emptying it. I was comparing Bombay Sapphire Sunset, Buffalo Vale Clair de Lune, Backwoods High Country, and Backwoods Muscat Gin (a special limited edition, no longer available). I find the differences between gins to be fairly subtle, and can only really pick it with side-by-side tasting, which is why I do this occasionally with as many bottles as I have, comparing the old ones just about to run out with the new bottles that I’ve recently acquired. The muscat one is unusual because of the sweet muscat grape infusion, but the other three are all conventional gins with subtle differences that I took notes on: Sunset was warm and spicy, with citrus peel notes; Clair de Lune is earthy and woody with lemon/lime hints; High Country was orangey, floral, and a bit grassy.

New content today: