ethics – dangermouse.net

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.

New content today:

8 kilos of cards mailed

Today I worked on a new Darths & Droids strip in the morning. Then before lunch I had to pack almost 8 kilograms of Magic: the Gathering cards to be mailed off. Someone had bought a huge stack of common cards off me, and a smaller number of uncommons and some rares. It added up to a fair value, but it’s also good to simply get rid of a large shoebox full of cards!

It was too heavy to consider walking up to the post office, so I drove up with Scully. I was hungry so we sat at the fish & chip shop first and I had a chicken burger for lunch. Then I went to the post office and sent the package. I also sent off a copy of each of my two Irregular Webcomic! books to a reader. I still have a few copies of those available (in case anyone reading this wants some).

This evening I had three ethics classes on the new topic of Time Passing, which I started yesterday. I think this is a slightly tricky topic to get the kids talking about, as some of the questions are a bit abstract and open, and their thinking is still a bit limited. As in they’re imagining restrictions to possible answers that aren’t really there. For example, I ask them “What are some things that change over time?” and a lot of the answers are focused on technology, while ignoring other potential avenues such as nature, culture, or societal values. I’m still working out how to encourage broader responses without too much prompting. But hopefully it’s a good exercise in getting the kids to think more broadly, rather than setting their own restrictions.

New content today:

Busy Baking Bits

I made sourdough bread today, and I made pizza for dinner. Tonight we had mushroom pizza, which is a topping we don’t have too often.

Again, it was a pretty standard day. I had a bunch of classes to teach. And in between I worked on next week’s new topic, which is Time Passing. I’ll be asking the kids questions about what things change over time, how fast, why, and what’s good and bad about how things change. We’ll also look at aspects of nostalgia, and looking forward to the future.

The reason I did it today instead of waiting until Tuesday like I normally do is that tomorrow I’m planning to go out in the morning and spend the time doing some stuff I wouldn’t normally get to do. This is because my wife is going to take Scully to work, so I won’t have to look after her at all, and I can go places that I wouldn’t be able to take a dog. I’m thinking I might do the Bondi to Coogee walk.

New content today:

Reasons to lie

It’s interesting in this current ethics topic I’m teaching on Detecting Lies. I ask the kids what are some reasons why people might tell lies. The very first thing they think of, in every single class, is:

If someone does something they shouldn’t, they might lie to stay out of trouble.

I presume this is because it’s the main reason kids lie.

This morning I worked on another new Darths & Droids comic. It was chilly and showery, so I waited until after to lunch to do my 5k run. Then it was the usual kind of afternoon and evening with classes, and cooking dinner. Tonight we had pasta with pesto and some chopped broccoli and pumpkin pieces mixed in.

I also booked a nice restaurant for our wedding anniversary, which is coming up in a few weeks. We asked our neighbours if they’d mind Scully for the evening and they were delighted to say yes.

Not much else to say about today – it was a pretty routine Sunday.

New content today:

A short bushwalk at Allambie Heights

This morning I wrote up my next week’s ethics class, on the topic of Detecting Lies. I’m going to play a little game where I tell the students two “facts” about me, one of them true and the other a lie. And they have to ask me questions and try to figure out which is true and which is false. I’ve chosen a list of unlikely but plausible things. Hopefully it should be fun!

The idea is to get the kids thinking and talking about how easy or difficult it is to tell whether someone’s lying. What signs are there? How could you probe to find out if someone’s lying? What if someone invented an app that could tell if people were lying by analysing their voice, and it was accurate – what effect would that have on society?

After writing that up, I took Scully for a drive to refill the car’s fuel and to pick up some pies for lunch at one of my favourite pie shops, at Allambie Heights. I had a vegetable curry pie and a pumpkin and feta one. Last time I looked on Google Maps at the park where I normally eat my lunch there, I noticed there are some bushwalking tracks right behind it. So today I explored a short loop track with Scully. It leads into the Manly Dam Reserve, also known as the Manly Warringah War Memorial Park. The area I was in was at the top of some hills, so we had a good view over the park.

You can see the Manly Dam reservoir in that photo. I don’t think it’s used for drinking water any more – the park and reservoir are used for recreation. Here’s Scully posed on the lookout rock.

The track we walked along was mostly surrounded by heathland. Scully was not impressed.

Back home in the afternoon I sorted some more Magic cards to prepare for selling them. I also made a sourdough loaf to give to our neighbours while returning the now-empty and cleaned jar of home-made marmalade that they gave to us a few weeks ago. I took them over while the bread was still warm from the oven, and they said they’d try some tonight.

New content today:

Deep learning and fire weather

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:

Comics batch done!

This morning we had to do an emergency bed linen change and wash, after Scully threw up on the bed. Thankfully this is a very rare occurrence, but it’s nasty when it happens.

I spent much of the day finishing off that batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I wrote and photographed a couple of weeks ago. I do batches of 30 strips at once for efficiency purposes, enough to last six weeks. And now they’re all done and uploaded, so I won’t have to do any more until mid-October. Phew!

I actually completed what I think will be the last strips in a couple of the themes, as I work towards winding down the entire comic. It’ll be interesting to see how many readers realise which strips are the last ones for any given theme.

In ethics classes tonight I asked that question I posed yesterday: If there’s a queue of cars waiting to exit in a single turning lane, and some driver decides to jump the queue by driving up the adjacent lane and then merging into the turning lane just before the turn: should the queued cars let them in, or should they bunch up to block them out?

Two kids from Taiwan were both very insistent that you not let the car in.
One girl from Australia said you should let them in, but wind down your window and….
I thought she was going to say “Yell at them.” But she actually said, very politely and meekly, “… tell them not to do it again.”
And one kid from Singapore said you should let them in, even though they’ve done the wrong thing, because it’s dangerous to block the second lane.

A friend of mine predicted that the answers would vary by country, and so far he seems to be right.

New content today:

Tax return time

Today I prepared my class plan for the new week’s critical thinking and ethics class, on the topic of Driving. I came up with a lot of questions, and in the first class tonight got through only about half of them. Which is a good thing – better than running out of material!

One interesting question I’m asking in this one is if there’s a queue of cars waiting to exit in a single turning lane, and some driver decides to jump the queue by driving up the adjacent lane and then merging into the turning lane just before the turn: should the queued cars let them in, or should they bunch up to block them out? And why? I expect there to be some varied answers to this one!

Scully got a big walk at lunch time – we spent about an hour and a half out before returning home. The weather has improved since the weekend and it was a really nice mild day.

This evening after dinner (lentils, potatoes, and broccoli with some curry spices) my wife and I sat down to do our tax returns. I’m sure I mentioned this last year, but the Australian Tax Office has really streamlined tax returns and it takes only a few minutes online to confirm all the financial stuff they already know, and to add in some deductions and my foreign income from Outschool (that the ATO doesn’t automatically know about). We were done with both of our returns in under half an hour. Job done for another year!

New content today:

Like Garfield, Mondays can be the worst days sometimes

Monday is my busiest day with online ethics classes. I have four between 8am and 1pm, with an hour break in between the two sets of two. And two of my most challenging classes are in this batch, with kids who are reluctant to speak, have difficulty speaking, I have difficulty understanding, have technical issues with their audio, and/or have lots of distracting background noise making hearing the difficult. It takes a real effort to concentrate on what they’re saying, or give them enough time to think, or encourage them to speak, or work around the audio issues.

By 1pm I was worn out. It was time to take Scully for a walk and get some lunch. We went up to the fish & chip shop and I grabbed some fish & chips there, then we walked down to the park by the ferry wharf to sit and eat by the water. This is a nice secluded park which is never busy, so it’s good for Scully to run around in. After eating I threw a ball for her to chase and fetch a bit, before we started walking home.

In the afternoon I worked on assembling more Irregular Webcomic! strips from the last photo batch. I got through a few, but still have many more to go.

My wife took Scully on another walk before dinner, and I met them up at a supermarket to buy some pizza cheese and pumpkin for dinner.

Tonight I have two more ethics classes. These are easier ones, but the last is from 9-10pm, so it’s quite late. Phew! It’s a long day.

New content today:

Dealing with Hate

This morning I wrote up my lesson outline for the new week’s ethics topic, which is Hate. And this evening I had the first class on this topic. There was a new girl in the class, a younger sister of another girl who’s been doing my classes for a couple of years now. She was nine years old, a bit under the recommended age range of 10-12. And it turned out to be a rather intense introduction, with lots of questions about hating things and the consequences of hatred. Hopefully she didn’t find it too heavy going and will return next week!

This afternoon I did more comics stuff. But in between I took Scully on a long walk, around the Waverton loop past the harbour shore. She did some tennis ball chasing on the grass down there to get some exercise. And when my wife got home from work we did two more walks! A short one before my class, and then a longer one afterwards to go to the grocery store and get some sour cream and a zucchini for dinner. I made vegetable fajitas, with the zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower, onion, carrot, and mushrooms.

Tomorrow I should have a bit more time to do some other things. Hopefully!!

Oh, I see announcements have been made about the new Apple iPhone 16, to be released soon. It’s about time I upgraded my old phone, as the battery life is getting quite short. I wanted to do it before our trip to Tokyo in February, so hopefully there’ll be plenty of supply of the new model before then.

New content today: