Plagiarism, text matching, and academic integrity Every modern academic teacher is in thrall to giant text-matching systems such as Ouriginal or Turnitin. These systems are sold as “plagiarism detectors”, which they are not - they are text matching systems, and they generally work by providing a report showing how much …

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What this post is about In the previous post we showed how to set up a simple interactive map using Python and its folium package. As the example, we used a Federal electorate situated within the city of Melbourne, Australia, and the various voting places, or polling places (also known as polling “booths”) associated …

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Message about the underlying software NOTE: much of the material and discussion here uses the Python package "folium", which is a front end to the Javascript package "leaflet.js". The lead developer of leaflet.js is Volodymyr Agafonkin, a Ukrainian up until recently living and working in Kyiv. Leaflet version 1.80 was …

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In this post we look at two Divisions from the recent Federal election: the inner city seat of Melbourne, and the bayside seat of Macnamara. Up until the recent election, Melbourne was the only Division to have a Greens representative. Macnamara, previously known as “Melbourne Ports” has been a Labor stronghold for all …

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This continues on from the previous post, trying to make some sense of the voting in my electorate of Wills and the neighbouring electorate of Cooper. Both these electorates (or more formally “Divisions”), as I mentioned in the previous post, are very similar in their geography, demography, and history. Last post I …

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So the Australian federal election of 2022 is over as far as the public is concerned; all votes have been cast and now it’s a matter of waiting while the Australian Electoral Commission tallies the numbers, sorts all the preferences, and arrives at a result. Because of the complications of the voting system, and of all …

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This post illustrates the working of Ramanujan’s generating functions for solving Euler’s diophantine equation \(a^3+b^3=c^3+d^3\) as described by Andrews and Berndt in “Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook, Part IV”, pp 199 - 205 (Section 8.5). The text is available from Springer. Ramanujan’s result is that if [ f_1(x) = …

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Wordle is a pleasant game, basically Mastermind with words. You choose an English word (although it can also be played in other languages), and then you’re told if your letters are incorrect, correct but in the wrong place, or correct and in the right place. These are shown by the colours grey, yellow, and green. The …

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I was going to make a little post about Wordle, but I go sidetracked exploring five letter words. At the same time, I had a bit of fun with regular expressions and some simple scripting with ZSH. The start was to obtain lists of 5-letter words. One is available at the Stanford Graphbase site; the file sgb-words.txt …

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What does one do on the first day of a new year but write a blog post, and in it clearly delineate all plans for the coming year? Well, I’m doing the first part, but not the second, as I know that any plans will not be fulfilled - something always gets in the way. You will notice a complete absence of posts last year …

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