When students get marks for different components of assessment in courses at school or university, then the overall mark for their course is usually some kind of weighted arithmetic mean. In this short post I want to make the case that use of the weighted geometric mean would in many cases be much more useful. … Continue reading The case of the geometric mean in Education
Students and school pupils are going through a very tough time in these months of global pandemic and weeks of necessary street protest against racism, discrimination and (police) violence. Something that keeps coming up is the need to listen. Yet it seems to be the key quality at which we fail, even in schools and … Continue reading Opinion #4: Counselling, tutoring, listening and why so many institutions fail at it.
Utilitarian narratives about Education are so prevalent nowadays that we tend to take them entirely as given, or worse as evidence-based. Often we don't even recognise they are based on layers or assumptions that almost all fail when confronted with reality. So let me be polemic and argue what is false about so much that … Continue reading Opinion #3: The narrative of much that is written about education is false.
Since January 18th I have been modelling the Wuhan/China #covid19 outbreak. Until 18 February I wrote a couple of post formulating a very basic model and seeing how it does. You find that here, here, here, here and here and overall the fit was good. Now a month later let's see how the model does … Continue reading #CoViD19: A final #coronavirus #modelling update
It has been a few days since the Chinese authorities changed their definition of "confirmed case" in describing the #coronavirus outbreak. In a previous post I checked whether my model needed modification, which seemed only minor. Now with a few days more of 'new' data, let's see what we find. Mortality shifts There is a … Continue reading #CoViD19: A #coronavirus #modelling update
The breaking-news last night was that Chinese authorities decided to redefine what a "confirmed case" was. This lead to an immediate jump in the number of confirmed cases as well as of confirmed deaths. Does this mean that my model laboured over the past few days was ripe for the trash can? Not really! Case … Continue reading Modelling #CoViD19: A #Coronavirus modelling update after case-redefinition
In a previous post , 4 days ago, I presented some common-sense modelling of the #Coronavirus #outbreak which was simply an attempt to check the sensibility of the official numbers. I updated that modelling two days ago using the data of two days for some minor adjustments. Now, again two days later, a second update. … Continue reading Modelling #CoViD19: A #Coronavirus modelling update
A few days ago I presented a simple model for the outbreak of the Coronavirus and the main conclusion of that was that the numbers reported by the Chinese authorities seems sensible and reasonable. That does not make them correct of course but it should make us weary of outlandish conspiracy theories. Here is an … Continue reading Modelling #2019NCoV: An Update
The #Coronavirus outbreak of 2019/2020 is currently dominating the news cycle. Let's have a look how the official data from the Chinese Ministry of Health compare to three relatively simple models for such a single-centre outbreak and ask ourselves what this tells us. Simple exponentials The simplest view of the outbreak of an infectious virus … Continue reading Modelling the #CoronaVirus outbreak
Last weekend the news broke of the passing of RUSH-drummer Neil Peart (1952-2020). When watching the response unfold on Twitter and Facebook, and digesting my own pain about this by listening to their music all weekend, it struck me: we should be making memories. My RUSH I stumbled upon RUSH by accident in 1979, … Continue reading Making Memories
