Remember many, many years ago the urban myth that it had been scientifically proven that bumble-bees couldn’t fly? Many people took that to mean that science was clearly bonkers, and good reason to ignore anything a scientist said. Unfortunate, when as a scientist you want to campaign on the fact that science is a useful […]
Continue readingYear: 2012
A rant for Friday afternoon
Forget Marmageddon – the university is clearly facing staplageddon. And it has for at least the last seven years. Why don’t students own staplers? How am I meant to keep control of assignments that are handed in on loose sheets of paper that aren’t stapled together? Half of them only have the student’s name of […]
Continue readingTechno-failure
I think it’s reasonable to say that technology (by which I mean computers, software, mobile phones, video projectors etc) has greatly changed the way that teaching is carried out. One even might say ‘revolutionized’, though that might be taking things too far, since the fundamental principles, such as linking assessment with what you want students […]
Continue readingDumping light into space
Actually, I’ve been thinking a bit more about the 200% efficient LED I described last time. Maybe it can be a solution to global warming after all. The LED converts heat to light. Now, if one were to direct the light upwards, through the atmosphere and into space, it would escape the earth. Sure, it […]
Continue readingA solution to the world’s energy problems?
A student of mine has drawn my attention to this article. (Full article in Physical Review Letters here, a more accessible summary of it in Physics World here.) It describes a light emitting diode (LED) that has a greater than 100% efficiency at converting electrical power to light. That is, put 30 picowatts of electrical […]
Continue readingA Threshold Concept
In recent years, science education has been taking note of the idea of ‘threshold concepts’. The idea came out of studies in how students learn economics by Erik Meyer and Ray Land, but has much wider application. We’ve done a bit of study in this at Waikato, particularly for electronics – see for example Jonathan […]
Continue readingPhysicsStop is five hundred!
This is the 500-th entry on PhysicsStop. That’s something I didn’t expect when I started the blog three and a half years ago. Next target is a thousand. That’s going to be some way off. Blogging might be defunct by the time I reach that! – or a sign that you’re an old person.
Continue readingNewton’s laws in action
For reasons best known to their little chicken-brains, Hyacinth and Brigitta (our chickens) have decided that their coop is no-longer the des-res that it once was and a far better location for a night in the wind and rain is on top of the garden shed. The problem is that neither (especially Brigitta) is particularly […]
Continue readingPutting your life into perspective
I came across these blog entries from David Spiegelhalter at the weekend from a statistician. In his posts he talks about quantifiying the risk from various activities (even just living) using the terminology of the ‘microlife‘ and the ‘micromort‘. The microlife is defined as 30 minutes – very approximately a millionth of the remaining life expectancy of […]
Continue readingTime well spent?
It’s the start of the A-semester today – along with getting those lectures going its time to review what I’ve spent my time on in the previous twelve months. I keep a record of where I spend my time – e.g. teaching what papers, doing what research, carrying out what talks for schools or attending […]
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