I've just been at a great lecture by Peter Leijen as part of our schools-focused Osborne Physics and Engineering Day. He's an ex-student of ours, who did electronic engineering here at Waikato – and graduated just a couple of years ago. He now works in the automotive electronics industry. That's an incredibly quickly growing […]
Continue readingYear: 2014
When whizz-bang isn’t whizz-bang enough
A couple of weeks ago saw the University of Waikato Open Day. (Acually, two days). There were some fantastic displays set up across the whole univerisity, with some exciting lectures and activities. With a dual-audience of would-be students and members of the public, our displays were meant to be eye-catching and fun, and I thought […]
Continue readingDismantling the health and safety pyramid
A few days ago I was updating one of the lectures I do for my Experimental Physics course. I was putting in a bit more about safety and managing hazards, which are things that are associated with doing experiments for real. When I was a student, we didn't learn anything about this – my first […]
Continue readingThe gearbox problem
At afternoon tea yesterday we were discussing a problem regarding racing slot-cars (electric toy racing cars). A very practical problem indeed! Basically, what we want to know is how do we optimize the size of the electric motor and gear-ratio (it only has one gear) in order to achieve the best time over a given […]
Continue readingSeeing in the dark
No, nothing to do with carrots and vitamin A I'm afraid. With dark evenings and mornings with us now :(, Benjamin's become interested in the dark. It's dark after he's finished tea, and he likes to be taken outside to see the dark, the moon, and stars, before his bath. "See dark" has become a […]
Continue readingA closing thought for Friday
We are three-quarters of the way through semester A. My Friday afternoon 🙁 tutorial for solid-state physics is still very well attended. Is this: A. Because the students are really engaged in this paper, learning a lot, and generally want to be there, or B. Because they don't have a clue what's happening and are […]
Continue readingWhen does collaboration become collusion?
Yesterday I attended a very interesting discussion on the problem of student collusion in assignments. It's a really grey area that is particularly prevelant in the sciences and engineering. This is the kind of thing we mean: Student A and Student B discuss their assignment one evening. Together, they think through what processes are needed […]
Continue readingTwo is a big number – revisited
In a long-in-the-past blog entries I commented on how two is a large number and three might be considered a working approximation to infinity. This kind of mathematics suits Benjamin (22 months old now). He's beginning to grasp what counting is about, but there's some way to go. I'm not exactly sure what's going on […]
Continue readingPassword entropy
As part of some 'NetSafe' training, I was shown this lovely xkcd cartoon http://xkcd.com/936/ . Password entropy. That's a good way of putting it. The statistical mechanics definition of entropy would be k ln W, where k is Boltzmann's constant, W is the number of permutations possible, and ln is 'the natural logarithm'. Higher […]
Continue readingDon’t trust the machine
Back to blogging, after a nice holiday in Taranaki dodging the rain showers (and, as it turned out, the volcano, which we never even got a glimpse of) and a frantic week of lab work while the undergraduates were away. Both were very interesting, but it's the lab work I'll talk about here. Something that […]
Continue reading