This is the third post in my “Nasty habits” series following Licking and Scraping. Nibbling is biting, but only with the incisors. Not the canines or molars. And it’s a delight. Nibbling is not uncommon. People tend to nibble on all kinds of stuff. Pens, erasers, straws, gums, clothes, buttons, spoons, rubber bands, paper, toothbrush, cups, bottles, cables, gadgets, books, chalk, coins. It’s a long list. But I don’t do those. I nibble only food and body parts. ...
At PyConf Hyderabad, I spoke about uv. It's a package manager for Python. I usually mix live demos into my narrative. So, rather than present with something static like PowerPoint (or Google Slides), I usually use: Front-end: Custom HTML mixed with RevealJS and CodePen. Observable is a good, too. Python: Jupyter Notebooks. Marimo is good, too. Others: Markdown and VS Code for most other things, e.g. SQL. For this talk, I needed to run commands on the shell. I evaluated: ...
This is about as insightful as the Ig Nobel winning papers “Boredom begets boredom” and “Whatever will bore, will bore” that methodically documented that bored teachers lead to bored students. But in the spirit of publishing all research without bias for success or novelty, let me share this obvious result. The Y-axis represents the total score of ~2,000 students on 4 graded assignments, each of ~10 marks. The X-axis represents the percent rank of engagement. The most engaged students are at 100%. The least are at 0%. ...
Does it make a difference if you submit early vs submit late? Here’s some empirical data. About ~1,000 students at IIT Madras took 3 online quizzes (GA1, GA2, GA3) in the last few weeks. The deadlines were all at midnight (India) on different days. Here’s when they submitted their final answers: There was a spurt of submissions at the last minute. ~1 out of 8 students submit with < 10 minutes remaining. Most students submitted ~4 hours before the deadline. In fact, 3 out of 4 students submit on the same day as the deadline. A fair number of students submitted the previous day/night. 1 out of 6 are diligent and submit a day early. But does submitting late help, since you get more time? Apparently not. ...