Musings on programming and education
In a recent article in Macleans, Jacob Shelley describes his experiences with cheating in a health-care-law class he teaches at Western University. There is nothing new about this of course, students have been cheating in courses for a long time. Of course the difference is that before it may have existed on the periphery, because [ ]
If you have watched the sci-fi series Murderbot, you ll know it s about a rouge security robot that secretly gains free will. Murderbot is a bio-engineered hybrid mechanical/biomechanical android, composed of a mix of cloned human tissue and synthetic machine parts. It has the intelligence to hack itself and remove its governor module, making it completely [ ]
Whether you are in undergrad or graduate school, here is a list of telltale signs to look out for in crappy teaching practices by an instructor: Now I will caveat this to say that sometimes professors are labelled boring . The problem is that some topics are inherently boring, and there is little to do to [ ]
As a new academic, getting the results of the first few course evaluations can be somewhat disheartening. In some cases they can be somewhat mediocre, often not holding up to expectations. It is to be expected, because the introduction to university teaching can be somewhat of a trial-by-fire. Honestly I was never a huge advocate [ ]
It s funny when you see students complain about how hard computer science (CS) courses are, on platforms such as Reddit. How they are defeated and more importantly, why does this happen? How do students that were getting A s in high school all of a sudden regress to barely passing some of their harder courses? There [ ]
The difference between participation and commitment is illustrated at breakfast. The chicken participates.The pig is committed.
Everyone thinks that students somehow become great writers at university, and some do, but many don t. The reasons are fairly simple. Firstly, coming from highschool, students are often not well prepared to write. This is an amalgam of age, a failure to teach proper writing skills, and likely the use of AI to help write [ ]
On March 5, the computing community lost another pioneer, Sir Tony Hoare at age 92. Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare was born on January 11, 1934 in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). More commonly known as Tony Hoare or C.A.R. Hoare, he made foundational contributions to computer science in the fields of programming languages, algorithm [ ]
Canada renegotiated a trade deal with China recently. Trying to fix a bunch of issues with tariffs and Canadian agricultural produce, leveraged with the import of 49,000 Chinese-made EV s. Those 49,000 cars would make up 3% of the vehicles sold in Canada. Of course the auto-industry in Ontario is annoyed because it will hurt the [ ]
There are some lotteries that allow the choice of $1000 per week for life, or $1,000,000 up front. Let s look at the math behind it. Now in Canada, prize money is not taxable, so either way there is no tax on the principal amount (once you start earning money on the principal, that money is [ ]