As we emerge from ‘lockdown’* it’s time to start reflecting on how we, as a tertiary teaching establishment, have been continuing to provide quality teaching to our learners. Like most places, The University of Waikato has a rapid transition to online teaching. From what I hear from colleagues and students, through official and unofficial channels, […]
Continue reading
I’m not quite sure of what to make of the new figures for COVID-19 (as we must now call the novel coronavirus – though I’m not sure the capitalisation is correct) from Hubei province: Image from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51495484 The spike yesterday is a consequence of a using a different way of defining a case – one based […]
Continue reading
I’ve just bought some thermometers, to use with a first-year physics class. A box of ten of them. Alcohol filled, which makes them a whole lot safer than the mercury ones. (If you have a mercury thermometer, my advice is never, ever break it, especially if it’s at home. I broke one at university a […]
Continue reading
So, yesterday we had our Science Communication students looking at social media and blogging in particular. Alison Campbell and I talked through what makes a good science blog, and the students got to explore sciblogs.co.nz and look for themselves*. In the coming week, the students need to put up a blog entry themselves. (I’m afraid […]
Continue readingRight. Time to come up for air after a hectic month. I can breathe again, at least until the end of tomorrow, when the next pile of assignments land on my desk for marking. I bought a new car last week. Well, new for me. The previous 22-year-old piece of machinery had finally succumbed to […]
Continue readingSeen on a notice at a Cambridge Cafe: Waipa District Council. Permit to occupy pavement space. This is to certify that **** has been approved to occupy 15.000000 metres squared of pavement space. I might not have got the exact words right, but I certainly counted the number of zeros after the decimal point. The […]
Continue readingThe big breaking physics news is the detection of gravitational waves. These waves are distortions in space-time, caused by a large mass doing something spectacular (two colliding black holes in this case) that propagate across the universe and create tiny changes in space when they reach us. The commentary here describes what goes on. Essentially, […]
Continue readingGoing back to my last post, our fancy balance proclaims that it weighs objects from 0 to 200 g with a precision of 0.001 g (that's one milligram). And it does – put an object on and the balance gives you an attractive-looking number on its prominent display reading 184.139 g, or something similar. […]
Continue readingIt's a New Year and there are lots of things to do at work before the students get back in any numbers. There are still summer students and research students here, and in the last couple of days I've been working with a summer student on getting a new piece of equipment running for our […]
Continue readingWe had our departmental Christmas lunch on Tuesday, outside in the campus grounds. We had some lovely sunshine, but the wind did rather spoil things. I've certainly got used now to living in a very wind-free place – a fresh breeze is something quite unsual here. We were hanging on to our paper plates, but […]
Continue reading