24 Feb 2023

Starter Pack I now have a starter pack I send to welcome BIPOC people, especially femmes, who are questioning whether they might be autistic, filled with essays, memes, hashtags, and online assessment tools. Many people with all kinds of disabilities are doing the same thing, even when we also pursue an official diagnosis—the first hints …

3 Feb 2023

Let’s get back to it. There’s catching up to do but in the meantime, I invite you to join me in the middle. Here are some thoughts from the past week. Reproducibility As part of my Interfaces seminar this term, I am having students do their projects around a process I called “hermeneutic reverse-engineering” (this …

Here’s why online teaching is sort of like chaos right now

I just got a query from a student reporter, who asked, “did McGill provide professors with enough Zoom training this summer?” I can only imagine what students are seeing! The institution provided a lot of training.  So much so that by mid summer I was “webinar-ed out.” Specifically, credit must go to Teaching & Learning …

Recording Your Lectures 1: the one thing your can do to improve your students’ listening experience

Tl;dr:Hang a blanket, quilt, or something else that’s absorbent behind you while you make your lecture recordings. That’s it. — A whole lot of people are going to be audio recording their university lectures in the fall, or delivering lectures live over Zoom. This series of tutorials will give you some easy steps to make …

Some quick takes on AI-based music composition startups

I just responded to two questions about AI-composition startups from a student and thought I’d share them here as well. This is a placeholder for deeper thoughts. The questions: What are your thoughts on the uses of Amper music specifically as an AI generative software? A user can create their own personal track by determining the …

Fake news about artificial intelligence and fake news

One of the things I hate most about the current AI craze is the apparently sanctioned ignorance in business and computer science about how the rest of the world works. Canada’s “Leaders Prize” just announced a $1 million prize for an AI application to automate fact checking. This assumes that a “fact” exists in the …