Guangyuan's Research and Development Blog: Education

Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts

How to know it is a good area when purchasing a property in Ireland?

One of the common questions when purchasing a property is the area, which might be an important factor to make a final decision on top of the price and condition of a property. In this post, I will briefly introduce the Pobal HP Deprivation Index, which could provide a good overview of different aspects regarding an area of your interests. Although things can change and the people living in that area can change as well as time goes, this at least gives a good reference with public data collected in a certain year.

What is Pobal HP Deprivation Index?

The Pobal HP Deprivation Index is a series of maps measuring the relative affluence or disadvantage of a particular geographical area in the Republic of Ireland, using data compiled from various censuses.

How to know whether it is a good area when purchasing a property in Ireland using the Pobal HP Deprivation Index?

The website (click the hyperlink) provides a great visualization about the index using different datasets from various years.

You can zoom in to an area of your interests and click the button highlighted in red below on the right top area of the page, which allows you to select one of the data sources.

For instance, the updated screenshot below shows the results when we choose the "2016-By Small Area" data source for our visualization. You can choose different data sources and have a look based on those sources.

The colors represent the degree of affluence in that small area, e.g., the orange color indicates "extremely disadvantaged" while the dark blue indicates "extremely affluent".

You could also click a specific small area to delve into details about that area. For example, the figure below shows some useful statistics about the chosen area such as:

Total population
3rd level education percentage
Local authority rented/Social housing percentage
Unemployment rate (%)
...
...

As you might expect, normally speaking, the property/housing price tends to be higher in those affluent areas when you look at prices listed on Daft.ie compared to less affluent ones.

It would be even better if there is data about recent years, but the most recent year seems to be 2016. So there might be some changes of the areas during the past years as well. Leave a comment or share the post in case it is helpful!

An overview of university places from secondary schools in Dublin 2019

Every year, the Sunday Times provides the top-n schools in Ireland. This list is based on the progression rate of each school to the third-level education. As I am more intersted in which universities the students of each school go, e.g., are students in Dublin also going to universities in other cities such as NUI Galway or UCC?, out of curiosity, I have a look over the 2019 data from schooldays regarding the university places of each school in Dublin area.

As I like heatmap due to huge influence from the tech lead during the previous job, I draw a heatmap where x-axis refers to the main universities in Ireland and y-axis indicates a list of secondary schools in Dublin. And each entry of the heatmap refers to the number of places to a university from a school. In the heatmap, a darker cell indicates a higher number.

In the first version of the heatmap, the first intersting thing catched my attention is the Institute of Education (IoE), which is an outlier in the heatmap with the highest numbers on university places overall. After digging into some details, I found it was founded in 1969 by Irish school teacher, Raymond Kearns, and is one of the largest private secondary schools in Ireland with the focus 4th, 5th and 6th year students. To better see overall difference among other schools except the IoE, the following heatmap exclude it for visualization and comparison purposes.

The heatmap tells many intersting things regarding university places.

We notice that students tend to go universities nearby the scool. For instance, the majority of places for Maynooth University come from the Dublin west county and Dublin 15, and those for DCU come from Dublin northside. And as one might expect, many of the places for UCD come from Dublin southside. In line with this obvervation, there is a small number of students going to the universities outside of Dublin such as NUI Galway, UL or UCC:) It seems the location of the university plays an important role while making the decisions.

It is also interesting to notice that the students going to TUD from a wide variety of schools from different zones of Dublin. This might be due to the fact that TUD was formed in 2019 by the amalgamation of three existing institutes of technology in the Dublin area – Dublin Institute of Technology, Institute of Technology, Blanchardstown, and Institute of Technology, Tallaght – which is now the second-largest university in Ireland.

As I am interested in which schools have a higher number places for specific universities such as TCD or UCD, I looked over the places for each university from each school. The Blackrock College has the highest number of places (with 42 and 99 places) for the two unviersities followed by St Andrews College. Interstingly, those two colleges are both private (fee-paying) ones. However, many public schools such as

Muckross Park College and Our Lady's School also have quite many places to the two universities. Those obvervations actually in line with the phenomenon that "Admissions figures show private schools and high-performing non-fee paying schools turned away hundreds of applicants last year." For instance, Irish Times says that the Muckross Park College had a total of 720 applications last year for just 120 first-year places, or six times the number of available places.

Although private education is quite popular in Asian countries such as South Korea, it is interesting to see it also quite popular nowadays in Ireland. Do you have your own view or experience on private and public education in Ireland? Share them in the comments:)

Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School

Recently, I watched a programme on BBC Two named "Are our kids tough enough? Chinese school". The show consists of three episodes that describe a unique experiment about five Chinese teachers from China take over the education of fifty students in a Hampshire school to see whether the Chinese education system can improve the performance of the students. The experiment ran for four weeks and the students in Chinese school took exams and compared to the normal students studied in usual conditions at the school and taught by their teachers.

Chinese school has tough schedule for students, which requires the students to come early and stay late after the class. That's the way of Chinese students at school to practice more and learn more to improve themselves. Overall, the students who volunteered for Chinese school stayed at school much longer than the normal students. However, the five teachers from China had a lot of troubles to make the experiment on the track since there are many students that cannot concentrate themselves on the experiment. This might be due to the requirement of studying for a long time or the way of teaching is boring. Usually, Chinese teachers will talk all the time during the class and let the students to memorize all of the contents within a class. In contrast, the students in England have less number of students, classified into different groups based on their levels and have more discussions for developing their imaginations and thoughts. Nevertheless, the five Chinese teachers tried their best to deliver their knowledge and Chinese-style teaching for those students.

After all, the students from Chinese school for the experiment out performed the students with ordinary routines. However, this doesn't indicate that the Chinese education system is better than England education system. Instead, both education systems showed the pros and cons and let people think about how to combine the strong points to provide better education for our kids and survive in the competitive world ever before.

How to do the research? Tips for research career.

Some resources for how to do research and related materials

(keep updating...)

For prospective Graduate students - Amit Sheth from Kno.e.sis

What is Ph.D in pictures

Starting a PhD - Choosing and developing your research topic

3 qualities of successful Ph.D students: Perseverance, tenacity and cogency

How to do research from MIT Media Lab

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/mit.research.how.to.html

Useful things to know about Ph.D thesis research

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~htk/thesis.htm
3. Types of Ph.D. theses (from Allen Newell)–not a topic of this talk
- Opens up new area
- Provides unifying framework
- Resolves long-standing question
- Thoroughly explores an area
- Contradicts existing knowledge
- Experimentally validates theory
- Produces an ambitious system
- Provides empirical data
- Derives superior algorithms
- Develops new methodology
- Develops a new tool
- Produces a negative result