The inaugural UK Conference on Teaching Statistics (UKCOTS) took place last Thursday and Friday at Manchester. I didn’t know what to expect, but learned a whole lot and got inspired on what to do for my future module on data visualisation. I think I will try to implement (a subset of) the following things:

Some Newcastle colleagues and I met some counterparts in Durham today to discuss teaching mathematics and statistics, digital materials and assessment, etc. I presented the conversion of the teaching materials that I talked about, this time in a slightly more interactive way. My focus was on making a sequence of small gains, in the spirit of Kaizen, but the main comment that caught me by surprise was that the use of bookdown might facilitate plagiarism, if those inheriting the converted materials have no idea where they originated from, which could be https://bookdown.org or an online repo.

Docker has made building web applications much easier than before. For literate programming and teaching reproducibility, this means virtual environments can be built with the specific versions of software we want, allowing us to experiment with e.g. Jupyter notebooks and R Markdown in a “clean” environment, and not allowing one to claim that “it doesn’t work on my machine”.

This is the presentation I made for our paper on discrete extremes & power law is available on arXiv.

A new version of our paper on discrete extremes & power law is available on arXiv now. Instead of talking about the content (maybe another post), I would like to document the issue when submitting on arXiv.

I have finally decided to revamp my previously webpage, which is almost non-existent. Thanks to Github Pages, giving my page a decent new look is not too difficult, even though I am illiterate at web development. A bit of knowledge in Markdown does help too. The template I use is Reverie. I chose this template partly because I subconsciously relate to the piano piece by Debussy, reimagined here by Ramin Djawadi.