Rolandt

I teach a training class for RStudio instructors once a month or so, and invigilate anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen exams each week. The mechanics are constantly evolving, but here’s what we use right now:

Application and Selection

People who want to take part fill in a Google Form that adds them to a spreadsheet. Every few weeks, I email applicants about upcoming courses based on their timezones. (I run separate classes at times suitable for people in the Americas, in countries between Ireland and the Indian Ocean, and in East Asia and Oceania.) Applicants who reply are allocated to classes on a first-come/first-served basis; the rest are carried over to the next round.

This is the least satisfying part of the whole process. I’ve been looking for a better queueing system since September, but so far haven’t found anything—pointers would be very welcome.

Before We Start

The class is two sessions of 4.5 hours on consecutive days. I send people a reminder a few days before it starts that includes video conferencing details, a couple of short readings, and an invite to a Google Doc for shared note-taking. I ask them to add a line or two about themselves to the doc before the class starts, both by way of introduction and to make sure they have edit permission for the doc.

During Class

I usually have between half a dozen and two dozen learners at a time. If some of them are co-located, I ask them to share one webcam and a decent meeting room microphone (the microphones built into laptops aren’t good for group conversations), but they should all still be in the Google Doc.

Everyone is muted by default. If someone wants to ask a question, they can either type it into the video conference chat channel or signal that they want to speak and unmute themselves when I call on them. (Allowing both modes helps people who feel shy or who need more time to compose a question feel more comfortable.) We use breakout rooms for small-group discussion and peer teaching exercises. They work pretty well, though it’s easy for groups to lose track of time.

Learners do exercises every 10-30 minutes. I paste a list of names into the shared doc; they then write their answers under their names so that they don’t stumble over one another’s cursors. They can also paste in images of things like concept maps; it’s a bit clumsy, but it works surprisingly well. They can also screenshare with the rest of the class whenever they want to demonstrate something, which is so useful that I’ve started doing it for in-person programming classes as well.

At the end I ask learners to make a calendar reminder one month in the future to mail me and tell me what they still remember or found useful. About 20% of them send that message, and it’s a useful gauge on what to keep teaching and what to drop because it hasn’t made an impact.

I don’t allow learners to record these online classes: it makes a lot of people uncomfortable, particularly if they’ve had to deal with online stalkers or harassment. I also don’t require people to turn on video, though if everyone has it off I may ask two or three people to re-enable it so that I’m not teaching to a mosaic of empty rectangles.

Afterward

People have to pass two exams in order to complete certification: one on teaching and one on the mechanics of using the Tidyverse. (They can also certify for Shiny, but they only have to do the teaching exam once.) I use Calendly to manage exam booking: I have open slots every week, and people can claim one whenever they want.

I clone and rename a Google Doc for each exam, then share it with the candidate and send them a zip file with the data they’ll need. Candidates share their screen with me when doing the exam so that I can watch them present or program. This lets me jump in right away if I see someone over-engineering an answer to a question, but it doesn’t scale: I have to run exams one at a time.

What I’d Like To Do Next

I have two things on my wish-list for 2020. The first is a better signup system: I don’t want to build something from scratch, but Salesforce, Lessonly, and Eventbrite all have gaps for this use case.

My second is to make more intensive use of graphics with learners rather than at them (as slides). Many laptops already have touchscreens; as soon as Apple produces a MacBook that supports fingerpainting it will be feasible to add new types of exercises to collaborative online classes, and I’d like to start playing with that now.

Bisher gibt es viel Schrott bei den Black Friday-Angeboten von Amazon. Die eigene Hardware ist super heruntergesetzt, das müsst Ihr mal durchklicken. Aber die Powerbeats Pro sehe ich zum ersten Mal günstiger. Für Sportler sind das die besseren AirPods. Gehen unter keinen Umständen ab vom Kopf und halten Schweiß aus. Mehr Bass, viel dickerer Akku, aber auch ein unpraktisch großes Ladecase. Das steckt man nicht in die Hosentasche.

More >

I just released a major upgrade to my www.niche-museums.com website (launched last month).

• The site is now rendered server-side. The previous version used lit-html to render content using JavaScript.
• Each museum now has its own page. Here's today's new museum listing for the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco. These pages have a map on them.
• The site has an about page.
• You can now link to the page for a specific latitude and longitude, e.g. this location in Golden Gate Park.
• The source code for the site is now available on GitHub.

Notably, the site is entirely powered by Datasette. It's a heavily customized Datasette instance, making extensive use of custom templates and plugins.

It's a really fun experiment. I'm essentially using Datasette as a weird twist on a static site generator - no moving parts since the database is immutable but there's still stuff happening server-side to render the pages.

Continuous deployment

The site is entirely stateless and is published using Circle CI to a serverless hosting provider (currently Zeit Now v1, but I'll probably move it to Google Cloud Run in the near future.)

The site content - 46 museums and counting - lives in the museums.yaml file. I've been adding a new museum listing every day by editing the YAML file using Working Copy on my iPhone.

The build script runs automatically on every commit. It converts the YAML file into a SQLite database using my yaml-to-sqlite tool, then runs datasette publish now... to deploy the resulting database.

The full deployment command is as follows:

datasette publish now browse.db about.db \
    --token=$NOW_TOKEN \
    --alias=www.niche-museums.com \
    --name=niche-museums \
    --install=datasette-haversine \
    --install=datasette-pretty-json \
    --install=datasette-template-sql \
    --install=datasette-json-html \
    --install=datasette-cluster-map~=0.8 \
    --metadata=metadata.json \
    --template-dir=templates \
    --plugins-dir=plugins \
    --branch=master

There's a lot going on here.

browse.db is the SQLite database file that was built by running yaml-to-sqlite.

about.db is an empty database built using sqlite3 about.db '' - more on this later.

The --alias= option tells Zeit Now to alias that URL to the resulting deployment. This is the single biggest feature that I'm missing from Google Cloud Run at the moment. It's possible to point domains at deployments there but it's not nearly as easy to script.

The --install= options tell datasette publish which plugins should be installed on the resulting instance.

--metadata=, --template-dir= and --plugins-dir= are the options that customize the instance.

--branch=master means we always deploy the latest master of Datasette directly from GitHub, ignoring the most recent release to PyPI. This isn't strictly necessary here.

Customization

The site itself is built almost entirely using Datasette custom templates. I have four of them:

• index.html is the template used for the homepage, and for the page you see when you search for museums near a specific latitude and longitude.
• row-browse-museums.html is the template used for the individual museum pages. It includes the JavaScript used for the map (which is powered by Leaflet and uses Wikimedia's OpenStreetMap tiles, which I discovered thanks to this Observable notebook by Tom MacWright).
• _museum_card.html is an included template rendering a card for a museum, shared by the index and museum pages.
• database-about.html is the template for the about page.

The about page uses a particularly devious hack.

Datasette doesn't have an easy way to create additional custom pages with URLs at the moment (without abusing the asgi_wrapper() hook, which is pretty low-level).

But... every attached database gets its own URL at /database-name.

So, to create the /about page I create an empty database called about.db using the sqlite3 about.db "" command. I serve that using Datasette, then create a custom template for that specific database using Datasette's template naming conventions.

I'll probably come up with a less grotesque way of doing this and bake it into Datasette in the future. For the moment this seems to work pretty well.

Plugins

The two key plugins here are datasette-haversine and datasette-template-sql.

datasette-haversine adds a custom SQL function to Datasette called haversine(), which calculates the haversine distance between two latitude/longitude points.

It's used by the SQL query which finds the nearest museums to the user.

This is very inefficient - it's essentially a brute-force approach which calculates that distance for every museum in the database and sorts them accordingly - but it will be years before I have enough museums listed for that to cause any kind of performance issue.

datasette-template-sql is the new plugin I described last week, made possible by Datasette dropping Python 3.5 support. It allows SQL queries to be executed directly from templates. I'm using it here to run the queries that power homepage.

I tried to get the site working just using code in the templates, but it got pretty messy. Instead, I took advantage of Datasette's --plugins-dir option, which causes Datasette to treat all Python modules in a specific directory as plugins and attempt to load them.

index_vars.py is a single custom plugin that I'm bundling with the site. It uses the extra_template_vars() plugin took to detect requests to the index page and inject some additional custom template variables based on values read from the querystring.

This ends up acting a little bit like a custom Django view function. It's a slightly weird pattern but again it does the job - and helps me further explore the potential of Datasette as a tool for powering websites in addition to just providing an API.

Weeknotes

This post is standing in for my regular weeknotes, because it represents most of what I achieved this last week. A few other bits and pieces:

• I've been exploring ways to enable CSV upload directly into a Datasette instance. I'm building a prototype of this on top of Starlette, because it has solid ASGI file upload support. This is currently a standalone web application but I'll probably make it work as a Datasette ASGI plugin once I have something I like.
• Shortcuts in iOS 13 got some very interesting new features, most importantly the ability to trigger shortcuts automatically on specific actions - including every time you open a specific app. I've been experimenting with using this to automatically copy data from my iPhone up to a custom web application - maybe this could help ingest notes and photos into Dogsheep.
• Posted seven new museums to niche-museums.com:
  • Cable Car Museum in San Francisco
  • Audium in San Francisco
  • House of Broel Dollhouse Museum in New Orleans
  • Neptune Society Columbarium in San Francisco
  • Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires
  • NASA Glenn Visitor Center in Cleveland
  • Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco
• I composed devious SQL query for generating the markdown for the seven most recently added museums.

This is how to get my linklog in email without an RSS reader. Directions in progress, subject to update.

1. Go to Feedrabbit and make a free account. Check your email and follow the instructions to confirm your Feedrabbit account.

2. On the Feedrabbit subscriptions page, click "New Subscription".

3. Enter https://rapids.aloodo.org/feed and click "Discover".

4. Click "Subscribe".

You can repeat for the feed for this blog, which is https://blog.zgp.org/feed.xml

Bonus links

Talking Points: Ethical Licenses

Old Navy will shift back to brand-building in a growing trend among advertisers

Let Kennedy be the Last President

California won't buy vehicles from automakers who side with Trump in emissions battle

Microsoft Says It's Cool With California's New Privacy Law

Adidas: We over-invested in digital advertising

Tech's new labor unrest

Is ‘Do Not Track’ The New ‘Do Not Sell’?

Benjamin Mako Hill: How Discord moderators build innovative solutions to problems of scale with the past as a guide

Burnaby at Brentwood has gone full urban.

This is the Lougheed Highway at Willingdon – one the signature crossroads of our region.  On the right, a massive mixed-use development called (awful name) Amazing Brentwood.

Ian Wasson at Burnaby City Hall gave me a heads-up:  Brentwood was ready for a walk-through.  And easy to get to – seamlessly connected to one of the most beautiful SkyTrain stations in the region.

At the same time Brentwood Mall was under redevelopment, the City rebuilt Lougheed into more of a complete street.  There are at least four modes of movement integrated but separate, with great materials, thoughtful landscaping and exciting urbanism in three dimensions.

We’ll explore Brentwood this week.  But here’s the judgment:

Brentwood is now a distinct station on the Millennium Line – like Oakridge on the Canada Line.  It’s no longer car-dominant; it works more as a truly urban place, comparable to downtowns built before Motordom.   Burnaby and Shape, the developer, were prepared to push past suburban compromises like Metrotown.

It could be a huge success – an urban landmark that will pull in people from all over the region, notably SFU, where the students will make this their territory too.  It already feels like a place you’d want to come back to, just for the people watching and to meet others.  It’s easy to get to because it’s an extension of SkyTrain.

If it all works, it will be amazing.

I remember first learning as a student that some infinities are bigger than others. For some sets of numbers, it was easy to see how. The set of integers is infinite, and the set of real numbers is infinite, and it seemed immediately clear that there are fewer integers than reals. Demonstrations and proofs of the fact were cool, but I already knew what they showed me.

Other relationships between infinities were not so easy to grok. Consider: There are an infinite numbers of points on a sheet of paper. There are an infinite numbers of points on a wall. These infinities are equal to one another. But how? Mathematician Yuri Manin demonstrates how:

I explained this to my grandson, that there are as many points in a sheet of paper as there are on the wall of the room. "Take the sheet of paper, and hold it so that it blocks your view of the wall completely. The paper hides the wall from your sight. Now if a beam of light comes out of every point on the wall and lands in your eye, it must pass through the sheet of paper. Each point on the wall corresponds to a point on the sheet of paper, so there must be the same number of each."

I remember reading that explanation in school and feeling both amazed and enlightened. What sorcery is this? So simple, so beautiful. Informal proofs of this sort made me want to learn more mathematics.

Manin told the story quoted above in an interview a decade or so ago with Mikhail Gelfand, We Do Not Choose Mathematics as Our Profession, It Chooses Us. It was a good read throughout and reminded me again how I came to enjoy math.

As we head into another holiday season, it can be stressful trying to find the perfect gift for friends, family, and significant others. This holiday season, help a loved one (or yourself) ditch the car, get active, and spend more time having fun adventuring with a Blix! Whether they like a laid-back ride,want a new way to commute, are looking to carry kids, or enjoy the RV life, there is an ebike model perfect for their riding wants and needs.

For the Laid-back Rider:

The Sol ecruiser is perfect. With wide handlebars, super cushy tires, pedal assist, and a throttle, the Sol is ready for every beach cruise. Plus, you can add a rear rack and fenders to carry your towel, beach chair, and cooler! Skip parking fees or long walks to find your perfect spot to relax. 

Now through the end of Cyber Monday, the Sol is $400 off! 

For the Stylish Commuter or City Fanatic: 

Why waste time in traffic on your daily commute when you can zip past looking super chic on an Aveny city ebike? With pannier bags, a front basket, and a 45 mile range, you will stop hating your commute and look forward to feeling the rush of wind. Plus, with pedal assist and a throttle, you will be free from sweat while still getting in some extra activity before sitting at work. Even if you don't commute, the Aveny is great for exploring new cities, heading to the farmer's market, and grabbing lunch with friends. Check out SFGirl's favorite things to do in Long Beach with her Aveny!

Now through the end of Cyber Monday, the Aveny is $500 off!

For Super Fun Parents: 

Trying to get the kids in the car for short distance trips can be such a hassle. This holiday season, help mom or dad ditch the car with the Packa. With a 400lbs capacity, pedal assist, and up to a 70 mile range, the Packa will help mom and dad spend more time outdoors with their kids. It is fun for the whole family! Check out what the Bailey family had to say about their experience with the Packa! 

Now through the end of Cyber Monday, the Packa is $400 off! 

 For the Adventurous RVers

RV life is always filled with adventure, but why not take glamping to the next level with a Vika+ folding ebike? The Vika+ folds super compact to fit in almost any small space. Unfold and go in a matter of seconds. With a 500W motor, ability to add baskets, and a 45 mile range, no hills are too big and no adventure too far. Bicycling.com ranked the Vika+ as the top folding ebike under $2k in 2019 plus, Mavis the Airstream, RVLOVE, Drivin' and Vibin', and Gone with the Wynns all have shared their experience adding a Vika+ to their RV lifestyle. Another great addition to your RV is the Linear Series Receivers from Magnadyne! Take your comfort level to an all time high with the addition of a Vika+ and a new radio for all your Christmas music. "Perhaps your family might make you a little crazy, but you can make it more enjoyable with Magnadyne and Blix bikes."

Check out the Linear Series Receivers from Magnadyne here:

 Already have a Blix? Accessorize!

The best part of Blix Bikes is your ability to accessorize them!  Between basket and racks, bags, kids features and coffee tumblers, there are so many great options for accessory bundles that will make their Blix Bike even more useful, stylish, and ready for any and every adventure!

                                                                                    

mkalus shared this story from Das Kraftfuttermischwerk.

Ich hab‘ Sampling damals noch auf einem E-Mu Emax 1, einem Akai S1000 und einem E-Mu Esi 32 gelernt. Für heutige Verhältnisse war das alles unfassbar kompliziert und damals noch echte Handarbeit. Ich weine dem nicht hinterher und bin froh, dass ich ähnliche Loops heute einfach so mit der Mouse zusammenschieben kann. Mag es aber trotzdem immer noch, Leuten dabei zuzusehen, die es halt immer noch so machen wie früher. Mit nem 1210er, ’ner ollen MPC und halt der Geduld dafür.

So wie MAARTN, der sich für diesen Beat einfach mal einen Sonntag lang Zeit genommen hat. Wie damals. Sampling – so schön.

(Direktlink)

What's interesting about this approach is that it draws (some) elements from Alcoholics Anonymous to faculitate a support network for collaboration practitioners. Probably the most salient feature is the regular check-in and the suggestion to "encourage (but not require) participants to find a regular checkin partner." And also, "I’m also making a bet about our Sharing muscles... I want to actively cultivate this muscle by encouraging participants to share rough little tidbits about their work and their thinking more frequently." I'm not sure how much of this would be appropriate for classrooms but I can see it having value in professional development circles.

Phil Hill has a two-parter (part one, part two) on recent news from Instructure that they are going “to explore strategic alternatives in order to maximize shareholder value”. What this means is that they might be open to being sold, and if so, then people might become concerned about Instructure becoming just another company that values corporate profits over... well, everything. Hill notes that Instructure's use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) gave it a big advantage in the market, because people could rely on AWS, but that this advantage has evaporated as all of the vendors have moved to the service. "AWS is king in EdTech." There's a part three to this series coming, so watch for it.

Next week I’m teaming up with Vanilla to host a series of 3 online workshops.

The sessions aren’t long.

Each will last approximately 30 to 60 minutes and cover a key aspect of community development.

These include:

Developing a complete community member journey.

Updating the design of your community.

Using community data for decision-making.

If you feel you’ve mastered the basics and you’re looking up to the next step, sign up to the webinars.

They’re completely free and will get you thinking at a deeper, strategy, level than you do today.

• Neulich hatte ich genau dieses Lenovo C340-11 Chromebook getestet und für gut befunden. Keine Hintergrundbeleuchtung bei den Tasten, mäßige Auflösung, kein Pen. Und das sind alle Nachteile. Der Rest ist absolut prima. Chromebooks sind in Sekunden eingerichtet, multi-user-fähig und lassen Android Apps laufen. 269 statt 349 €.
• Sehr witzige stromsparende LED-Schreibtischlampe mit Bewegungsmelder, Taschenlampe, USB-C-Stromversorgung, HomeKit-fähig. Schaut Euch das Video an. 56 statt 80 €. Wenn es nicht gleich klappt, noch mal probieren.
• Mein Lieblingspulli (Modell Steve Jobs) gibt es tatsächlich noch mal billiger. 25 statt 33 €. Ich ziehe nichts anderes mehr an. Den Preisnachlass gibt es auch für die anderen Meraki-Strickpullover.
• Der beste Bluetooth-Kopfhörer von Bang & Olufsen (!) mit Noise Cancellation ist reduziert auf 260 €, in beiden Farben. Besonderer Vorteil: Der Akku ist kinderleicht austauschbar. Damit wird er nicht so schnell obsolet. Und schick ist er auch noch.

Being a member of the union, I’m on strike for as long as it lasts. One of the grounds for the strike is manageable workloads, so I was rather surprised to be asked yesterday evening (erm… evening…;-) to comment on the final version / revisions in light of reviewers’ comments, of a paper I’m named on that needs to be returned before the strike is over.

My formal academic publishing record is so poor I guess I shouldn’t begrudge any opportunity to get entered into the REF, but there’s a but…

One of the issues I have with academic publishing is the relationship between academia and the publishing industry. The labour and intellectual property rights are gifted by academics and academic institutions to the publishers, then the academic institutions pay the publishers to access the content.

As an employee of a university, my contract has something to say about intellectual property rights; I’m also pretty sure I’m not allowed to enter the institution into legally binding contracts. However, it’s par for the course for academics to sign over intellectual property rights in the form of copyright to academic publishers. (I’ve never really been convinced they/we are legally entitled to do so?)

But that’s not the issue here. Strikes are intended to cause disruption to the activities of the organisation the strikers are employed by. We’re on strike. Partly over workloads. Universities benefit from their academics publishing in academic journals in a variety of ways (and yes, I do know I’ve not played my part in this for years, ever since a researcher on a temporary contract I was publishing with was let go; IIRC, I offered 10% of my salary, 20% if needed be, to help keep them on till we managed to find some funding, even though internal money was around at the time; it would have been in my interest, academically speaking and career progression wise…).

So… the strike is an opportunity to raise concerns through causing disruption.

One of the current strike concerns is workload. Universities either value academic publishing or they don’t. If they do, providing time in work time to publish is part of that contract. On the other hand, an academic makes themselves more employable by having a better publishing record, so using strike time on “personal brand boosting” academic publishing gives the academic power when it comes to personal negotiations with the academy, for example over salary grading, or when threatening to leave. (Many universities, I think, can suddenly find a Chair to offer to someone who has been offered a Chair elsewhere in an attempt to retain them…)

But if workload is a legitimate issue, then engaging in an activity that an institution may sideline on the grounds that they know the academic will use their own personal time, including strike time, to pursue, seems counter to the strike’s concerns?

Academic publishers and conferences may actually benefit from the strike too, in terms of time being freed up by strike action for such activity (Lorna Campbell posted eloquently on a related dilemma yesterday in terms of what to do regarding attendance of events taking place during, but booked prior to, strike action being called: Where to draw the line?).

Whilst the strike is directed at the employers rather than the publishers, when it comes to workload, surely the way the employer-publisher complex is organised is part of the problem? So should the strike not also be directed at the publishers? If journal issues or conference plans are disrupted, isn’t that part of the point? (And yes, I do know: many academic conferences are organised by academics; I used to organise workshop sessions myself; but some also have a commercial element…)

Another of the issues the union keeps returning to is the question of pensions. Academic authors, signing away as they do intellectual property rights that may be theirs, or may be their employers, also sign away pension pin money in the form of royalties they don’t otherwise receive.

Whilst teaching myself R a few years ago, I kept notes and published them as a self-published book on Leanpub. The royalties from it only ever trickled in, but they cover my Dropbox and WRC+ subscription costs and buy me the odd ticket to go and see the touring cars or historics. At the time, I started sketching out how many self-published books I’d need to eke out a living on; I had enough blog posts on Gephi, OpenRefine and various data journalism recipes to be able to pull a couple of manuals together in quite quick time, but figured I’d probably need to crank out a quick manual every couple of months to make a go of it and rely on organic sales without engaging in any marketing activity.

One of the struggles I have with strikes is knowing how to spend my time whilst on strike given that I am supposed to remain available for work, and then deliberately withdraw my labour, rather than take the time as a de facto holiday. Idly wondering about what the point of the strike is, and what it’s supposed to achieve, is part of the strike action I take (as I realise from previous posts on strike days, such as On (“)Strike(“) <- once again, WordPress misbehaves…).

And one thing this post has got me wondering about is: should academics go on strike against the publishers?

PS thinks: one of the purposes of strike disruption is to get folk who may be being disrupted but who sympathise with your cause to help lobby on your behalf. If academic strikes against employers also mean not supplying publishers, the publishers may then also start to lobby the employers on behalf of the striking academics becuase they don't want their businesses disrupted… Hmm.. Strange bedfellows… My enemy's enemy is my friend…

PPS Double thinks: not publishing affects the REF, so by not using strike time to get ahead with a research paper, you put more pressure on the organisation who feels its REF returns may get hit? Rather than using the the stike time to potentially improve the institution's REF return? (And yes, I know: as well as your own… But strikes do involve self-sacrfice; that's also part of the point: that you are willing to do something that may cause you short-term harm on the way to improving conditions for everyone in the longer term.)

RIPE announced yesterday that they’ve handed out the last IPv4 address ranges. RIPE is the organisation that allocates IP addresses for Europe, Middle East, Eurasia and Middle Asia.

Time to step up the transition to IPv6, an address space that even at the current available ranges (about 20% of the total), easily allows for the allocation of some 4000 ip addresses to every person on the planet as end-users. IPv6 is what makes it possible to have a much wider range of objects in our environment be connected. Such as ever more sensors in/around your home and in your city. It allows the level of data saturation that is needed to provide self driving cars with rails of data and not have them depend on just their own onboard sensors.

Our home internet connection has an IPv6 address and an IPv4 one, which allows us to reach both types of addresses (you can’t otherwise visit one from the other as they’re different protocols, unless you can use a translation service). I am unsure what type of range, if any, I’m allocated in the IPv6 range though. Will have to ask my provider.

Joshua Rosenberg describes his one-day experience teaching R to 7th graders:

[T]he activity worked albeit, as a very gradual introduction to using R. In combination with starting with modest goals, having the right tools (R Studio Cloud, R Markdown, and a suitable data set), I think, helped to make this work. 7th-graders can (start to) use R. The goal that Alex and I have is for students to be able to analyze data that they collect (and already-collected scientific data).

Lucky kids. All I got was a scientific calculator.

Tags: education, R

There is no sign of a slowdown in greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere.

Current CO2 level: 407.8ppm.

Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer resigned this weekend in a dispute over military justice for Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher. His letter is a not-so-veiled dig at President Trump’s respect for the rule of law. Here’s what happened: Gallagher was accused of crimes including the murder of a wounded Islamic State prisoner. He was convicted of … Continued

The post Navy Secretary’s letter spits in Trump’s eye on the way out the door appeared first on without bullshit.

Toward the end of his career as a nearshore sedimentologist, one of the tools my father spent a lot of time working with was RoxAnn, which a paper of his describes like this:

RoxAnn is an acoustic processor which analyzes echo-sounder returns to produce a classification of bottom-sediment types which is then confirmed or adjusted with independent sample, diver or television data. Acoustic data are logged and displayed on a notebook computer running the survey program, Microplot. Microplot logs RoxAnn data and associated GPS positions at one-second intervals or about 2-3 m for the standard survey speed of 2-3 m/s and within the depth range of 2 to 30 m. Acoustic bottom types are displayed as they are collected on an electronic chart of the survey area within the Microplot program.

Put simply, RoxAnn bounces sound off the lake-bottom to see what’s down there — mud, sand, gravel, and so on.

As a RoxAnn survey proceeded, the position of the survey vessel would be logged, and could then be visualized as “tracklines,” like this:

One of the last areas that Dad focused his research on was the St. Clair river, which runs between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, past Sarnia and Detroit.

One day, during a RoxAnn survey of the river, unbeknownst to him, Dad’s technicians secretly arranged to send him a message via these tracklines. As he described it to us, when Dad got back at to his home base at the National Water Research Institute after the Sarnia trip, he was analyzing the data in Microplot and, the, as he watched the RoxAnn tracklines progress through the Government Dock in Sarnia, he watched his name spelled out in GPS traces — N O R M.

When he retired, he was presented with a poster of the result, which hung on his office wall for all the years after his retirement:

What a lovely parting homage to a distinguished career and a good working relationship it was.

Oliver and I arrived home last night on the Maritime Bus around supper time to find the larder in need of replenishing, so my first task on this bright fall day was to head to Riverview Country Market and Sobeys to do just that. Along the way I stopped at Charlottetown Vet Clinic for Ethan’s dog food, and at The Bookmark to pick up a just-arrived pre-order of Danny Gregory’s new book How to Draw Without Talent (based on his online course of the same name).

By the time I was done, the bicycle trailer was fully-loaded, and my body was a little weirded out by my sudden request that it spring to life and cycle 6 km after a week of sedentary reflection.

With no snow on the ground, and temperatures still mostly above zero, I’m managing to extend cycling season much longer than I have in years previous; I’m very happy about this, and thus somewhat dreading the coming of the bleak midwinter.

Similar to Walmart, EB Games and Best Buy, The Source is putting on a Black Friday sale.

The Source’s sale starts on November 28th and ends on December 2nd.

• 128GB iPod Touch 6th-gen — now $199, was $369.99
• Beats Solo 3 Wireless On-Ear — now $129.99, was $329.99
• Acer Aspire 3 laptop — now $399.99, was $599.99
• Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8-inch tablet — now $149.99 was $199.99
• UE Boom 2 LE — now $99.99, was $199.99
• Google Home Mini — now $29.99, was $79.99
• Google Home with Wi-Fi LED bulb 3-pack — now $69.99, was $129.99
• Fitbit Charge 3 activity tracker — now $129.99, was $199.99
• Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild / Super Mario Odyssey for Nintendo Switch — now $59.99, was $79.99
• Xbox One S 1TB All-Digital Edition — now $179.99, was $299.99
• PS4 Pro consoles — now $369.99, was $499.99
• Galaxy Buds — now $179.99, was $199.99
• Google Nest Hub — now $89.99, was $169.99
• Amazon Echo 3rd Gen — now $79.99, was $129.99
• Galaxy Watch Active 2 — now $299.99, was $369.99
• Fujifilm Instax — now $59.99, was $79.99

Check out more of the Black Friday deals at The Source.

Source: The Source

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Ryan Reynolds now has an ownership stake of the Costa Mesa, California-based Mint Mobile.

This is not an April Fool’s joke — Deadpool himself now owns a U.S.-based carrier.

Newest @_MintMobile customer. Also, owner of the company. To keep things above board, I’ll be paying myself $15 a month. #MintOwner pic.twitter.com/hrzd8t8T2H

— Ryan Reynolds (@VancityReynolds) November 25, 2019

The three-year-old Mint Mobile is an American carrier and a subsidiary of Ultra Mobile.

“It’s a bit unconventional which is why I like it,” said Reynolds in a press release. “Celebrities generally invest in high-end products like skincare brands or delicious gin companies. Yet Mint is making wireless way more affordable at a time when the average American is paying 65 dollars a month. I’m excited to champion a more practical approach to the most essential technology.”

Mint Mobile offers an assortment of devices with affordable plans. A current Black Friday promotion offers $15 for 12GB of 4G LTE data for three months.

The British Columbian-born Reynolds was recently in Detective Pikachu and Deadpool 2 and will be in the upcoming movie 6 Underground.

Source: Globe Newswire

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London Drugs is now offering same-day delivery service in 20 markets across Western Canada. The company is making this shift just in time Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Customers who place orders before 2pm can get same-day delivery Monday to Friday. According to a press release, online orders will get fulfilled by London Drugs locations within 10km of a store.

Same-day delivery is available in Vancouver, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Delta, Ladner, Langley, New Westminster, North Vancouver, Richmond, Surrey, Victoria, West Vancouver, White Rock, Edmonton, Sherwood Park, St. Albert, Calgary, Airdrie, Saskatoon and Winnipeg.

Same-day delivery excludes, heavy items, including furniture, big-screen TVs, larger unconventional items. Orders over $75 are free and under is $7.95.

London Drugs also has an assortment of deals for Black Friday. These deals run from November 28th until December 4th. All of the offers can be found below:

• Fitbit Charge 3 — now $129.99, was $199.95
• PS4 Bundle — now $249.99, was $379.99
• Thinkware FA10 Dash Cam — now $69.99, was $149.99
• Sodastream Fizzi Sparkling Water maker — now $69.99, was $119.99
• Dyson Cyclone V10 Motorhead Stick Vacuum — now $399.99, was $599.99
• Shark Navigator Lift-Away Upright Vacuum — now $139.99, was $329.99

Check out at London Drugs’ website for more deals

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Artificial intelligence has been able to determine exactly how much of a Shakespeare play was written by someone else.

Czech researcher, Petr Plecháč, has created an AI system that has identified which parts of Henry VIII were possibly written by Shakespeare’s contemporary, John Fletcher.

Plecháč trained the machine learning algorithm to recognize the rhythm and word choice of Shakespeare and Fletcher. The technique did not factor in the beginning or endings of different scenes and instead looked at the play as a whole.

The AI system was able to determine that Fletcher wrote nearly half of Henry VIII. Fletcher did not just help out with the start of new scenes, he also pitched in to finish other scenes. Further, There some scenes that depict mixed authorship, which means that Shakespeare and Fletcher worked quite closely together.

The machine learning algorithm was also able to determine that Philip Massinger, another famous playwright, was not involved in the writing process of the play. Historians previously believed that he may have been.

Plecháč’s tool is still in development but could be used to learn more about historical pieces once it is fully formed.

Source: MIT Technology Review 

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Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, has published a new set of guidelines to help keep the internet neutral and use it for good.

These guidelines are called the Contract for the Web, and there are nine core principles and 72 clauses to help “make sure our online world is safe, empowering and genuinely for everyone,” according to the website.

Berners-Lee began working on the contract in 2018, and throughout the year, his team gathered information from more than 600 people, including policy experts. This also includes representatives from top tech companies and governments, including, Microsoft, Germany, France, Wikimedia, Google and more

The contract is a mandate for what we want the internet to be in the future. To help make this a reality, the team is pushing to gather more partners. So far, it has support from a considerable number of companies such as Reddit, Facebook, DuckDuckGo and Twitter.

The contract’s FAQ page states a few ultimate goals for the web. The main goal is to create turn the online space into a place “where everyone around the world can “learn, communicate and collaborate, free from fear of abuse, privacy infringement, misinformation and suppression.”

The nine principles

1. Ensure everyone can connect to the internet
2. Keep all of the internet available, all of the time
3. Respect and protect people’s fundamental online privacy rights
4. Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone
5. Respect and protect people’s privacy and personal data to build online trust
6. Develop technologies that support the best in humanity and challenge the worst
7. Be creators and collaborators on the Web
8. Build strong communities that respect civil discourse and human dignity
9. Fight for the Web

You can dive deeper into these principles on the contract’s website.

Source: Contract for the Web

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In addition to the Early Black Friday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday discounts, Amazon Canada has revealed deals on several SD cards.

Below are all of Amazon’s discounts:

• SanDisk 1TB Extreme microSDXC UHS-I Memory Card with Adapter – C10, U3, V30, 4K, A2, Micro SD – SDSQXA1-1T00-GN6MA for $454.35 (Save $155.65)
• SanDisk 512GB Ultra MicroSDXC UHS-I Memory Card with Adapter – Sdsquar-512G-GN6MA for $101.84 (Save $148.15)
• Samsung MicroSDXC EVO Plus Memory Card w/Adapter 512GB, 512GB (MB-MC512GA/APC) for $120.83 (Save $79.16)
• SanDisk 512GB Extreme microSDXC UHS-I Memory Card with Adapter – C10, U3, V30, 4K, A2 for $140.11 (Save $27.06)
• SanDisk Extreme Pro 512 GB microSDXC Memory Card + SD Adapter with A2 App Performance + Rescue Pro Deluxe for $158.66 (Save $20.24)
• Samsung EVO Select 256GB microSDXC UHS-I U3 Memory Card with Adapter (MB-ME256GA/AM) [Amazon Exclusive] for $50.81 (Save $7.03)
• Samsung MicroSDXC EVO Plus Memory Card w/Adapter 512GB, 512GB (MB-MC512GA/APC) for $120.83 (Save $79.16)
• Lexar Professional 633x 64GB SDXC UHS-I Card w/Image Rescue 5 Software – LSD64GCB1NL633 for $18.99 (Save $18.99)
• Patriot EP Series 512GB A1 / V30 Support microSD Card SDXC with 4K App Optimized – PEF512GEP31MCX – for $83.99 (Save $6)
• SanDisk 256GB Ultra MicroSDXC UHS-I Memory Card with Adapter – 100MB/S, C10, U1, Full HD, A1 for $45.55 (Save $9.40)
• SanDisk 400GB Extreme microSDXC UHS-I Memory Card with Adapter – C10, U3, V30, 4K, A2, Micro SD – SDSQXA1-400G-GN6MA for $105.00 (Save $7.62)

Source: Amazon Canada

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