Wales is going to look very different if the actual results follow these polls ...

Perfect

I also threw all the feedback into notebookLM and generated a 20 minute podcast overview of the feedback as a tool to help students avoid the errors made by previous classes

this is a nice way to practice analysis and vis skills, get some formative feedback on what they're doing, *and* encourage the class to engage with the previous year's feedback before they submit their own final assignments

today in datavis class - we're looking at feedback for the final assessment. I gave out *all* the feedback I'd given for the last few years, students analysed it, then came up with some 'dashboard' type visuals to show what they'd found out

Yes, lots of consideration and reflection, and a lot of interesting ethics discussions beforehand and afterwards

A5 We've had students set up personas on tiktok or instagram and examine how easy it is to manipulate the algorithm to serve particular content or topics without explicitly searching for them - interacting with posts they think will eventually lead to where they want to go #LTHEChat

Yes, think it's important to look at the whole ecosystem, particularly given how tightly coupled some of these systems are now (e.g. grok + X)

A2 Yes, for now ... but really I think HE is too late. This needs to be embedded in earlier parts of the education system - so I'd like to hope eventually it would be something that students join us already being fully aware of #LTHEChat

A1 filter bubbles for our students dictating what they see and hear ... a concern for well over a decade but I'm not sure how widespread or large the impacts really are. Concerns that AI will make things worse perhaps? #LTHEChat

Yes, with slightly more realistic* data it looks a lot less busy and perhaps more understandable

(*polling, with random seat distributions geographically, so take your realism with a pinch of salt)

perhaps part of the problem is that we have too many parties. we should restrict it to two to reduce the colour clashes

hmmm ... it's better than the contiguous I think, but the background is definitely needed

Yes, I think that's a potential benefit.

But having struggled with the difference between South and mid Wales in population terms I will now be standing for election on a single issue platform of empowering the boundary commission to forcibly relocate the people rather than moving the boundaries

an AI written web app to turn geographic coordinates into hexagons

To place my hexagons and create the 'Wales' background, I needed to generate a hexmap of the shape of Wales. There are probably a few ways I could have done this, but the easiest was to boil an ocean to get Gemini to code me up a web app that takes in geojson boundaries and spits out hexagons

Wales gets slightly less awkward if we try to use non-contiguous hexes. Next up, start adding 'fake' election results to see how they look with realistic results

#datavis #dataviz #hexes #election #senedd

In future rather than adjusting constituency boundaries according to population, we should adjust the population according to the constituency boundaries, to make the maps nicer.

I for one will welcome the relocation to mid Wales, even if it does make the commute a challenge

Wales is a really awkward country to turn into hexagons, but I think this just about works.

martinjc.github.io/senedd-2026-...

A screenshot of an article with the headline "there's one simple method to lower alcohol intake, and it works" and a picture of a pint of beer being poured.

Is it "stop drinking"?

More details in the write up (s):

www.martinjc.com/blog/posts/2...
www.martinjc.com/blog/posts/2...

and the code is all on github:

github.com/martinjc/str...
github.com/martinjc/ani...

I found myself with a little spare time this week, so finally finished a side project - writing some simple python scripts to download data from Strava and creating an animated timelapse of my running data over the last 15 years.

Is it useful? Not at all. Am I pleased? Yes I am.

Is 2026 the year that Britain’s universities go bankrupt? Immigration crackdowns are cutting revenues from overseas students - and now some institutions are on the brink

Lords minister Jacqui Smith gave evidence to parliament and suggested universities could simply continue to teach students if they were insolvent – something widely believed to be illegal

✏️ @jamesrball.com

and it just did it. built the thing. found some errors. debugged and rewrote the thing. refactored and tidied the code. wrote me some docs. and it works.

a prompt for an AI coding agent: "hex.html contains two maps showing results of an election, and parliament contains a parliament diagram showing the same results. i need to create a single page showing all three diagrams at the same time. it should be flex, column order on mobile and row on desktop"

a prompt for an AI coding agent: "let's improve the interaction. each hexagon in the first diagram contains six smaller triangles. each of these triangles corresponds to a smaller hexagon in the second diagram, and a single triangle in the third diagram. when we click on a traingle or hexagon we should highlight the region to which it belongs in the first and second diagrams, and the related triangles in the third diagram. we should also update the information displayed so it lists the winner of that seat and the party, not just the name of the area"

and some very basic prompts ...

I gave it my wales election results project ...

bsky.app/profile/mjc....

do we as educators need to shift from "here's how you write code" to "here's how you review code"?

how much coding knowledge do you need to be able to steer and prompt and review efficiently and effectively? Some? None? All of it?

to see these agents read my very basic prompts, analyse my code, design solutions and then check that they work ... this is disruptive, unnerving, and a little upsetting.

Google Antigravity Google Antigravity - Build the new way

I have been playing with Antigravity, and it is *very* good.

antigravity.google

We're questioning 'how on earth do we teach coding in a world where agentic development exists?', but we're also thinking 'do we even need to teach coding in a world where agentic development exists?'

#ai #coding

my career

I think what I'm heading to here is an interactive ... start with Wales as a traditional geographic map, show how we can change it to a hexmap, break a hexagon down into six seats, show the full wales hexmap, then move into the parliament representation.