Author: Justin Smallwood
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PyCon US 2024 Recap
I was lucky enough to go to PyCon US 2024, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from May 17-19. A long trip from my usual home in Melbourne, Australia! Getting There I flew from Melbourne to Pittsburgh via San Francisco on United Airlines. I had a very long stopover in San Francisco, about 14 hours, so I…
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Errors that students make in introductory statistics
It’s that time of the year again – final exams have rolled around and, as a tutor, I’m sitting around marking them. Exam marking can be an extremely depressing or entertaining process, depending on the state of mind and quality of the exams being marked. I thought it would be interesting to document here my…
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Failures of Instant Runoff Voting
I have always thought that Australia has had a perfect electoral system, at least for the House of Representatives. Compulsory ranked voting with instant run-off? What’s not to like?! The electorate is forced to show up once every four years and have their say, and no-one’s vote is wasted, or so I thought. I was…
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Magic Squares
I was watching an episode of Penn and Teller Fool Us with my parents, if you haven’t watched this show, you really should. It’s extremely entertaining, though my girlfriend gets very upset that the show doesn’t tell you exactly how the trick is done. In this episode, a magician by the name of Amazing Allison…
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Partial Scoring for Multiple Choice Tests
I read some time ago an article by Terence Tao on how to assign partial credit scores for multiple choice tests – the article can be found here. Terence’s solution focused on True/False questions, but could be easily generalized to multiple choice questions, but involved as part of the solution giving negative marks to students,…