Tag: teaching

Marking done

Today I did the marking for the first experiment planning report for Data Engineering. I had four teams’ reports to mark. I think the quality is definitely better than last year, though there was still some significant variance overall.

There was more heavy rain this morning. It’s been raining every day since 1 May, and the forecast is for rain every day until at least 13 May. I needed to go to the post office to try to get them to reroute the lost package back to me, rather then continue delivering it to Canada, as I refunded the buyer all of the money. In the channels where I’m selling these cards, reputation is everything, and I’d rather take the hit on refunding the money than get a negative seller reputation that would make it difficult to sell more cards. But the post office said there was no way they could do that. So, I have to trust that if the buyer eventually does receive the package that he’ll let me know and be reasonable about sorting things out fairly from there. I do have reasonable trust that he will, since as I said reputation is prime in these circles and the guy has a positive rep that he won’t want to tarnish too.

Anyway, I decided to drive up instead of walk in the rain. It doesn’t save much (if any) time, but it does mean about a kilometre less walking in the wet. But by the time I got there, the rain stopped and the sun came out!

Since I had the car out by now anyway, I decided to drive over to Maggios’ Bakery at Cammeray for lunch, where I got a slice of pork sausage pizza and a pistachio chocolate scroll. And tonight for dinner we have minestrone, to round out the Italian food day.

New content today:

Tale of a missing package

I’ve been selling my old Magic: the Gathering cards piecemeal over the last 4 years, and as indicated here recently I’ve started a renewed effort to sell more of them. I’ve ever had a problem with shipping them to all corners of the globe. Until now.

On 24 April I sent a package of cards to a buyer in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. This morning he sent me a message indicating he hadn’t received them yet. I always send the packages with tracking, so I checked the tracking info on Australia Post’s website and discovered that the only update on there was that the package had been received at my local post office where I lodged it. The next step should be “Cleared and awaiting international departure”, but that wasn’t there. Apparently the package is still in Australia somewhere.

I went to the post office and talked to someone there about it. They brought up the tracking details in their system, which has more info recorded than shown on their tracking website. The delivery address was correct, except for some reason it didn’t display “Canada”. I’m not sure why – I filled out the customs form online and it did auto-completion of the address, so it should know that it’s in Canada.

My theory: I guess the bar code has been scanned and it just shows a street address and Victoria (the city in British Columbia), without Canada, so it got sent by domestic mail to Melbourne, in the Australian state of Victoria. Presumably it’s sitting there somewhere, waiting for someone to figure out that it can’t be delivered, actually read the handwritten address, and realise it’s meant to go to Canada.

So… maybe it will get to international post handling eventually, and from there it should be smooth sailing to the destination in Canada. But… the problem is that the buyer wanted some of those cards specifically because he’s meeting the artist at a tournament on Wednesday next week, and he wanted to get them signed. Even if they figure the parcel out tomorrow and get it on a plane, it’s not going to be delivered to the final address in time.

Also today there was a bit of an incident in my Data Engineering course at the university. The professor and I had to defuse a situation with some members of one of the student teams having a disagreement. I don’t want to go into details, but it was rather uncomfortable and I felt like some lines were crossed. Hopefully we resolved things and nothing similar will happen again.

New content today:

Problems with Instagram

Okay, so I deactivated my Facebook account a few days ago. Something I’ve been wanting to do for years. Today I wanted to use Instagram and… it wouldn’t show me my normal feed. I couldn’t post a photo. I went into the Account Settings to try to log out and back in again, and it wouldn’t load the account info page.

I figure this must have something to do with my Facebook account being deactivated, because they’re both owned by Meta. But I switched to Scully’s Instagram account (yes, she has one), and that was working fine. But Scully doesn’t have a Facebook account. So clearly Instagram can work without an associated Facebook account. So why is mine now completely broken?

I’ll have to look into this another day, because today was very busy and I’ve just finished three ethics classes in a row, after spending the middle of the day at the university doing tutoring for the Data Engineering course. We’re approaching the end – only two more weeks to go. But I’ll have marking of student reports and videos to do.

This morning I also had to dash up to the post office to mail some more Magic cards to people. The weather was rainy again today, and I got sprinkled on, but it wasn’t heavy. It would have been miserable taking packages there in heavy rain.

In other teaching news, I heard back from Loreto Kirribilli and now that it’s second term of the school year, they have organised a group of four Year 9 students for me to mentor. We’re going to do fortnightly sessions this term, and then maybe organise something different in third term. I go to visit the school to begin in two weeks. I’m looking forward to this -it should be fun, and also hopefully really inspiring for the students.

Oh, and finally, last night I had a big panic when Wednesday’s Irregular Webcomic! wasn’t ready in time for the automated update, and I quickly assembled the comic, uploaded it, and forced a manual update. It was only when I woke up in the middle of the night that I realised it was Tuesday, not Wednesday, and I’d therefore manually published Wednesday’s comic just an hour after Tuesday’s one!! So to correct for this, there’s no new comic tonight – since tonight’s comic was actually published yesterday.

New content today:

Busy day at Data Engineering

I had a pretty full day. First thing I took Scully for a walk while my wife left for work (to avoid Scully pining for her as she leaves home). Then I had to pack some more Magic cards to post overseas to someone who bought them. And then walk up to the post office and send it off.

When I got back home I thought I’d have an hour or so to deal with some other things, but I looked at the time and realised I had t leave for the university almost immediately to make it on time for today’s project tutorial session! So I quickly grabbed my things, and Scully, and walked her up to my wife’s work, then over to the station to catch a train into the city.

I grabbed lunch at the university, a halal snack pack again like I had two weeks ago. I tried a different sauce this time, garlic sauce instead of chilli. It’s a delicious lunch, but loaded with meat and hot chips, so not exactly the healthiest thing. I also grabbed a slice of poppy seed cake from a German bakery as a sweet treat for afterwards during the tutorial.

Students are now working on their Data Engineering projects. They have until the end of next week to write up their planning report, then two more weeks to execute and report on the data analysis part. Most of the teams were in a pretty good position, having settled on a topic and done some preliminary work to either organise data collection, or download data and begin to think about analysing it, and working on their planning reports. But one team had already finished their report and moved onto the analysis part! And another hadn’t decided what project to do yet. There are always a few outliers.

Some teams stayed most of the three-hour session, utilising it to ask us questions and get guidance on various things. I didn’t get home until approaching 4pm, and my three ethics classes began at 5. Now it’s after 8… and I really should think about what to eat for dinner!

New content today:

Full on teaching day

IN order to clear tomorrow, Thursday, for my expedition to the mountains, I moved all my ethics classes to other days. The evening ones went to yesterday, while the morning ones went to today. So I ended up with 2 classes first thing in the morning. Then I had to head into the university for today’s Data Engineering lecture and workshop. It was the final lecture before the students start concentrating on their assessment project. Next week we have a break as the university takes a week off at the same time as school holidays, and then four more weeks of assisting the students with their projects.

And then back home I had three more online ethics classes, beginning at 5pm this week, an hour earlier than last week due to the daylight saving change.

So I didn’t have time to do much else today. I did plan out a rough itinerary for the day in the mountains tomorrow with my American visitor. The National Park alerts still say the walking tracks will be open from 8am tomorrow, so I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to do the walk I have planned.

New content today:

Back to the ethical grind

I had a busy day today. In the morning I was taking care of negotiating/finalising some sales of some old Magic: the Gathering cards. Then I had to take Scully to my wife’s work and head into the city for today’s Data Engineering lecture at the university. Today was all about machine learning and deep learning to discover patterns in data.

I had some sushi for lunch before the lecture. During pauses in the lecturing, I talked with some of the student groups about their projects. One is keen on the idea of analysing traffic accident data to determine causative factors, such as day of the week, time of day, speed limit zones, weather conditions, and so on.

After the lecture I headed home, picking up Scully again on the way, Then I had about 20 minutes to pack Magic cards and head up to the post office before it closed. I didn’t get home until about 5:30, and then I had three ethics classes in a row from 6 to 9pm. So it’s been non-stop all day… and now I can finally relax a bit. After I make myself some dinner….

New content today:

Teaching about plotting

It was a bit of a rainy day today, though I managed to avoid most of it. I drove Scully to my wife’s work before returning home and then hopping on the train into the university for today’s lecture on Data Engineering. This week we did the topic on data presentation, which was mostly about how to prepare graphs, plots, and other data visualisations so that they are clear, concise, easy to interpret, and not misleading or confusing. It sounds simple enough but that’s enough material to fill a 3-hour lecture and tutorial session. I may have mentioned this in past years, but we conclude with a brief study of COVID data reporting, and examine how the state of Florida in the US deliberately changed the way it reported and presented COVID deaths in 2020 to give the impression that the pandemic situation was improving, when it was actually getting worse.

Before the lecture I stopped in at one of the university’s food outlets for students and tried one of the offerings there for lunch. It was a place that makes Malaysian meals, and I tried the nasi lemak with beef rendang, which is one of my favourite Malaysian dishes. It was pretty good, though not exceptional. The lecturer told me later that he rates the Malaysian place across the road as slightly better.

Back home in the afternoon I made another weekly batch of comics for Irregular Webcomic! and uploaded them to the buffer queue. Then before my evening ethics classes online I had the leftovers from last night’s Indian curry for dinner.

And then into three classes in a row, on this week’s new topic of “Countries”. I got some interesting answers and discussion, and there were some interesting disagreements on the question of whether each cultural group of people should have their own country or not.

New content today:

Wednesday is now my busy day

As per title. I made a few comics in the morning to fill out this week, then I had to prepare for the university Data Engineering lecture. I dropped Scully off at doggie daycare then caught a train into the city and had some quick sushi for lunch before the lecture began at midday.

It was a longer lecture today – 2.5 hours with the tutorial breaks. About designing experiments and how to deal with control and independent and confounding variables and stuff like that. Then I caught the train home and picked up Scully from my wife’s work, as she’d picked her up from the daycare place after a few hours.

I made Thai red curry vegetables and rice for dinner, before getting stuck into three ethics classes in a row, on this weeks’ new topic of Artificial Intelligence. The first class has three kids who are, shall I say, a bit playful. I showed them some brief examples of ChatGPT in action to set context for questions, including some examples of how easy it is to get it to produce false information. This produced much mirth and the class sort of devolved into the kids requesting me to type in more and more ridiculous prompts to see what ChatGPT would do. I squeezed some serious questions in there, but everyone was having fun, and one of them said at the end that this was the best class ever.

New content today:

What is data and what is ethics?

Today was a busy teaching day. This morning I wrote my lesson plan for the older group of kids and the ethics topic on Confession. Then I dropped Scully off at my wife’s work and took the train into the city and the university for the second lecture of Data Engineering. Today the lecture was about different types of data: nominal, ordinal, numeric, qualitative, quantitative, subjective, objective, and so on. Th first coding tutorial took place during the lecture and as usual someone asked me a question that basically came down to debugging Matlab syntax, which is always a pain since I don’t use Matlab regularly and always have to relearn the syntax every semester.

The students spent some time during the first tutorial break moving around to find their assignment groups. The lecturer splits the class into random groups of 6 students to work on their final projects. It’s always a bit chaotic since few of the students know each other and they’re assigned to these groups with strangers, and have to work out who they are and find them. It doesn’t help when one student can’t find Group 10 and I go around shouting “Group 10! Group 10! Put your hand up if you’re in Group 10!” and nobody reacts, and then 5 minutes later it turns out Group 10 is right there but they were too busy introducing themselves to have heard me earlier.

After coming home I finished off the Confession lesson, in time to start making some lentils and chick peas with rice for dinner, before the three in a row classes on the “What is Ethics?” topic. This is a pretty deep topic and I can really see the kids are thinking hard about some of the questions. Which means it’s a good one!

New content today:

The spelling of chilli / chili / chile

Yesterday I wrote about the troubles I’ve been having with my latest chilli plant. Carl commented on that post:

Your problem is that you offend the plants by continuing to misspell “chili”, which has exactly one “l”. In Spanish, “ll” is pronounced identically to English “y”.

To which I replied:

“Chilli” is the preferred and common spelling in British/Australian English. So it’s even more complicated than that.

This may be surprising to users of American English, but it’s genuinely another example of the weirdness of spelling differences between our dialects. My Australian dictionary lists “chilli” as the preferred spelling. My computer, set to Australian English, accepts “chilli” while marking “chili” as a spelling error. And I went through my pantry and found every relevant product:

Chilli products

As you can see, three out of three in favour of “chilli”. So that hopefully explains what up until now some readers may have assumed was a strange individual quirk of mine.

In another follow-up, recall last Friday I visited Loreto Kirribilli to talk to some of the students there. The school has posted photos of me and some of the students to their accounts on LinkedIn and Instagram.

As for today… it was a bunch of ethics classes from 10am to 2pm, with a brief lunch break in between. I took Scully for a couple of walks. This afternoon I made sourdough bread, and also pizza dough for dinner. And I’m not sure where the rest of the time went. I had another class this evening after dinner… and now time to relax.

New content today: