on-line course

Since this teaching semester is 100% on-line in Paris Dauphine for the third year students, I started last Monday to teach my statistical modelling course from my office on my computer. Using a Teams connection with the 180⁺ students,  sharing my slides or my webcam with them, and writing on a Huion drawing tablet to write on the pdf slides (or on Teams whiteboard). I found the most convenient way to write on the slides was via Xournalpp. From my end of the exchange, the class went on rather smoothly, with students interacting about the practical and contents of the course. As I have also recorded my lectures (in August), and hope the students to first go through the recordings, I will see next time how much effort they have put into assimilating the material, as the on-line class will mostly concentrate on questions and applications. I also hope to have a quick multiple choice question at the end (or beginning?) of each class, but am still fishing for an interface that would (a) handle LaTeX or MathJax (b) shuffle questions from a pool of questions so that each student gets a different question (or thinks so) and (c) store the outcome of the test. Any suggestion welcome!

R-ecap [-16]

This morning, I noticed that none of my R related posts had appeared on R-bloggers for the past fortnight… After investigating, this was caused by…cut-and-paste! Indeed, when advertising about the special issue of TOMACS Arnaud Doucet and I edit about Monte Carlo methods in Statistics, I copied the main parts from the pdf announcement, straight out of Acrobat, and the word “field” was used, involving a ligature between the f and the i that did not get copied in proper UTF-8:

error on line 434 at column 330: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! Bytes: 0x0C 0×65 0x6C 0×64

So here are the entries in the ‘Og for the past 16 days that could have been of interest for R-bloggers readers:

• MCMC with errors
• Typos sorted, at last!
• One bicycle for two
• Bertand’s paradox [R details]
• Special issue of TOMACS