anyway, I sort of made this example up and thought it might be a useful intro demo so thought I'd share 😀

the fun thing about this example is you can visually see the plot twist - that the characters believe that Snape is the villain, but right at the end, Quirrel is revealed to be the true villain! (The sharp uptake in name appearances after Chapter 16)

but then I asked the students which professor they think was most mentioned, and we plot the data to find out:

We used the text from Harry Potter to count the number of times different character names were mentioned throughout the book, starting with the 3 lead characters. that output is not super surprising – that Harry is mentioned many more times than Ron or Hermione.

I'm teaching a data science course this semester and wanted to put together a fun demo for the first class. Our class is based on Berkeley's data8, who has an example using the text from Huck Finn & Little Women, but I wanted to pick a more modern example. So I made a demo based on Harry Potter!

does anyone have recommendations for user research scheduling tools that allow participants to sign up for a time available on X/N facilitator calendars?

at Apple, we had an internal tool that would sync our calendars and let participants sign up for times where a minimum number of researchers (such as 2/4) could facilitate. that way, it could allow for more sign up times while still ensuring we had a facilitator & notetaker that could be present.

Barnard Computer Science is hiring *2 assistant professors* this year! Review of applications start October 18th. Please share with your network 😀

https://barnard.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Faculty/job/New-York-City-NY/Assistant-Professor-of-Computer-Science_JR4112

@andresmh I have the cannondale quick helmet and think it’s great. The rechargeable light uses an older usb cable but I hardly have to charge it so I don’t mind. https://www.cannondale.com/en-us/gear/helmets/adult/quick-adult-helmets/quick-adult-helmet

I'm curious how this compares to what other people do 🙂

I've finally worked out a system that works for my teaching prep!

I decided to use a Notion database where I have a card for every class – this links to a page where I can write down all the notes and ideas for what to cover.

Each card has a date property, so I can filter by what's due this week, next week, etc and also view it on a calendar for planning.

Since I do a lot of multimedia notetaking (videos, images), this has been the only process that keeps me quasi-sane!

@julian awesome, thank you!

following up on this - I've found tinyurl.com to be perfect - very simple for combined link shortener + QR code generator, and it's free!

@andresmh awesome, thank you!

so I guess I need to generate a bunch of QR codes / shortened URLs now for teaching...but bit.ly is surprisingly expensive.

does anyone have recommendations for more affordable alternatives (or ones that have educational discounts?)

@andresmh

I think people don’t really appreciate how startup-y being a new professor is.

Today I assembled a table, unboxed a mini fridge, soldered some hardware, met with potential collaborators, and wrote a little bit of code.

@jonfroehlich @andresmh this is super helpful, thanks! Agreed about having the documentation be useful to others (like on Instructables). I think I might try Notion for ease of use for process documentation, and then have students distill key ideas into GitHub READMEs along with their final code.

I want to be able to support students documenting projects in my courses this year, but I also want to use publicly available tools.

will probably have them just use Github Pages, but if there are better publicly available tools for documentation, I'd love to learn about them...

and my own multi-year research project example:

https://tifftseng.com/archive/bip/spin/

for example, this project on documenting the design of a 3d-printed chess set that was created by a high school student

https://tifftseng.com/archive/bip/chess/