News: Being a good teacher
Kindy is awesome
My younger daughter started kindy last week, and I got to actually be there for the beginning of her first day. It was one of those moments only a parent can understand as I realised with both excitement and sadness that my little baby was not a baby any more.
Happy Photographers
Once upon a time at my place we used to watch "New Zealand's Next Top Model" and "America's Next Top Model". They were a bit of light fluff that we could have on while doing something else.
Things I didn't learn from OZCOTS 2012
A couple of weeks ago I found out that OZCOTS (Australian Conference on Teaching Statistics) was being held here in Adelaide. I thought that I should go to it, since I seem to be spending rather a lot of time teaching statistics these days. And so I went.
Good movies, bad movies
I went to the movies a month or so ago and saw two movies. I get to go to the movies very rarely, so when I do I like to see movies that are very good. Of course, you can't know in advance whether they will be very good, and based on last month's experience the reviews in the paper are no help whatsoever.
Can I take a cheat sheet?
The first maths exams for the year are tomorrow, so recently I've been talking to more and more students about exams. To be clear, I'm not complaining about this! It's a really important part of the MLC's role to give students advice about exams, since they have such a huge impact on the students' experience of learning maths at uni. We can make a big difference to people by simply helping them cope with this stressful time.
"Helping" Hands
In recent weeks, a new artwork has appeared on the walls of Hub central. They used to have people's faces, and now they have people's hands in various poses.
Statistics and Insomnia
Some years ago, I saw a snippet on the ABC science show Catalyst about insomnia – in particular, the flavour of insomnia where a person has trouble falling asleep at all. They reported on a trial study investigating the effectiveness of a tortuous new treatment for chronic insomnia. (You can find the published research here: .)
Mathematical collocations
There is a phrase people use when talking about statistics that really bugs me. It's "non-parametric data". I see it all the time in statistical teaching materials and I hate it because I know what they mean, but what they've said is simply wrong. Whoever writes this phrase has a tenuous grasp of what the word non-parametric means. If they really understood what it meant, they would realise that the word non-parametric can only be used to apply to a statistical procedure, not to the data itself; the words "non-parametric" and "data" just can't be put together like that.
Dagwood Dogs at the Gawler show
I went to the Gawler Show with my family the weekend before last, and it was a wonderful day. We had camel and pony rides, patted the animals, looked at all the stalls, bought some toys, got given balloons and generally had a most excellent day.
Rapunzel's Epiphany
We bought Disney Studio's newest film "Tangled" on the weekend and I have to say it's one of my favourite movies ever. It's certainly Disney's best movie since "Beauty and the Beast", and I dearly loved "Beauty and the Beast". I should warn you now that in order to say what I want to say I'm going to have to reveal a bit of the plot, so let this count as your spoiler alert.
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