Tag: ethics

The scientific method

I started my new weekly ethics topic with three classes today, on the scientific method. I’m a lot happier with this topic than the last one on digital assets, which I felt was a bit too technical for some of the kids, and they didn’t really enjoy it as much. This one feels better. It’s really more about critical thinking, but since my class is advertised as “Critical and Ethical Thinking”, that’s not a bad thing.

It was supposed to rain here today, being stormy, but there was barely a sprinkle. We may have more move in overnight. The next few days are supposed to be very rainy. We’ll see.

Mostly otherwise I worked on comics, and did my 2.5k run, and took Scully for a walk.

Oh, and I got the agenda and schedule for the next ISO Photography Standards meeting, which is being held at Apple headquarters in Cupertino in November. I’ve decided not to fly over to California this time, but to attend via web conference. That means starting at 4am (9am in California), for three days in a row. It won’t be pleasant, but at this point I prefer that to flying to the United States, given COVID and the political situation over there.

New content today:

Stu-vac Monday

Today is mid-semester stu-vac (short for study vacation – I have no idea if this term is used outside Australia or not) at the University of Technology, so I don’t have my regular Monday evening tutoring class there today. And next week is the Labour Day public holiday, so there are no classes then either. I also have two weeks of school holidays off from teaching my Wednesday morning face-to-face ethics classes.

I used the extra time this evening to finish writing my class for online ethics. It was a tough one to write this week, taking me a lot longer than usual. The topic is the scientific method. Which I know how to explain, but I had to find ways to insert questions for student thought and interactivity throughout, which was tougher than I expected.

The morning was full of the final classes on digital assets. One was interesting, because it had a kid who for many weeks now has occasionally been bringing up NFTs as examples in his answers, and it’s clear that he has a very poor opinion of the concept. But he listened and contributed in a positive manner to the discussion, so that was good.

My wife and I took Scully on a long walk for lunch, and then this afternoon we took her to the dog park, for the first time in months. The old regulars there had missed us and wanted to know why we had been away so long. Much of the reason is busy-ness because of my teaching. I have some classes that start at 5pm, which doesn’t give me much time to get home from the regular meet-ups there. But that will change next week when Australia goes onto daylight saving time, and those classes move to 6pm (so they can stay at the same time for Asian/European/American students), giving me an extra hour buffer to get home from the dog park. So hopefully over the summer I can take Scully there a lot more again.

New content today:

And a busy Tuesday and Wednesday

I was so busy on Tuesday that I neglected to update this blog. I wrote my new class material for this week’s online ethics classes on digital assets. I talk about Bitcoin, then things like music downloads and piracy, and finish talking about NFTs. It’s a bit more technical than most of my classes and it took a bit of concentration and explaining of some of the concepts before the kids could answer questions about them. In particular, I go through an explanation of what NFTs are, using a few analogies, and then ask the kids if it seems like a sensible idea to have some sort of method of specifying who owns a digital asset, that can be sold and transferred. So far, after 6 classes, about half the kids think that’s a reasonable goal, while the other half think it sounds a bit weird or nonsensical. One kid said, “This is really hard, I have to think about this.” I’ve glossed over the implementation of NFTs using blockchain, and concentrated on the concept of transferable digital ownership, because the implementation is a whole can of worms I didn’t want to open.

Today, my wife was home and we decided to drop Scully off for some doggie daycare while we took the opportunity on a weekday to go to a nice restaurant for lunch – a place that is normally booked solid on weekends. We had a very pleasant lunch, overlooking a beach, and got to sit indoors for once!

Before that I had my face-to-face ethics class at the school, and we finished off the topic of drugs in sports. That was a good discussion too. At one point as I was going through the syllabus material, posing trickier questions, one of the kids said, “You’re trying to make us all change our minds, aren’t you?” Heh… no, at least not deliberately. I’m just following the course material and raising the tricky questions that it specifies!

And I also worked on some new comics again today… it never ends!

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Finding dog-friendly dining

I mentioned briefly last Saturday that my wife and I are taking a short trip next week, to the country town of Orange, west of Sydney. I said we had dog-friendly accommodation, so we can take Scully.

We’ve been trying to book places to eat that have outdoor dining areas, where we can take Scully as well. (In Australia, dogs—other than assistance dogs—are banned from indoor seating areas of establishments serving food, but are okay in al fresco areas.) But we’ve run into a bit pf a problem. There are many cafes with outdoor seating that serve lunch, but they are all closed for dinner. And despite a couple of days of searching, we’ve found only two places in all of Orange that serve dinner and have dog-friendly seating options. Neither of them take bookings either, so we just have to show up and hope they have a free table.

A friend of mine’s parents live in Orange, and he’s contacted them to ask if they have any other suggestions, but he hasn’t heard back yet. I suppose if worst comes to worst we can get take-away food from somewhere and eat in our hotel room. But oh well, we have other things planned and I’m sure we’ll enjoy the time away!

Today I had my face-to-face ethics class at the school. We talked about cheating in sports, and it was a really good and lively discussion. Several of the kids had pertinent examples for the questions, some from professional sports they have seen, and some from their own sports that they played at the school. One girl said that in one netball game they played against another school, the opposing team were being really physical, making a lot of illegal contact, and the referee wasn’t calling penalties. So she said her team “had to” start doing the same, in order to be on an even footing. She said she doesn’t even remember who won, but that it was most fun game of netball she’d ever played in!

New content today:

Ethics of waste; and Stable Diffusion

Today was the start of a new ethics topic for my online lesson: Waste. I wrote my lesson plan this morning, and did the first three classes tonight. It runs through a series of questions for the kids on: how we handle our waste, is it ever okay to litter, is it okay that some people make a living by waste picking, what can or should governments do to encourage/force people to produce less waste, and whether the global waste trade is okay or not. Towards the end we talk about whose responsibility it is to ensure that toxic waste (including domestic toxic waste such as batteries) is handled correctly, and then talk about nuclear waste. I leave them to think about the problem of designing effective long-term nuclear waste warning messages for future civilisations.

Also today I signed up for another AI art generation application: Stable Diffusion. I spent a bunch of my free credits experimenting with it, and I think I’m of the opinion that it’s not as good as DALL-E, at least for generating the sort of medieval fantasy scenes that I’ve been trying to produce these past few days. No matter what prompt I tried, I simply could not get Stable Diffusion to generate a picture of a castle drawbridge.

New content today:

Another exhausting Wednesday

Wednesday starts early with getting up in time to have breakfast and be ready to head to the school for my Primary Ethics lesson. There was heavier than normal traffic today getting there, because of combined train and bus strikes – but fortunately I was going against most of the traffic. The road going the other direction was chockablock with cars.

Today we discussed various rules in sports and whether changing some of them would be fair or unfair, or make the sport unsafe. This leads into next week when we start talking about cheating in sports. Then this evening I had three more online classes about bionics.

On the way home from the school I popped into a bulk foods shop to get some more rye flour, for use in baking sourdough. The woman at the checkout actually asked me if I was making sourdough with it, and I said, “Yes!”

Much of the rest of the day I struggled with writer’s block while trying to write a new Darths & Droids comic. And that… yeah… that consumed several hours. I got there in the end, thankfully.

New content today:

Six Million Dollar ethics lesson

Today I worked on the lesson for my new week’s ethics topic: Bionics. I decided to open by telling the kids about this “old” TV show from the 1970s: The Six Million Dollar Man. After all these years, and the fact that I only ever watched the show as a young kid, I still remember the words of that opening sequence. Hopefully I can pass some knowledge of it on to another generation!

We talk about the idea of giving people artificial limbs if they lose their natural ones in an accident or to disease. I mention that historically prosthetic limbs were fairly crude replacements, but now we can make some that are potentially better than natural limbs. I give the example of Oscar Pistorius who, after a legal battle to be allowed to compete, qualified for the 2012 London Olympics, and ran on his prosthetic legs against able-bodied athletes in the 400 metres. In the first three classes this evening, the students have been split on whether he should have been allowed or not, worried that his carbon fibre running legs might give him an unfair advantage.

Pistorius of course later became notorious for murdering his wife, but I don’t mention that. One of the kids in my last class was South African, and when I showed a photo of Pistorius he said, “Oh, he’s from my country!” I asked him if he knew about Oscar Pistorius, but he said no, he just recognised the athletics uniform. So I presume he didn’t know about the murder part.

We conclude by discussing whether it would be okay to give people prosthetic limbs or other parts that are better, stronger than natural human body parts. And if so, would it be okay for people to have healthy body parts removed in order to have stronger prosthetics attached? This question really split the kids! In my final class tonight two of them were adamant that this should not be allowed, while two thought it was fine if that’s what the person wanted.

In other news today, I took Scully for a lunchtime walk down to a waterside park, picking up some fish & chips on the way. I didn’t go to my normal lookout spot, because it was rather warm today – 24°C – and there’s little shade there. This other park has a lovely shaded bench looking out over the water.

New content today:

Drugs in sport Wednesday

This morning was Primary Ethics at the school. I started a new topic this week: Drugs in Sport. This is one of my favourite topics, because it really gets the kids thinking. They all start with the simple idea that performance-enhancing drugs in sport are bad, but then we very carefully pick that apart and examine where that opinion comes from, and why, and how well supported it is by rational thought in the context of all the other things that athletes do and the technology they use to gain advantages. By the end of it (the topic is 4 weeks long!), the kids have a much better appreciation for the nuances around the whole area of fair play and cheating in sport.

I dragged myself out for some sport myself, doing a 2.5k run after lunch. It was tough because it was very cold today. The storm and cold front that hit yesterday brought a real Antarctic blast from the south. We had snow on the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney. Even a dusting is a rare event, but this was heavy enough to close both of the roads across the mountains.

Here in Sydney the temperature sank to 7°C and stayed there until a couple of hours after sunrise, with the wind chill bringing the apparent temperature as low as -0.3°C.

Tonight I made soup for dinner: pumpkin, potato, and bunya nut.

Pumpkin, potato, bunya nut soup

Nice and warming! (Served with a blob of sour cream.)

New content today:

Surprise twins

Wednesday is face-to-face ethics class at the local school. I learnt something about my class today: two of the kids in it are twins!

Yes, I hadn’t noticed that before. They’re fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, which is why I didn’t even suspect it before. They have the same surname on the class roll, but I pay very little attention to the surnames when I’m learning the names of a new class full of kids. It’s enough of a job to remember all their first names. So, that was a surprising discovery!

It may have been the most notable thing I did all day, though. I did a 2.5k run, and I wrote and made a new Darths & Droids comic, and this evening I did three online classes on the topic of weather. The third class only one of the two enrolled students turned up. Normally this is bad, because with only one kid giving answers I can run out of material. But fortunately the kid I had was talkative, and I could let her run on for a few minutes before asking another question. So it was actually a little easier than an average class.

New content today:

Ethics of weather

Tuesday – new topic for online ethics classes. This week we’re discussing the weather. I wrote the lesson this morning, and it turned out to be a lot of material about potentially controlling the weather. There are a lot of cases to go through, and situations to discuss where the boundaries are between what would be an acceptable use of weather manipulation versus unacceptable. We also go into a bit of climate change and the consequences, and responsibilities for it. The first three classes tonight went well enough, but I may need to add a few more questions to fill time if I get a class with just 1 or 2 students in it.

For lunch today I went for a drive. I took Scully out to a new pie shop that I wanted to try, at Allambie Heights, about 25 minutes drive away. I tried a Thai chicken pie and a sausage roll, and also got a custard tart for afters. They were all pretty good! Then I let Scully run around on the nearby soccer field for a while to burn off some energy before we headed home.

This afternoon I put together a few more comics from the next batch of Irregular Webcomic! that I photographed last week. Hmm… and that’s about it.

New content today: