I teach an Introduction to Engineering Design course where students program Arduino-powered robots to autonomously navigate an obstacle course. I keep wishing I could have a conversation with @gvwilson because I think ArduinoC actively encourages *bad* software engineering practices. Yesterday I had to tell a student that it would be more trouble than it was worth to try to extract repeated behavior into something like a function, and my heart sank.
“The reason most public transportation is seen as ‘losing’ money is precisely because it charges for trips. If you don't charge fares, suddenly it can't ‘lose’ money. It just costs money, the same as the roads.”
This random comment has given me my new favourite argument for removing fares from public transit.
We are dropping the Dilbert comic strip because of creator Scott Adams’ racist rant: Letter from the Editor - cleveland.com https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/02/we-are-dropping-the-dilbert-comic-strip-because-of-creator-scott-adams-racist-rant-letter-from-the-editor.html
Expanding Tidy Data Principles to Facilitate Missing Data Exploration, Visualization and Assessment of Imputations by @njtierney and @visnut #RStats #DataViz https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v105i07
This morning I'm speaking at Harford Community College's 2023 STEM day. https://www.harford.edu/about/get-to-know-harford/news/2023/01-january/stem-day.php The slides for my talk, Data Science as a Superpower, are here: http://amelia.mn/presentations/DataScienceAsASuperPower2023.pdf
#2731 K-Means Clustering
According to my especially unsupervised K-means clustering algorithm, there are currently about 8 billion types of people in the world.
https://xkcd.com/2731/
It's taken me over a decade to realize how significant a problem this is, but comparing GPAs between students with significantly divergent course history is idiotic.
At least in programs with a lot of course choice, a GPA largely measures a student's ability to pick courses in which they will achieve high marks, and punishes students who challenge themselves.
While I’m on about nice software, the @Iconfactory’s just-right iPad/iOS sketching app Linea was updated today. I like it. https://blog.iconfactory.com/2023/01/announcing-linea-sketch-4-2/