Tag: teaching

More teaching prep work

So I had a few things to do today. I’m visiting Wenona School tomorrow to give a talk to high school students in their lunch time science club. I told the teacher I’d do it on cameras and human vision, thinking I had a slide presentation ready to go. But when I checked, I’d sort of remembered two halves of different ones I’d done previously. So I had to spend some time deciding what content from each one to use, and then stitching them together into a single presentation. Which was complicated by the fact that one of them was very old and done in 4:3 aspect ratio at lower resolution, while the other was newer and in 16:9 at high resolution. I had to reconfigure and recrop a lot of the diagrams, so it took some time.

When I was done I uploaded a copy to Google drive and sent the teacher a link, suggesting she could download it to have a look, and maybe have a copy on a school machine just in case I have trouble connecting my laptop to their display.

Secondly, I’ve been trying to juggle a couple of requests from Outschool parents of two different kids who approached me about doing some additional classes for their kids. One wants a science class for a 10-year-old, and the other wants some one-on-one tutoring for a student starting Year 9 who needs help with formulating arguments in essays. I can do both these things, and would like to help them out – the main issue is finding time in my schedule. I suggested I could do them both on a Wednesday, during the day since they’re both in a good time zone for that (Japan and Australia). Now I have to make new class outlines and submit them to Outschool for approval.

In between all this I wrote a new Darths & Droids comic (which will have to wait until tomorrow to make), and picked up Scully from my wife’s work and took her for the long walk home. And then three classes on “Light and Darkness” this evening. Another full day!

Setting up for more teaching!

Well, I had the usual five online classes today, on the Sharing topic. For the older 13-15 age group I recast the topic as “Resource Distribution” and concentrated more on complex real world scenarios such as countries or communities sharing resources, rather than individuals sharing things. I wrote about 1.5 times the usual length of scenarios and questions, and am picking different subsets with some overlap between the age groups. So it’s kind of an efficient way to get two somewhat different topics.

Also I had a video meeting with a teacher at Wenona School, to kick off our new STEM Professionals in Schools partnership. She told me some of the science programmes and projects the kids are doing to give me an idea of where I might be able to help. I suggested a first step would be if I come into the school and do a short presentation for some of the students and the use the visit to meet some other science teachers and get further ideas on how we can work together. She said they have a science club every fortnight on Thursdays at lunch time, and I could come to do a talk next week. So I’ll be heading in then and doing a talk on cameras and human vision, to cross over between physics and biology and hopefully appeal to a wide range of the students.

For lunch today I got fish & chips from my regular shop in Greenwich for lunch. I was shocked to discover they’ve raised the price for a basic fish & chips to $18.40. 😲 The last price I recall was $14.90. Which I still hadn’t got over thinking of as a bit expensive after they raised it from $12.90. Wow.

Weather was miserable, as you’d expect from the forecast of a solid week of rain. It was very cold. The rain did stop occasionally, and I almost got home from buying lunch without getting wet, but it started raining again just as Scully and I approached home, and then she had to dawdle and sniff around the grass for a few minutes before going inside. 🙄

Image Processing restarts for another year

Today it was up early for an 8am start with critical thinking classes, up to 1pm. Then I walked Scully up to my wife’s work to drop her off there for the afternoon, so I could head home and get ready to go into the city for the first Image Processing lecture of the semester. I used the opportunity to run home via the 5k route I developed in the last couple of weeks. Today I managed to run below 27:30, which I consider a good time. And this is on a route that involves a road tunnel with about 30 steps down and the same number back up on the other side. I don’t run down steps as I’m too terrified of tripping, so this slows me down a fair bit.

I used to work with a guy who would leap down flights of stairs, taking 2 or 3 steps at a time. I tried it once and was so convinced I’d end up breaking a leg that I’ve never tried it again. I don’t know how anyone could do that.

One I was home and had a shower and changed, I had about an hour free before I had to go into the city. I worked on my Berlin meeting report for Standards Australia, getting another section completed. Only one part to go, which hopefully I can knock off tomorrow.

I got into the university about 5pm, giving me time to eat dinner before the lecture began at 6. But I was still full from the lunch I’d picked up on the way to dropping Scully off, after 1pm. The combination of a late lunch and a forced early dinner meant I didn’t want to eat much, so I just got a small box of sushi rather than sit in at a restaurant for a hot meal. Next week I’ll have to remember not to have such a big lunch, even if I’m hungry after the long morning of working.

The lecture went easily, as it was the introductory stuff about the overall subject and administrative details for the students. I didn’t have to do too much other than introduce myself to the students. We had a special observer today, a visiting lecturer from Ho Chi Minh University of Technology, who is here for collaborations and to observe our teaching methods. The lecture was very full; something like 350 students are enrolled in the subject!

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!