Tag: teaching

Fog and cheesecake

This morning dawned cold and foggy – the first significant fog of the year. My wife suggested I take a photo to put in this blog, but I neglected to and now I’m kind of regretting it. But we have more forecast for tomorrow, so if there is I’ll try and get a photo then.

In other non-weather atmospheric phenomena we had two interesting astronomical things happen overnight, visible from Sydney: a significant meteor sighting, and also a brilliant pink aurora australis which was visible as far north as Sydney. Unfortunately I was asleep for both. But I’ve been enjoying the views of Scorpius directly overhead late at night when I take Scully out for her pre-bedtime toilet.

Monday is always my busy day with lots of online ethics classes to wrap up the week’s topic. It’s been an interesting one on names, with plenty of interesting questions that I rotate from class to class to keep it fresh for myself.

In between I marked another university Data Engineering assessment report. A student team studied potential predictors of the length of stay in hospital for cardiac patients, from among variables such as: vital signs during initial triage; levels of haemoglobin, blood oxygen, and electrolytes in an initial blood test; demographic data such as age, sex, ethnicity; and also insurance status. They used publicly available data from over 265,000 United States patient admissions, collated by the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, Boston—the MIMIC-IV dataset, downloadable from physionet.org. Note especially that this is data from the United States.

After doing various regression analyses, they discovered that the strongest indicator of a longer stay in hospital was… being non-white. The second strongest indicator was a low blood haemoglobin level at admission. Although the actual correlations were quite weak in all cases.

AT lunch I walked Scully up to my wife’s work to drop her off for the afternoon. On the way home I decided to pop in at the cake shop nearby and grab something. I got there about 1:40pm, and was surprised to see the cake displays completely empty. They’d packed them all away already, in preparation for closing! My wife and I always comment how silly it is that cafes in Sydney all seem to close at 2pm. It’s really weird… it’s virtually impossible to find a cafe anywhere in Sydney that is open later than 2pm. They seem to think all the business is for the morning rush and lunchtime, and nobody is interested in coffee or cakes after that.

Anyway, I expressed surprise and told the woman in the cake shop that I had wanted to get a slice of cake. She said she could go get one for me and asked what I wanted. So I decided on a slice of cheesecake. She dashed out the back and returned with a slice for me. And then probably proceeded to close up shop as soon as I left.

I took the slice home on the train and ate it at my desk while I marked the above student report. I needed the sugar to get through the day!

Starting on marking assignments

This morning I did another 5k run. But after yesterday’s fast effort I took it easier and also my muscles hadn’t fully recovered, so I ended up being quite a lot slower. Never mind, the important thing is to do the exercise, not to be great at it.

I started work on marking the student assessment reports for Data Engineering. I need to get written reports and video presentations marked this week, so used my Sunday to get started. I only got one marked before my ethics classes in the afternoon, but at least I’ve started.

Not much else to talk about today – I didn’t go anywhere.

End of semester at university

Today was my last day heading into the university this semester, for the final class of the Data Engineering course. Students are well into their final assessment projects, and it was a pretty easy tutorial, answering questions and giving advice to a few teams of students. They’ll be submitting their projects on Friday and then next week I’ll be stuck into marking them. Then no more university until the third year Image Processing course begins at the end of July.

They are having graduation ceremonies at the university – in fact they have been for the past few weeks. I walk through the main building and they have a huge reception area with drinks and snacks for the graduates and their families, and about a dozen stalls set up for photography. And lots of people milling around – graduates in academic robes and hats, and their guests all dressed up in fine clothes. It’s actually a bit of an obstacle course to make my way through them to the lecture room.

The rest of the day was busy with online ethics classes, and making pizza for dinner after I got home from the university. it was a gloomy and chilly day, but the rain was really restricted to heavy overnight, and then returning this evening. There’s more coming in the next few days though.

Last night I finished watching the Netflix movie Cuckoo. It’s a German horror film and… is very German. Very weird, and I didn’t understand what was going on until 2/3 way through, and then there was no explanation or real resolution at the end. The core concept was kind of interesting, but frustrated by a lack of development.

Getting a bit sick of all this rain

It’s pouring down as I type this. We’ve had showers every day for the past few weeks, and the forecast that I just saw for the next week is more rain, every day, with heavy falls up to 45 mm early next week. Our weather is broken and I want some new weather.

Also, the USA is broken, can we have a new one? I don’t want to go into any details, but I had an interaction today which almost broke my brain about how far gone the USA is under Trump. Reasonable people are actually fearing for their lives under this regime. It’s horrible, and terrifying, and exhausting. Ugh.

On the bright side… I managed to complete marking of all of my assigned student project reports for Data Engineering. This is the experimental planning report. In two weeks we get the final results report and their presentation videos to mark. And I’m happy to report that this year’s crop of students appears to be better at planning their experiments and writing their reports than last year’s. I was prepared to disappointed but I was pleasantly surprised.

Election countdown: 5 days

Five days until the Australian election. But also our friends in Canada vote today. It’s a similar story in both countries, with both incumbents being left-leaning and before Trump returned to power in the USA polling behind their respective right-leaning oppositions. But Trump has turned around the fortunes in both countries, with voters in Canada and Australia shifting away from right-wing favour, and polls in both now predicting incumbent victories. But we shall see.

Today was busy, with three online ethics classes in the morning, followed by having a quick lunch at home before racing to the train to head into the university for my teaching stint there for Data Engineering. The students are into their four weeks of working on their assessment projects (after having the last two weeks off). So I need to patrol the room seeing what students are working on, answering questions, giving advice, and so on. I was surprised that some of the student groups hadn’t yet decided on the topic of their investigation, whereas some had almost finished writing their first report!

The weather was very rainy, and I got wet walking to the station to catch the train, despite using an umbrella, because of how heavy the rain was. This rainy weather is set to continue for at least the next week as well! When I got home this afternoon we had four umbrellas drying in the bathroom – even though I live with just my wife.

I made pizza for dinner. And then had two more evening ethics classes, to round off a very busy day.

Completely forgot about yesterday’s post

Ooops! I intended to write a blog post yesterday, but I just completely forgot. It was a busy day. I had two ethics classes starting early at 8:00 am – an hour earlier than last week because of the daylight saving change on the weekend. This also meant that my 12:00 class—that I’d temporarily shunted to Tuesdays because it didn’t give me enough time to get into university for the Data Engineering lecture—could now be moved back to 11:00 on Monday. So I had that class too. Then I had one hour to take Scully to my wife’s work and hop on a train into the city and pick up some lunch on the way before the lecture.

This was the last lecture with new material, talking about complex systems and agent-based modelling. We have two weeks off now for the mid-semester vacation and then the Easter Monday public holiday, followed by four weeks of student project work tutorials.

When I got home, I made pizza for dinner and then had two more ethics classes in the evening, which chewed up the rest of the day.

Today we had some rain and cooler weather, which was nice. I wrote my new ethics class topic, on “Brands and Trademarks”. With some interesting questions like:

Should I be able to start a business called McDonald’s:
• that does shoe repair?
• that sells pizza?
• that sells burgers?
• if my surname is McDonald?
If I do start a shoe repair shop called McDonald’s, should I be allowed to advertise it with a red and yellow sign saying “McDonald’s”?

I also made some slides to show the kids with illustrative photos of businesses with modified names, and this took a while. So it took me longer to write this class than usual, and I didn’t get around to doing much else during the day.

Scully is finished her medication for her bloody poops last week, and seems to be fully recovered, so that’s good news. There was some other test the vet did which also came back negative. So we don’t really know what the problem was – probably some sort of gastro-intestinal infection I guess.

In other news, the Australian election campaign is progressing. Prime Minster Albanese is firming up in the opinion polls, while opposition leader Dutton is falling behind. At least part of this is the “Trump factor”, with Australian voters recoiling from conservative politics due to the destructive antics of Donald Trump in the USA. Dutton was initially a few weeks ago expressing a need for some Trump-like policies, such as reducing the size of the federal government, but this has backfired badly and he’s had to backpedal and change his tune. So if anything good can come from Trump, I’m hopeful that it makes Australian voters head for a more progressive choice, n the same way it appears to be doing in Canada.

Introing to machine learning

Today I was back at the University of Technology Sydney for the ongoing Data Engineering course which I’m helping to teach. Today’s lecture was an introduction to machine learning, which is a fairly advanced topic for an introductory first year course. But there are tools which let people code up machine learning examples and projects without too much difficulty and we want to make sure the students understand the basic principles behind them. Some will probably elect to use this in their assessment project, which they should start working on after next week’s final lecture.

Then we have a two-week mid-semester break. It’s normally one week, but Easter Monday eats up the next week’s lecture slot as well. Then four weeks of tutorial time to help the students as they work on their projects.

On the way home I stoped at my wife’s work and we had a pleasant walk home together with Scully. We were a bit concerned about the weather, as heavy rain was heading our way on the radar, but luckily it never arrived and we made it home dry.

I made pizza for dinner, topping it with very thin slices of one of those gourmet potatoes we bought at the farmer’s market on Saturday.

And we did some planning for our next trip, which is to Europe in June for the ISO Photography Standards meeting in Berlin. It’s a five-day meeting, so we’ll be there for that long, and then we’re planning to visit some of the central European countries and cities we haven’t been to before. A couple of days in Prague, then we plan to spend a week in Vienna, renting an apartment for the week instead of using a hotel. We’ll do side trips from there to Bratislava and Budapest, before heading to Salzburg to finish up before flying home. We have the itinerary sorted now after deciding on various options this evening. Now to book some accommodation!

Summarising data and learning Japanese

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!

Back to the grind

Today was my first full day home from my trip, and it was a busy one. I had two ethics classes in the morning. Unfortunately about half an hour before the first class I got a message from my Internet provider saying that there was emergency maintenance being carried out, and my broadband connection would be interrupted, starting in 20 minutes!

As it turned out, it was a bit later than that. I had time to start the Zoom class and one kid joined in… and then my network dropped out. I’d had time to send a message to the students warning them that the class might be cancelled because of this. The net came back about half an hour later, so my next class was unaffected, but I had to refund the class fees for all the students in the first class.

After the second one, I had to quickly get ready and dash out the door to take Scully to my wife’s work, and then catch a train into the university for today’s Data Engineering lecture. I made it with a few minutes to spare, but had to eat a quick lunch of sushi that I’d picked up on the way during the first few minutes of the professor starting the lecture.

After the lecture was over, I caught a train back home and then went out for a run, since I haven’t done any for a couple of weeks due to my trip. It was warm and humid, and I’m still a bit tired, so I only did 2.5k instead of my usual 5.

I made pizza for dinner. Our usual pumpkin and walnut toppings. And then had two more ethics classes late in the evening before bedtime.

I processed some photos from the Japan trip today, but I haven’t uploaded any new ones. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have a bit more time to show off some photos from the last day there.

Oh, I also think I won’t bring back the listing of new comics content to this blog. I didn’t have time to do it while travelling, and it’s just easier not having to do it every day. Anyone reading this probably doesn’t need the reminders!

Starting up data engineering again

Today was the first lecture session for the University of Technology Sydney first year course on Data Engineering. As in the past few years, I’m doing tutoring work on this course again. Unfortunately the scheduled lecture time clashed with two of my online ethics classes, so I’ve had to move them from Monday to Tuesday. I don’t think all of the kids can make the new day, so some will probably have to drop the class.

Straight after my two morning classes, I had to dash off and take Scully to my wife’s work and drop her off there, then dash to the Metro station and catch a train into the city. I stopped quickly at a supermarket to get some sushi for lunch, since I hadn’t had time to eat anything while travelling, and just made it to the lecture on time. I had to eat my sushi in the class as the lecturer began teaching! It’ll be like this in two weeks as well (next week I’ll be away in Tokyo so will miss the lecture), but after that the US goes on to daylight saving time, and I move all my day classes an hour earlier to adjust (since most of the students in them are in the US), so I’ll have an extra hour to get into the university and have lunch.

The lecture went pretty well. I expected more people in the class, but I suspect some stayed home today because there was a sort of shadow strike action on the Sydney trains today, with hundreds of train drivers calling in sick in what the government calls an unauthorised strike action, but which the rail workers union claims was genuine sickness. Being a Monday, and the first lecture of a first year course, it may well have been the first time these students had attended a university lecture.

I made it back homeward in time to meet my wife at work and we walked home together with Scully. I made pizza for dinner tonight, and am finishing off some final Irregular Webcomic! strips for this week, before heading into two more ethics classes from 8pm. Quite a busy day!!

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