teaching – Page 18 – dangermouse.net

Applying binary morphologies

This evening was lecture 3 of the image processing course that I am tutoring, dealing with some more basic image operations such as edge detection and binary morphological operations. By combining these you can do quite a lot of interesting things, such as image segmentation – identifying the shapes of objects and structures in an image.

The lecturer tried a workaround for the problem I had last week with unmuting my audio. During the tutorial time, he set Zoom so that nobody could unmute themselves. It turned out that this was a useful workaround – because when I joined a team chat on MS Teams, and unmuted myself, Zoom popped up an error dialogue telling me that it couldn’t unmute me because the host had disabled it. So I could talk on Teams without also talking on Zoom, like happened last week. But it does definitely indicate that clicking the unmute button on Teams is – for some reason – attempting to unmute me on Zoom as well.

I discussed this with some friends and they seemed to think this must be because the mute functions in both Teams and Zoom are implemented by accessing the global audio settings of my computer, rather than settings local to each program. So seemingly I can’t unmute just one program – both programs actually tell the system to unmute the whole computer. Which seems a completely daft way to implement things. And also – why do only I seem to have this problem? Why isn’t the net full of people making the same complaint??

Anyway, technical problems aside, today’s lesson went more smoothly than last week. I joined several student team chats and helped the students with various problems and questions. It’s good doing useful work and having students appreciate the assistance.

Other things I did today included the final lesson of the ethics of machines and robots with my Monday morning group. And going out for a walk at lunch to get some fish & chips and eat with Scully in the park overlooking the harbour.

The weather by the way is very spring-like. Warm and sunny, and many trees are starting to put out new green shoots and foliage. It’s definitely the start of the new season already… a very early end to winter. August is usually cold and very windy here in Sydney, but no sign of that at all yet. Temperatures for the next week will be 20-24°C.

New content today:

Erosion and dilation

Today I went through the material for Monday’s third lecture and tutorial on image processing. It’s about image segmentation and morphological operations (such as the titular erosion and dilation). I know about this stuff and how it works, but I’ve never actually done work with it or implemented it, which is what I have to teach in the tutorial session on Monday. So I worked through the exercises and got familiar with how to do them all in Matlab.

There was also another big walk with my wife and Scully today. We have a new favourite route, out along the peninsula west of us, and along a bushwalk track by the harbour shore, which emerges near streets at a small grassy area, which is quiet and where we can get Scully to run around chasing a ball for a while. It’s near the panoramic photos I posted in this entry a week ago.

COVID news was very bad today, with a new record high 466 cases in New South Wales. This has finally prompted the state government to strengthen the current lockdown restrictions, introducing them across the whole state, and reducing the distance you can travel from home from 10 km to 5 km. There’s a range of additional restrictions and removal of exceptions to get people moving around less as well. If only they’d done this 8 weeks ago when this outbreak began, we wouldn’t be in this current mess now.

New content today:

Late image processing Monday update

I was busy Monday evening with the image processing university course that I’m helping to teach. It was the first lecture to be followed by actual exercises for the students to do, which is the part I’m helping with. I spent much of the afternoon preparing by going through the exercises myself, and teaching myself a bit of Matlab at the same time.

The lecture part was good, with close to 200 students joining in on a Zoom meeting. Then we split up into teams of 5 students, each team with two assigned tutors to assist them. For this we used Microsoft Teams, where the lecturer had assigned each group to a separate team within the app. I had to jump between several teams to see if the students needed help and then assist them.

The problem I had was that several of the teams started voice chats to discuss the exercises. I tried joining one and was initially muted. I hit the unmute button and started talking… and after a while someone in the Zoom meeting said that I was talking there to all 200 students! I placed the MS Teams and Zoom windows so I could see both on my screen. I hit the unmute button in MS Teams, and I saw that Zoom also indicated I was unmuted there. Zoom was responding to mouse clicks and keyboard commands that should only have gone to MS Teams!

So I had no way of unmuting myself in MS Teams without also unmuting in Zoom! After a few minutes I had to shut down Zoom so that I could use voice chat in MS Teams. But even after I’d done this, the unmute function started to work intermittently in Teams – sometimes I’d start talking, thinking I was unmuted, but they couldn’t hear me, and sometimes they could. It was incredibly frustrating.

So I spent most of the time just using the text chat feature in MS Teams to provide assistance to the students. I’ll have to look into the muting function and see if I can work out what’s going on, and why there’s a weird interaction with Zoom. By the end of the hour assigned for the exercises, I felt like I’d been useful for several of the teams, so that was good at least.

With the class ending at 9pm I neglected to write this up and just wound down before bed time.

New content today:

First image processing lecture

This evening was the first lecture and tutorial of the image processing course that I’ll be tutoring for this semester. I had a bit of a mad scramble today when I realised that I needed a Zoom account based on my new university email address, and also a Microsoft account with the same address for using MS Teams, and then realising I had no idea how to get them as the university domain had been reserved by the university with both Zoom and Microsoft, so I couldn’t just create a new account and choose my own password. I had to go via the university somehow.

In the end I figured out MS Teams, but I still haven’t figured out what to do about the Zoom account – I may need to contact the university IT department or something. Thankfully I could join the Zoom lecture as a guest, and told the lecturer my predicament (via email) and he let me in.

The first lecture was very introductory, and the tutorial segment was just the lecturer going through some basics of how to use MatLab. Next week we get stuck into some more meaty content, and the tutorial part will be the students doing exercises while I supervise and assist, mostly via MS Teams I think. There are 5 tutors and I think each will be assigned a subset of the students to look after, so I’ll have about 30-40 students to handle. So next week will be the real test of how well I do with this! Hopefully I’ll get a Zoom account sorted by then.

New content today:

Training and practice

Saturday… I had to complete the pre-job training I started yesterday. I was wrestling with trying to get the online training module loaded in Firefox, which was stated to be necessary because it didn’t work on Safari or Chrome. But My Firefox was refusing to let me log in, for a couple of frustrating hours until I realised I had JavaScript disabled. 🙄

Then I did the training which was supposed to take an hour, but ended up taking maybe 90 minutes.

And I’ve spent some time working on the Galactic Puzzle Hunt with friends. A bit too much time, perhaps…

New content today:

Administrivia day

170 new COVID cases in New South Wales in the last 24 hours, which is a welcome drop from yesterday’s high. Fingers crossed that this is the start of a downward trend, although to be honest I’m not very confident about that.

I spent much of today doing administrative tasks for the new casual tutoring job that I applied for a few weeks ago. I’m now on the University of Technology Sydney’s staff list as a casual academic. I needed to sign a contract, submit a passport quality photo for a staff ID card/access pass, activate my staff email account, do an online training module on occupational health and safety, do another online training module on sexual harassment, update my academic qualifications in the human resources database, add emergency contact person details in the HR database, check my banking details were correct, and then check out the course outline and presentation materials for the course I’m going to be tutoring. At some point I should also download MatLab and try out some of the exercises. (Being a staff member gives me a MatLab licence!)

It’s a course on Image Processing and Pattern Recognition. The lecturer is an associate of mine from my previous job. My role is as one of the course tutors, giving advice and assistance on the subject to individual students during the practical work portions and the end of semester project. The course begins on Monday, running in the evening from 6-9pm. Normally it would be face-to-face at the university, but because of the current COVID lockdown in Sydney, it will be all online for the first few weeks at least.

Tonight is another virtual games night with my friends. We’re doing an Olympic themed night. Each one of us has picked a country and we’re recording firsts, seconds, and thirds in each game we play.

New content today:

Casual job application

The top news today is not necessarily the state of my throat following the tonsillectomy, but I’ll provide an update anyway. It’s continuing to be less sore, but I still have significant pain when trying to move my tongue around or—as I discovered today—when trying to suppress a sneeze. I was eating breakfast and had some residual cereal and milk in my mouth that I hadn’t been able to flush clean with dextrous tongue movements between mouthfuls, when I suddenly had to sneeze. I ended up having to clean up splatters of cereal and milk off the carpet.

My wife and I took Scully on a big walk today, getting our lockdown exercise time out of the house. We met a little puppy, just 9 weeks old, whose owners still hadn’t even decided what name to call him, thought they said they were thinking Winchester. Scully and possibly-Winchester had some fun playing a bit. She likes playing with little dogs, especially any smaller than her.

But the main thing I did today was complete the application for that casual teaching position at the University of Technology, Sydney, that I mentioned two days ago. I didn’t complete it then because I got to page 3 of the online form, after filing in simple things like my name and contact details, and found that it asked for a full curriculum vitae, including things like my philosophy of education, evidence of sensitivity when teaching students of diverse cultural backgrounds and identity, and experience teaching in a university context with feedback from students! So I deferred that to today, and spent some time sprucing up a CV and composing answers to the various questions.

I finished that just after lunch and submitted my responses and uploaded my CV, and then discovered that page 4 of the online application form requested a 5 minute video with myself answering questions about what practices are important for teachers to engage students, give a “rich example” of a teaching method I have used, give an example of when I have adapted to student feedback in my teaching strategy, and talk about why I want to teach and what benefits I would bring to the faculty!! Holy cow!

So I spent much of the afternoon writing a script and then recording a video of myself. Hilariously, the first take went perfectly… except that I thought I’d started recording when I actually hadn’t, and when I hit the record button again after I’d finished in order to stop the recording, it actually began recording. So I had to do the whole thing again from scratch.

Eventually I completed the video, uploaded that, and completed the application. Here’s hoping that after all this effort I get the job!

I intended to do some comics work in the afternoon, but I was so mentally worn out, and it was getting late in the afternoon and time to think about what to make for dinner, that I never got into it.

I’m now trying a larger fraction of Seedlip Spice 94 (mentioned yesterday) in an alcohol-free drink with some lemon juice and soda. I’m still not getting it. On a more careful sniff with more of the product in a glass, the aroma of the Seedlip is subtly attractive, with warm spicy notes of cloves and cinnamon, but the flavour is, well… pretty flavourless. It has a hint of citrus on the palate, but the spice doesn’t really come through very much at all. I’m going to persist trying it in various combinations until I empty this bottle I bought, but honestly I can’t see myself ever buying it again. In my opinion, it’s a complete debacle for the $50 a bottle price tag.

New content today:

Getting stuck into big science

This morning I had my face-to-face ethics class, after skipping last week due to the students having tests. It was the second lesson of the Vanity topic, and in this one we had three scenarios and the kids had to discuss how vain the people in the scenarios were, and assign them on a scale of 1 to 10. One of the scenarios introduced the idea that vanity can be about things other than appearance, and posed the questions of whether that was any better or worse. And we discussed the big question: Is there anything wrong with being vain?

Back at home I spent much of the day working on outlines for my planned Big Science series of lessons for my online classes. I’ve completed outlines for atomic theory, evolution, relativity, and am mostly done on quantum mechanics. After I finish that and the next two, I’ll start work on detailed lesson plan and assembling slides to illustrate it. That’s the hard part, because as discussed before I can’t just grab pictures off the Internet. I have to make sure they’re public domain, or make them myself. So that will take a bit longer.

One good thing is that I came up with a common thread to tie all these topics together. Each will demonstrate the process of science, with different aspects covered: thought experiments, physical experiments, construction of models, making predictions, testing theories, assembling evidence, refining models, and so on. Basically the scientific method. So the overall uniting theme will be the development and use of the scientific method as a means of discovering how things work. So I’m pretty pleased with that as a concept!

On a completely different topic, I was just watching a cooking show on TV – while making and then eating dinner. It’s an Australian show, in which one of our celebrity chefs invites two guests to join him, and they all cook a dish while having a chat about food, their careers, their lives, whatever. Tonight’s guests were chefs from America. There’s a theme ingredient each show that they all have to use. Tonight’s ingredient was lemons, so the host chose to make lemon chicken.

Now, everyone knows and loves lemon chicken, right? Well… apparently only everyone in Australia knows and loves lemon chicken, because neither of the American chefs had ever even heard of it! I know certain dishes are regional, but I’m surprised to learn that lemon chicken is not widespread enough to even be known in the US. To chefs, no less.

I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised at Chinese-derived dishes in particular being a complete disjoint set between Australia and the USA. I’ve been in Chinese restaurants in the US and literally not recognised a single dish on the menu. And I know American friends who’ve visited here and had similar experiences not recognising any dishes on our Chinese menus.

But wow… lemon chicken. You Americans are really missing out!

New content today:

A new course idea

After yesterday’s disappointment with Outschool’s rejection of my idea for a Harry Potter themed ethics class, I started work on a new idea for a class. This time it’ll be science.

The idea is a six-week course, with one session a week about the six biggest ideas in science, one from each of chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy… and physics gets two because it’s impossible to choose. Respectively, the topics are: atomic theory, evolution, plate tectonics, the Big Bang, and the two physics ones are relativity and quantum mechanics. And I’ll do them from a historical perspective, showing the development of the ideas and why they were needed to resolve problems in each of their respective fields.

It’ll take some time to assemble the material. I’ll need to make class notes and slides for each lesson, and probably draw a lot of diagrams from scratch since I can’t use anything downloaded from the net that might be copyright. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

New content today:

No Harry Potter for you!

Outschool got back to me about the Harry Potter themed ethics classes I submitted for approval. They were not approved.

They said that due to a request from Warner Brothers, they did not allow any classes that mention Harry Potter in either the title or description, other than literary analysis classes. A friend of mine pointed out that Warner Brothers don’t own the copyright on the Harry Potter novels, and I’m not making a movie out of the material, so how is it even any of their business? The answer was actually in Outschool’s email, reading more carefully.

Warner Brothers has a trademark on the name “Harry Potter” and several other terms from the movies. And it looks like they are ruthless in enforcing it. Outschool, quite sensibly, doesn’t want to anger the dragon, so they have a strict policy of not allowing any Harry Potter content at all, other than literature analysis classes.

So… that’s the end of that. I’d hoped that theming an ethics class using Harry Potter would attract a lot of students. My approved, unthemed class has had no enrolments yet. I’m sure a lot of kids would actually enjoy it, but it’s going to be hard for them to notice it and decide to pursue it.

Beyond feeling bad about this, I spent the day writing Darths & Droids comics. And made pizza for dinner, with hand-made dough for the base. I don’t think I’ll go back to store-bought pre-made bases again!

Oh, here’s a photo I took yesterday while out walking Scully. This kookaburra was sitting on a branch about head height, right near the path I was walking on. I approached slowly with my phone held out at arm’s length, and managed to get close enough to take this photo before it flew away. This is not cropped either – it’s the entire image from my phone camera.

New content today: