It's now four weeks into the semester, and this would usually be the time that I'd be feeling like classes are hitting full stride. But I'm not teaching this semester. I'm taking a class, I'm working 20 hours a week for the Health District, and I'm doing my own personal projects. I don't even know what my stride looks like in this context.
Work with the Health District is going well. My first couple weeks were spent really taking a deep dive into the COVID dashboard and learning some R Shiny along the way. Right now, the updates I made to the dashboard are under review to ensure the accuracy of the data being presented. I had already done some checking by hand, so I feel pretty good about it.
Earlier this week, I picked up my second project, which also turned out to be an R Shiny project. California's COVID Assessment Tool (CalCAT) grabs a number of projections from various sources and puts them together into a projection dashboard. The way that it's set up, it can be used by other states and pull the real data from other sources. So I'm helping one of the other team members try to get that up and running. I have more background in R than he does, and so I'm going through and figuring out what needs to be changed so that when he sits down to work on it he has a guide that helps him know what he needs to do. It's been a nice working dynamic so far. Even though I'm technically the "intern" I'm starting to slide back into a teaching role because I'm getting the opportunity to start to explain things to someone else. But while I can move through the code more quickly, he's definitely the one who knows more about the data itself.
I've also tried to schedule a meeting with two other people on the team. This is more for background knowledge to learn more about the work that they do, and for me to ask them about the skills they think are important for someone to have if they are working in (or towards) positions like theirs. I will probably also ask to see if I can pick up a project from at least one of them so that I can have the chance to work with them a bit and learn from them. In a non-COVID world, I'd probably shadow them for a day or something like that to just see what they do. We did talk briefly about doing remote shadowing, which makes sense for this line of work because it's all on computer anyway. So we'll see what happens with that.
The MIS 776 class continues to roll on. It hasn't really felt like it's picked up any speed, though the content itself has been a bit more interesting than the previous courses. We're just about done with the discussion about data warehouses, and so we're getting close to the business intelligence portion of the course. I'm hoping to push myself a bit and try to learn/do more with this because this the sort of thing that I really want to start to get a good grasp of. Just as with the other classes, there's going to be a team project. We haven't defined the teams, but so far the team experiences have been fine and so I'm not too worried about it.
My personal projects are in an okay place. The next round of the ATMI survey is currently out. I should be getting a chance to look at the responses in a couple weeks. So there's not much for me to do with that. When the data comes in, I'm going to compare this year's online math attitudes with last year's "normal" math attitudes. I'm somewhat expecting a difference in confidence, but we just have to wait and see. There's still something else I want to try to get back to with the older data, which is to see whether certain combinations of student features stand out in any way. For example, the data shows that we have a clear gender gap (unfortunately). But does that gap look any different (in a statistically significant way) when something like ethnicity is included? I have the tools to do that, but I just haven't actually taken the time for it.
I've started working on a paper for something that's fairly different from the things I'm normally doing. It's basically trying to model dicing onions in a mathematical way. I think it's a fun little project, but I'm not sure if the results will ultimately be anything worth publishing. For now, it's just an exploration.
My independent reading and learning has ground to a halt. I don't really know why other than I've been spending my time on other things. As I look back at my list of things I wanted to try to do, I still need to go through the Python Data Science Handbook and I still want to do a little more Javascript programming. I'd also like to try to do something with making videos for the new remedial textbook that we're using.
Looping back to teaching, I need to determine what textbooks I'm going to be using for the Spring semester, and I'm thinking about starting to spend time moving back into that teaching mode starting in mid-October or so. That gives me another month to work mostly on sabbatical things before starting that transition back into the teaching life. It was recently announced that we're going to be continuing in the online modality going into the Spring, so that lets me plan for that now. My teaching schedule will be ART 240 (3D Modeling for 3D Printing), MATH 127 (Trigonometry), MATH 283 (Multivariable Calculus), and MATH 330 (Linear Algebra). I have to decide how exactly I'm going to structure things. I need to make sure I take extra steps to make sure that students engage in the class material and engage with each other. I also need to think through which classes I'm going to do synchronously and which ones I'm going to do asynchonously. So there's definitely some new planning steps this year.
I got my AC unit replaced. I know I've mentioned it a couple times, but I don't really remember how much I've said. The old unit used R22, which is a refrigerant that is being phased out and will no longer be produced (or imported into) the US. I had it recharged earlier this summer because it needed it, and the AC guy was kind of surprised that the system was still functioning given its age. But it had been worked on a couple times already, and since he was going to apply the money I spent on the recharge (a few hundred dollars) towards replacing the system, I decided I'd replace the system at the end of the summer (or sooner if the refrigerant was actually leaking... which doesn't appear to be the case). And so I have a much newer, much more efficient, and much quieter system. I really won't know what my energy cost savings may look like until next summer. It's currently in the $150/month range, though I've had some summer months costing over $200. (I can't complain too much, as I've heard stories of electric bills in the $400-$500 range.) But that's a $6000 expense that will take some time to make up. The last couple years have had some expensive house expenses, so I'll hopefully be able to have a couple years without having to making another big payment of that type to rebuild the savings a little bit.
Other things: I've messed around on the piano a tiny bit, but nothing resembling regular practice. Thor is doing well. He has a new hummingbird feeder that's stuck to the window where he normally hangs out. I've seen a couple hummingbirds starting to visit, so I'm hoping that he's able to get some natural primal stimulation from that sort of thing. I've mostly successfully hacked my home alarm system. In the last couple weeks, I was able to figure out how the box communicates with the keypad, and I've been able to code up an Arduino to do most of what I want it to do. I'm still waiting for a couple final parts before I'm able to put the whole thing together. Right now, it's in pieces with a breadboard and jumper wires. I'll probably take some time this weekend to reorganize that and start planning out the PCB. We're about 6 weeks from another Presidential election and RBG died today. I think things are about to get kind of stupid in the world of politics as a result. But I'll let my doppelganger deal with that one.
