Beginning this morning, my morning classes moved an hour earlier, because of the USA going on to daylight saving time on the weekend. Since most of my students in the morning classes are kids in the USA doing classes in the evening, I adjust the class time so it stays the same for them, which results in them moving an hour earlier for me. Then in a few weeks when Australia goes off DST, the times become another hour earlier for me. So classes that began at 10am in summer will be starting at 8am in winter (for me). But for now they’re at 9am.
After two classes I got ready to head into the university for today’s Data Engineering lecture. Today’s topic was summarising data – basically how to calculate simple statistics like the mean, median, mode, standard deviation, quartiles, etc., plus how to compare and interpret them. There’s also some background material on probability distributions and statistical sampling, and the differences between populations and samples. So it sounds simple, but it’s quite detailed and is one of the longer lectures in the course.
I got home and made pizza for dinner. Tonight we had potato and rosemary.
My usual daily Japanese lesson on Duolingo today was notable for one answer in which I had to type in four different writing systems: hiragana, Roman, katakana, and kanji scripts. It was a listening exercise and the correct answer that I had to type in was:
このTシャツは五百円ですか
Which is said: “kono T-shatsu-wa go hyaku en desu ka”, and which means: “Is this T-shirt five hundred yen?”
I’ve been learning some of the simpler kanji as part of this course. I brought a few business cards back from my recent trip to Japan, from restaurants/bars that I liked. And yesterday when I looked through them I realised I could read 田中 as “Tanaka”, the name of the proprietor.
Pretty cool!