Following on from yesterday’s discussion of the paper by Gire et al. I’ll remark on one little aspect of this study that physics teachers and lecturers need to take note of. (Well, in my opinion they do, and I’ve got a steadily increasing pile of literature to back me up on this). One of the questions […]
Continue readingYear: 2010
How does a physicist think?
As part of my reading for the Postgraduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching (henceforth known as the PGCert(TT) ) I’ve come across this article by Gire et al. on how physics students think. The study looked at how closely the physics-thought-processes of undergraduate and graduate students aligned with the physics-thought-processes of practising physicists. In other words, do students […]
Continue readingI hate maths…
I’ve spent most of the morning grappling with a bit of troublesome mathematics. I can tell that I’ve had enough, because I’m starting to see greek letters tango with roman ones across the computer screen before raising themselves to inappropriate powers and differentiate themselves into oblivion, and graphs of noisy data that are beginning to […]
Continue readingTechnology wins again…
It was nice to hear this morning that someone actually has won the America’s cup, and there is now the prospect of getting back to some proper racing again instead of slugging it out in a courtroom. In the end it was superior technology, rather than a superior legal team, that won the day for […]
Continue readingDoes my teaching work?
This year, I’ve finally decided (more accurately, finally got around to doing it) to undertake a Postgraduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching. In plain English, that means do some training that actually prepares me to teach at university. "What?" I hear you say – "You mean you haven’t got any qualification to teach at university?". Nope. […]
Continue readingDynamic equilibrium
I keep a list in a notebook about possible things I could write a blog entry about. When I see something in the media, or something happens at work, anything to prompt me to think about a particular area of physics really, and I scribble it down and may choose to inflict it upon the world at a […]
Continue readingWhere the money is
I was reading this weekend in January’s physicsworld some curiously contrasting articles on the state of physics funding in various countries. The UK has recently announced some serious cutbacks to their international collaborative projects, in an attempt to claw back 40 million pounds that was mis-spent a couple of years ago following an accounting error. Whoops. […]
Continue readingTwo is a big number
In an earlier post I made the outrageous claim that three is a working approximation to infinity. If you thought that was ambitious, have a read of the following extract from an abstract that I discovered this morning while doing a bit of literature searching as part of my research. It’s a great insight into the mind […]
Continue readingThe rise and rise of the science journal
Every time I blink I seem to get another email from a science journal that I haven’t heard of inviting me to contribute to their most prestiguous publication. It’s all very flattering to get emails telling me that as a world leader in organic chemistry research I am invited to contribute to their well-read journal, […]
Continue readingInteresting but useless fact
According to the fount of all knowledge – Wikipedia 😉 – the only three countries not to have adopted the System Internationale units are Burma/Myanmar, Liberia and the United States of America. I can’t help thinking that there is something deeply significant about those three countries falling into the same group, but I can’t quite […]
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